A word from - Felicity Cloake
"Felicity, the definition: happiness, bliss, eloquent or apt expression." Karl Isberg - Siberia with a View
By now you will have realised that I'm a fan of Felicity Cloake's Guardian column How to cook the perfect ... In these articles Felicity Cloake takes a particular well-known dish, researches and tests various versions of it and then comes up with a synthesised 'perfect' recipe. Of course she doesn't research every single food writer there is, and her choice of authors tends to be restricted to the British, but nevertheless they are pretty informative - and entertaining articles - a sort of a cheating short cut for me sometimes. Besides you have also probably realised that I have the same British bias, though I have to say that I am diverging from it little by little - rather like the two worlds in that excellent TV series Counterpart. (If you haven't seen that then seek it out. If you live in Australia it's available on SBS' On Demand service. Well unless it's finished its allotted time.) I digress, but the point is that, having lived for so long in Australia, I now find some British ideas, opinions, attitudes rather foreign, although I suppose the bedrock of me is still British -nay English.
I do not have any of her books - she has written four, though I nearly bought one of them when it was on the Readings bargain table. So I couldn't rush to them for quotable quotes. And so I thought I would find out a little bit more about her.
The first thing I discovered is that she is rather younger than I thought from the tiny picture that adorns her Guardian columns. Still in her 30s. I think the picture at the top of the page was taken in 2017. This one is from her own website Felicity Cloake.com. The website is actually not very useful in terms of quotable quotes. I suspect it's really a sort of vehicle for advertising her books.
However, I did find out a little about her background from various interviews and a profile on The Oxford Student which probably has an interest in her as she graduated from Oxford, which puts her in the brainy elite of the UK. She graduated in English literature and went into publishing, thinking she would make the next big publishing sensation discovery. But she soon discovered that she preferred to write and decided that the growing interest in all things food was an opportunity. Eventually she began writing for The Guardian and also The New Statesman and from there came the cookbooks. So possibly more of a journalist than a cook. So here, in no particular order are a few things that she has said - mostly gleaned from that Oxford Student intereview. And I shall, of course, continue to use her columns as a touchstone for some of my posts.
“The process is actually pretty hard work. Tracking down several distinct recipes, sourcing the relevant ingredients (which sometimes involves cycling halfway across London on deadline) and then making them all at once and forcing friends to try them all and make sensible comments (especially on anything involving alcohol) is quite a mission, and that’s before I’ve even written a word. Getting the perfect version right quite often takes a few goes too. So it’s a real labour of love; you don’t go into food writing for the money.”
“If you’re investing time and money in a recipe, you need to know it will work. If it tastes good, then it’s a success; if it’s different and interesting in some way, then that’s a bonus. So test, test and test again.”
“Clean eating. All this nonsense about gluten poisoning and alkalising foods makes my blood boil with rage. The boring truth is that moderation is the key to health and happiness, not bloody chia seeds."
"In an age when even petrol station pasties proclaim their artisan credentials, it’s amazing how incurious we are about the food we eat; even those of us who think of ourselves as conscientious consumers rarely look beyond the particular buzzwords that we have decided fit our world-view. Such labels – “local”, “Fairtrade”, “sustainable” – undoubtedly save time at the supermarket, but matters are rarely so simple. There is no algorithm to help you make the right choices every time."
"I'm not a trained cook. I certainly couldn't say I was an expert chef. But I would say that I'm a moderately good cook for the amount of practice I've had. And I've had an awful lot of practice. Five years of cooking relentlessly."
"I don't like truffles ... They're sort of armpitty."
"People say they don't have time to cook, yet the average person spends four hours a day watching TV. It's a life skill. People should know how to do it."
