What was the dish of 2022?
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Among the many boo-boos former Prime Minister Liz Truss made, issuing a memorandum on what she would and wouldn’t eat on trips abroad was possibly one of her unwisest. Her “rider” insisted on coffee sourced from independent stores, sandwiches that were freshly prepared and absolutely no mayonnaise on anything. To that list of unacceptables, we might now add iceberg lettuce, since a tabloid ran stakes on which would have a longer shelf life. Perhaps Truss will see the funny side and endorse a line of salad spinners. As next chapters go, it could hardly be worse than feasting on cow anus on reality TV, as done on I’m a Celebrity… by former minister Matt Hancock.
It’s been a year of unlikely food headlines. Consider the story from October of Jonathan Hoitinga, a carer from Leatherhead who spotted the face of Boris Johnson in his chicken korma and reckoned it was a sign of BoJo’s imminent resurgence. Food was even dragged into the culture wars in October, when Home Secretary Suella Braverman railed against the “tofu-eating wokerati”. As author Séamas O’Reilly pointed out, tofu is such a hack reference. That bellwether food of left-leaning elites has long since been superseded by avocados, kale, quinoa, jackfruit and kimchi.
A timelier lightning rod, though perhaps more of a generational divide, is the butter board, the latest trend to emerge from TikTok. While I have embraced some of TikTok’s cookery wisdom, including the baked feta pasta, I worry when a recipe like “Sleepy Chicken”, which requires cooking chicken breasts in cough medication, starts trending and the FDA is forced to issue a health warning. Mooted as the alternative to cheese and meat boards, butter boards involve smearing butter on a board and sprinkling it with anything, from edible petals to nuts, for guests to swipe with bread.
Food played its part in the many satires of wealth: witness the Sicilian spreads in The White Lotus or the “tweezered to fuck” plates in Ralph Fiennes’s The Menu. I particularly relished the Palme d’Or-winning Triangle of Sadness that sees a specially helicoptered shipment of Nutella delivered onto a luxury yacht to establish the levels of privilege among its passengers. Subsequent scenes of a disgustingly emetic captain’s dinner could put you off champagne and caviar forever.
It was hard to know what to make of charismatic actor/TV host James Corden being banned in October from Keith McNally’s New York restaurant Balthazar for “abusive” outbursts to staff. His wife had ordered an egg yolk omelette, which arrived with some egg white (his wife is apparently allergic). Cynics might suspect a publicity stunt given Corden is now playing an up-and-coming chef in Amazon Prime’s Mammals. The bigger takeaway for me, though, was what the hell is an egg yolk omelette? And can I have one?
The food story that most captured my imagination, however, concerned a “special” salad dressing that director Olivia Wilde reportedly made for her paramour Harry Styles amid her breakup from Jason Sudeikis. The dressing seemed to be based on the vinaigrette in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, which consists of two tablespoons of Grey Poupon mustard, two tablespoons of red-wine vinegar and six tablespoons of olive oil. As American TV chef (aka Barefoot Contessa) Ina Garten (or her hilarious TikTok impersonator Tom Hearn might say), “How easy is that?!” The story got me thinking about the dishes I’d make to impress a new squeeze. My beef ragù perhaps. Or lamb biryani. A vinaigrette wouldn’t cut it. Not on iceberg lettuce anyway.
Comments