Can't eat, won't eat

The Three Graces by Peter Paul Rubens

I was asked by Rude Health to do a 'rant' by their bandstand at The Real Food Festival. I got there late, having mistaken Olympia for Earls Court, and literally ran on, grabbing the mike as I staggered forward in my pink high heels and hat.

My subject was 'allergies', especially appropriate during Food Allergy Awareness Week. Allergies are the bane of every chef's life, especially if, as in my case, you do a fixed menu.

There is a difference between food allergies, intolerances and aversions. The first gives you hives, the second gives you gas, and the last means you simply don't like it.

You'd be amazed how many people in the latter category 'upgrade' their aversion to a full-blown allergy when ordering in restaurants. Short of demanding that your guest has a blood test on the spot to determine a positive IgE antibody reading, the restaurateur is in a helpless position to rebut these claims.

My own sneaky technique when faced with, say, a guest suffering from a 'dairy allergy' is to exclaim:

"What a shame! I've got this extensive and expensive cheeseboard, and poor you won't be able to try it..."

The reaction can often be:

"Oh maybe I'll have just a little bit..." accompanied by an embarrassed giggle.

It's not only hard for professional chefs; having a dinner party has become a nightmare for a host. Between the vegans, the vegetarians, the pescatarians, the wheat free, the dairyacs, the coriander haters, the ayuverdics(no garlic,onion,mushrooms) and Atkins dieters, the hostess ends up with nothing to offer everyone, maybe just a bowl of porridge, with soy milk of course, unless she's the kind of masochist that wants to do a separate meal for each guest.

Despite reports that allergies have grown in the last decade by 18%, the percentage of genuine food allergies is low. In a recent Californian study by Dr Marc Riedl, while 30% of adults believe they have a food allergy, it's actually only about 5%.

The rate is slightly higher for children, 8%, but most outgrow their allergy by the age of 12.

Lets take a look at food allergies around the world: they are highly heritable and often have a genetic or geographic bias.

As much as 70% to 90% of Asians are lactose intolerant, only 10% to 15% in Westerners, while 50% of Asians cannot drink alcohol.

The Japanese can be allergic to buckwheat flour, used in soba noodles.

Irish people, particularly those on the West Coast, suffer from coeliac disease, they cannot digest gluten.

Nightshade vegetables such as aubergine, peppers, tomatoes and potatoes can cause arthritic symptoms.

An allergy to celery of all things is common in Central Europe.

Peanut allergies can lead to anaphylactic shock or death.

Some people hate coriander, it tastes like soap or worse, bedbugs, the origin of the word 'coriander'. On the other hand, it's considered a folk remedy for diabetes.

We must also distinguish between fussy eaters and religious taboos: restrictions such as halal meat for muslims and kosher food for Jews are well known but did you know that some religions, Jainism for example, advise against eating things that grow underground for, if you eat the root, you kill the plant.

Old world religions can be suspicious of new world ingredients. Imagine our diet today without peanuts, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, coffee, tobacco.

Things we don't eat are famine foods: associated with desperate times and terrible poverty: in Iceland and parts of Sweden, for instance, mushrooms are considered an animal food and only eaten in times of hardship.

Another food edict is against salt: the author Jeffrey Steingarten writes that after a worldwide test conducted by the World Health Organisation, only 8% of people are sensitive to salt, that there is no proven link between high blood pressure and salt, and that most of us can eat as much salt as we feel like...

One of my most frequent complaints about other home restaurants, which must reflect home cooking in general, is undersalting food. I use good quality sea salt while cooking, in this way I minimise the use of salt at the table.

Having spoken to people with very real allergies, tested and proved by blood tests, I know they are irritated by the fakers. My beef is with the food intolerance group: it's funny how the women (yes it's generally women although I do know a few men who are also neurotic about food) who complain of wheat or dairy intolerances are invariably skinny with concave stomachs. (Hey, where do they fit their reproductive organs?)

Why don't they just admit they are 'being single forever/not being able to fit into Topshop clothes/can't cope with not getting society & media approval' intolerant? That'd be a bit more honest.

As far as I'm concerned, they are just on a diet. Which is fine, but why come to a supperclub if you don't like to eat?

I 'think' this is how to listen to my rant: http://www.sendspace.com/file/w0q6nz

The Secret Gardens paladar

Tequila Sunrise, so 80s but I loved it! Behind: totopos (roasted corn tortillas) con salsa fresca de jitomate (red tomatoes) y chipotles adobados.

Bright Mexican paper decorations

Lesley, front of house, spent all day making paper flower decorations

Ceviche (sea bass) with corn tortilla

Main course of yuca chips, fish in an umami rich olive, pepper and tomato sauce (a la vercruzana) with green rice and a delicious onion salad (pickled in lime juice).

Carla makes salsa picante which she sold out at The Underground Farmers & Craft market

TV being used as sideboard

A warming flourless chocolate and chili brownie with hot mole sauce (choc, chili and cinnamon)

Food blogger Carla of Bribed with Food has a paladar in her home in Willesden Green. Carla comes originally from Panama, and her food reflects her Latin American roots.

This evening, el cinco de Mayo, a holiday that celebrates an unlikely battle victory over the French during their occupation of Mexico, myself and 12 other guests were treated to a Mexican menu. Bright paper decorations, handmade by Lesley, her flatmate, graced the tables, Tequila Sunrise cocktails were shaken by Carla's other flatmate.

We started with fried tortilla chips and salsa then a ceviche with tortilla wrap. I love this raw fish 'cooked' by citrus juice dish which I often ate in Peru on street stalls, despite warnings of worms and cholera.

Main course was all piled on one plate, typically South American, with authentic fried yuca or cassava. I remember eating yuca nonstop during my year in South America, in which I travelled from Venezuela through almost every country until Tierra del fuego. As a non-meat consumer on a meat obsessed continent, it was one of the few food stuffs I could eat, on 12 hour bus trips stopping at dusty roadside cafes, with a fixed menu chosen by the bus driver.

Yuca is oddly popular: one of the most widely consumed carbohydrates in the world, if you eat it raw or 'insufficiently processed' it's poisonous, cyanide to be specific and can lead to paralysis. But the bitterness of the cyanide means that's it's easy to grow, resistant to pests.

The red onion salad and green herby rice were particularly delicious...Carla, do post us the recipe?

We finished with a moist chili chocolate brownie. A well known combination nowadays but one that doesn't always work too well, here it did!

As Carla had a gluten free guest ( a real one, with Irish blood!) the whole menu was gluten free but you'd never have known!

At the end, Carla emerged from the kitchen and joined her guests at the table for drinks...which went on till 4 am. My only memory after midnight is doing a poor version of Beyoncés 'single ladies' dance with fellow supperclub hostesses @foodrambler and Carla. Despite our wide range of age and body shape, all of us are single. Cooking for a living means you end up with a nun-like existence. Food Rambler started about six months after me, but has also noticed how the guests are changing...she increasingly wants to move away from hosting dinners in her home, preferring the detachment and enjoyment of transforming a rented space. Waking up to other people's mess on a weekly basis can be wearing. The rare rude guest is still disproportionately upsetting when it's in your own home. I was relieved to find out that she too from time to time spends all day in bed, physically recovering from the graft of cooking for large numbers in a domestic kitchen. I thought I was getting old!

May Day! May Day!*

Trout baked in banana leaves, Thai style

Saffron kulfi with cardamom and almond tuiles

If my supperclub is a random but accurate sample of what's going on in the world, it looks like the Conservatives will win. Practically every guest was going to vote Tory. This has made me so depressed that I've had difficulty rousing myself to write this blog post. Those of us who lived through the stultifying Thatcher and Major years are not looking forward to a Tory government.

Another lesson learnt: don't put coconut milk in with rice in a rice steamer. You will find that your fish is cooked, you check the rice to go with it and...it is raw. You try to switch on the rice steamers and they will not remain switched on. You resort to sellotape and tape down the switch. Ten minutes later you smell something burning and realise that your rice is burnt. All of this was done under the unrelenting gaze of the BBC Moneywatch cameras (I think they must be making a feature film on me). If, when it is screened in July, you see a harassed and hysterical MsMarmitelover screaming helplessly "You cunting Teflon" at an inanimate object, picking burnt bits, trying to rescue some rice, hyperventilating "I can't cook rice except in a steamer" to a strange first-time waitress well...please understand. This was scary. Probably the biggest cooking scare I've ever had. The cameras just kept turning, focusing in ever closer on the caramelised bottom of the rice steamer, the blobs of rice everywhere, counter, plates, in my hair. I wanted to stop them but realised this would make me seem even more uncool. So much for my unflustered, I can cope with anything persona that I dimly fantasised that I would project on the telly screen. It was car crash cooking. Embarrassing.

I mentioned it on Twitter and apparently this inability of a rice steamer to cope with coconut milk is well known. The trick is to use coconut powder instead. Or just add the coconut milk at the end.

Menu

Pimms with mint, cucumber and strawberries

Rigatoni puttanesca

Banana leaf wrapped red sea trout with Thai spices and coconut (the banana leaf 'en papillote' style of cooking really retains the moisture and flavour of the fish)

Coconut Rice

Neal's Yard cheese board with Dorstone goats cheese, Ardrahan washed rind cheese, Coolea (made by a Dutch couple who moved and shipped Dutch cows to Ireland) and Colston Bassett Stilton, a fig and walnut wheel, oat cakes and almonds.

Cardamom and almond tuile

Saffron kulfi

Coffee by Douwe Egberts (cafetiere blend)

Chocolate truffles made by moi.

I tried a couple of tuile recipes, one with caster sugar, the other with icing sugar. Perhaps the icing sugar version turned out thinner and crispier. Once you get the knack of spreading a circle of the batter with your spoon, not too thin, not too thick, it's a fun thing to make and matched well with the creamy kulfi.

Even a table of British-Asian guests (Tories and interestingly, concerned about immigration, talked about the differences between generations) loved it. Compliment indeed. They asked when I was going to do an Indian night....soon....

Another table of guests had come all the way from Essex. One of the ladies was a life coach and personal trainer.

"Where are you going next?" she asked me with a significant look.

"What do you mean?"

"Well you can't start a restaurant can you?" she pronounced

"Can't I?"

"Ooh no. It just wouldn't be the same" She paused then announced "What you need is a franchise"

"Er how would that work?" I asked politely.

"Sell your idea to other people, train them how to do it, set up other home restaurants..."

I was a bit tired so couldn't wrap my brain around this idea. Does she mean...buy lots of other houses, put an Aga in each and er...rent it out to people on condition they hold a weekly dinner for strangers?

I would have added 'buy a Smeg fridge-freezer' but I spent 1.5k on one which was delivered last Friday. As I unwrapped the boxes inside, I noticed one of them was broken, one of the handles kept coming off. Saturday I saw the seal at the top of the door was coming away. Sunday, the door wouldn't shut, again, out with the sellotape. Again. Never buy major mechanical appliances under a Mercury retrograde.

I didn't take many pictures...too hard with a film crew there. My teen did my makeup for the filming. As she worked she said expertly

"I need a shiny blusher for flash photography"

She's supposed to be revising for her GCSEs but appears to have watched an awful lot of Youtube tutorials of how to apply makeup instead. She has also started a blog about music and, possibly, makeup...

*May Day as a call for rescue comes from the French 'M'aider!' 'Help me!'