BBC Food blog

Such is the current dominance of American-style Halloween festivities in Britain: it could almost be the result of a marketing pact sealed at midnight between America’s pumpkin, fancy dress and candy industries as a way to increase their global sales. Indeed in the USA today, Halloween is third only to New Year’s Eve and the Superbowl final as an occasion to eat, drink and be merry. But look a little deeper, beyond the pumpkin pie, jelly and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video, and you’ll find the much older traditions, customs and recipes native to the British Isles and Ireland. 

 

For the Celts, just as for us now, late October saw the end of the harvest and the onset of winter. The festivities associated with this marked the passage of one year to the next. Sacred plants and foodstuffs like acorns, nuts and apples were not only eaten, but also used for divination and fortune telling. Most of these folk customs centered around determining potential spouses and remained in use in the more remote parts of Britain until the late eighteenth century. It was said that the peel of an apple thrown over your left shoulder, for example, would curve into the initial of the one you will marry. Or that a girl who cut an apple into nine slices and held each on the point of her knife before her mirror at midnight, might see the face of her future lover behind her, who would ask for the last slice. (You can see why the Church opted for an apple as the fruit that tempted Eve.)

Perhaps the ultimate food fortune teller however was the Irish bread called Barmbrack. This yeast-leavened bread was enriched with dried fruit, and when made at Halloween contained various symbolic additions. Find a ring in your slice, and you were to marry within the year; a dried pea meanwhile meant poverty and loss; while a bean or coin indicated good fortune. It’s still made today and commercial versions contain a plastic ring.

Beverages also got the apple treatment. Lamb’s wool is a drink made from the pulp of roasted apples mixed with milk and seasoned with spices. Many believe the name comes from its white frothy appearance, but it’s more likely to be a corruption of a Celtic phrase indicating the first day of November. This day was dedicated to the angel presiding over fruits and seeds and was called La Mas Ubhal (pronounced 'lamasool'), that is 'the day of the apple fruit'. In English this was corrupted to lamb’s wool.  The drink - often made with ale or cider rather than milk - was also drunk over Christmas and into January in Britain. Indeed such was the glut of apples at this time of year they were also put to use in probably the only folk custom many of us still enact today, namely bobbing for apples. And so we don’t leave out the Welsh and their Halloween food habits, amongst other things they believed that a crust of dry bread eaten before going to bed on Halloween would lead to wishes being fulfilled.

Nowadays of course we use dating websites algorithms rather than apple peel or nuts to find future spouses, but if you’re going to have a party on Halloween, why not feature a few ancient customs and foods of our forefathers? With the right atmosphere, ancient druids, fruits, fairies and imps can be a lot more macabre than rubber-faced B-Movie monsters.

 

What are the Halloween traditions in your house? And what will be cooking this Halloween?

Andrew Webb is a writer and food journalist.

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From drooling over that oozing M&S chocolate pudding to regularly seeking gastronomic titillation on the internet, at some point we’ve all got hot under the collar about a delectable dish that’s been primped and preened for our pleasure. That’s why the pastime has the slightly unsavoury label of food porn.

 

Despite what you might think, food can be quite the diva to photograph: it doesn’t strike a pose and it never smiles. Step forward food stylists: the people who work the magic behind the scenes on photoshoots.

Now, we’ve all heard rumours about the black arts of home economy: varnished tomatoes, mashed potato scooped into ice cream cones, and micro-waved sanitary products steaming from behind painted turkeys or popped into stone-cold pies. However, contrary to popular belief, good stylists now coax the best out of their subjects without resorting to subterfuge – which is heartening news for us amateurs. These days, the stylist’s wand is no more than a pair of tweezers, a spritz of water, a steady hand… and the nous that comes from experience.

So what can us mortals do to make our food photographs cut the mustard? I’ve directed many photoshoots for the site – a tough job, I know, but somebody has to do it – and have asked the experts for some tips.

First and foremost, all agree that buying the best digital camera you can afford is a worthwhile investment. But there’s no need for expensive lights, says food writer, stylist and blogger Jennifer Joyce – make the most of the sunniest room in your house and set up a temporary ‘studio’ there:

“As far as the set up goes, the best thing to do is to pick the best light in your house – a porch or back door where light floods in is perfect”, she says. “Get a table set up and use a tripod or lamp stand to put your camera on.

“Next, get some different coloured sheets of cardboard from stationery stores to use as backgrounds and use clamps from hardware stores to clip them to the table. You can also buy a reflector from photography specialists – it’s a simple screen that reflects whatever light you have back onto your food.”

Once you’re set up, visualise how you want your images to turn out.

“Think about what style you want the image to have – such as rustic, contemporary or minimal,” advises Joyce. “Think about whether to do an overhead shot or one at an angle. With an overhead shot you can get away with as little as possible props-wise.”

 

Professional stylists hire their props – crockery, cutlery and linen – from specialist companies. However, there are always interesting pieces knocking around in charity shops and second-hand stores.

“Have fun with what you have in your house – chopping boards, tea towels, skewers and cups,” says Joyce. “For a rustic feel, try putting your dish on a wooden board and a very simple linen tea towel. For barbecued dishes or canapés you could present little skewers of food in glasses.”

 

There are ways to lift an image without using more props. On a recent shoot for BBC Food, food writer and stylist Mari Williams used a stencil to add a cocoa snowflake to a picture of egg nog. “For a similar effect,” she said, “use the edge of a doily.”

 

And what about the hero of the image – the food? Nine times out of ten your dish, however delicious, will need a little TLC in readiness for its close-up, and that’s where the food stylist shines. Joyce recommends using colours and textures to your advantage.

“If you’ve got a soup or curry the ingredients will look much better chopped up chunky and graphic,” she explains. “With a soup, chop everything up roughly and serve less liquid in the bowl than you normally would. That way, you see all the big stuff on the top.

“If you’re shooting something that doesn’t have bright colours of its own, like a brown stew, then you definitely need a bay leaf or some fresh herbs to make the image pop. For a curry you could use chopped spring onions, coriander or red chillies to bring it to life.”

 

Williams agrees that judiciously placed greenery can do wonders for the finished image.

“You only need to add a few leaves and herbs to the plate,” she warns. “Less is more: if you pile a normal-sized portion of salad leaves next to the food, it will look much bigger on camera.”

Chef Peter Gordon, who writes and styles all of his cookery books, agrees:

“How the camera sees the food is a lot different to how your eye sees it. Sometimes you’ll have a beautiful fish like salmon with a lovely crispy skin, but it can look like a big mound on camera. In that case we might angle the food a bit differently or put fewer components on the plate. I roll my finger and thumb together to make a telescope and look at the shot through that.”

And have I picked up any tips from my time on photoshoots? While no expert, I’m always impressed by the way a little salt and pepper or a drizzle of olive oil can bring a shot together. I’ve also realised that it’s best to build up the components of an image gradually and keep it simple. But the most important rule? Never ever eat the food unless you’re sure that shot is a wrap…

Oatcakes before...

...oatcakes after.

Do you take photos of your dishes or do you salivate over other people’s? Share your favourite sites and your own tips for making food photos look fabulous.

Nicky Evans works on the BBC Food website.

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Whether you see Halloween as an All Saints Day marketing spinoff or an insidious Celtic heresy, kids across the country generally couldn’t care less. For them it’s all about adult-sanctioned naughtiness and scoffing sweets at a perfect time to cause maximum orthodontic devastation. But hey, it’s tradition so wind yer neck in, grandad. Your job as an adult is merely to make it as spectacular as possible – at the very least, more spectacular than your immediate neighbours. The minimum requirement is to carve a jack-o-lantern out of an unsuspecting pumpkin (there are some great pumpkin templates here), but I think we can do better than that, so please send in your favourite ghoulish foods. Here are a few of mine.

 

Glowing fluorescent jellies are brilliant. Make them with tonic water and place them on a UV light - the quinine that gives tonic water its pleasant bitterness lights up spookily. And for grown-ups, you can make them with gin too. Make up your jelly using leaf gelatine, using the instructions on the packet, but with about 25% higher concentration of gelatine than stated (to ensure it sets well). Use tonic as your liquid, add the juice of one lemon and 50g caster sugar per 500ml, and leave for 3-5 hours in a fridge. That way your jelly should still be fizzy, even though it’s set, and you should have bubbles ‘frozen’ in the middle.

For simple gruesome pleasure, you can buy a good (but sometimes pricey) range of edible insects from big department stores, and they are always fun to eat. Perhaps offer a dip into the pick-n-mix only after the kids have scoffed a fat-bottomed ant? But if you’re too squeamish for that, you can make food look like spiders, bleeding fingers, mummies or ghosts...

 

You could serve a deep blood-red borscht or this simple (but quite similar) hot blood soup. Kids often find this pan-fried lambs testicles recipe from my CBBC Gastronuts series hilarious too. For adults, Bloody Mary soup is excellent – it’s basically just a huge Bloody Mary, but with more tomatoes and a bit less vodka. For simple, scary-looking food, you can make gruesome-looking gimlet eyeballs out of steamed Brussels sprouts rolled in beetroot red food colouring (add some concentrated blackcurrant juice for flavour and you may find your kids eating sprouts out of choice!). My kids love to eat delicious marinated grilled chicken heart kebabs (mainly because I present them as chicken nuggets!).

Food with a life of its own is fun too. Sprinkling popping candy crumbs onto their food (especially with thin slices of pineapple) is great fun, especially if you don’t tell the kids what you’re doing. There are lots of recipes around for ghoulish snacks. I also love to serve foods that scare the living daylights out of kids – nip down to your local Chinese shops for instant jellyfish salad, black fungus (great in salads), or seaweed for lots of squeals and giggles.

Of course, you can also take the whole gig a little more seriously too: after making a TV series about Feasts we now celebrate the Mexican Day of the Dead (the day after Halloween) – it’s a great opportunity to talk about death and our lost family and friends in a relaxed, unthreatening way. It’s a very food-and-drink based affair, too, when you cook meals that your loved ones enjoyed when they were alive. It may sound odd, but it’s very therapeutic! Here are some classic Day of the Dead recipes.

What extraordinary foods do your kids love, or gave you a glorious fright when you were little? Because of course, no food scares you now you’re a grown-up, does it…? Sheep’s eyeball anyone?

Stefan Gates is a BBC presenter and food writer.

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We now spend three billion a year on sandwiches and sales are up six per cent this year. Not bad for an industry that’s only been going in its ready-made, packed-in-a-box format for just over 30 years. Our busy, 'grab it and run' meal culture has made the sandwich even more ubiquitous. It’s now something (and I find this hard to grasp) that we eat for breakfast and supper as well as lunch, but as Bee Wilson (author of Sandwich: A Global History) said on this week’s Food Programme, so many sandwiches are just plain boring. There’s a cornucopia of choice as you face the chill cabinet, but when you open up the cheese thingy on granary, the prawn thingy on white or the chicken thingy on wholewheat, all of them glooped-up with mayonnaise, so many taste depressingly similar.

However the sandwich world is changing. The cheap sandwich will probably always be with us on the high street, but now there’s a new wave of fresh, delicious, culturally rich sandwiches being made in the capital. This new wave is influencing the big manufacturers making sandwiches for the high street chains and the big retailers.

There are five big sandwich manufacturers in the UK. We went to Buckingham Foods in Milton Keynes, owned, in a sign of the times, by the private equity firm Adelei Foods Group, to find out how they turn out a million sandwiches a week for Sainsbury’s. It’s a science: the sandwiches are made from precisely engineered (not GM!) tomatoes with the minimum of moisture, lollo rosso bred to develop small circles of leaves so that there’s nothing to chop, and enzyme-enhanced bread to retain freshness for up to three days. But beyond the lab and the production line the company's scouts are always on the prowl for new taste sensations they can adapt for the mass market.

And we don’t have to look far for inspiration. In the programme, Daniel Young of food blog Young and Foodish visited Broadway Market in East London to sample what many people think is the best Vietnamese Bánh mì in the UK.  Bánh mì (pronounced Bang Mee) is a relic of the French occupation of Vietnam – traditional baguettes filled with slow-cooked pork, herbs and pâté that had Daniel and food writer Richard Johnson in taste heaven. It’s sold by two city workers Anh and Van who were finalists in last month’s British Street Food Awards.
 
Plus there’s Sam Singh (another City boy in search of a new life through sandwiches) in Soho making moolis - Indian street-food sarnies based on rotis, which are made fresh every day in their roti-maker. Long-cooked goat is the big seller. Just a couple of tube stops toward the City brought Daniel to the Moo Grill, which turns out authentic lomitos from Argentina: a rich but not overwhelming mix of steak, egg, lettuce, tomato and ham in a soft, grilled bun. If I were going to eat sandwiches three times a day that’s the way to go. 

What’s your idea of the perfect sandwich filling? Are you a traditionalist or are you starting a revolution in your own lunchbox?

Shelia Dillon is the presenter of Radio 4’s The Food Programme.

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In the 1960s portrayed in BBC Four’s multi-award winning US drama Mad Men, the booze and grub is almost as important as the suits and smoking. As befits greedy men with expense accounts to burn, it’s rare that an episode doesn’t see some of the ad men drop into Manhattan’s power eateries like La Grenouille and Lutece to entertain a client or a mistress.

 

Food is an important part of creating the reality of the Mad Men world. Indeed, prop-master Ellen Freund hires a professional chef to get things right. It can make for light moments when the audience, with 21st century hindsight, can laugh at the fads: “They make you wear a bib!” says Roger Sterling with glee as he sends Don Draper off on a date to Jimmy’s La Grange for chicken Kiev.

Steaks and fatty foods from places like Jim Downey's Steak House are the main order of the day - even if it means multiple heart attacks for the likes of Roger. One of the first times we see him, he’s having a raw egg cracked over his steak tartare and a few episodes later he’s marvelling over his room service: "We've got oysters Rockefeller, beef Wellington, Napoleons... we leave this lunch alone it'll take over Europe." Main man Don, who grew up poor and eating horsemeat, isn’t such a glutton, in fact in the latest series it’s been noted that he hardly eats at all. The suspicion being that his stomach can’t handle it because of his drinking.

 

Booze in Mad Men is key to the characters’ lives - for better or, usually, for worse. When we first met Don he was drinking classic whiskey cocktail the Old-Fashioned in Harlem’s Lenox Lounge. It’s a favourite of his, but by the current season he’s necking back whiskey like apple juice and not always the good stuff either. When his English colleague Lane Price (Jared Harris) shared a bottle of vintage Scotch with him, he was amazed by the lack of bite.

Roger, meanwhile, is more of a Martini man. Indeed, when Don wanted to get revenge on Roger for making a move on his wife Betty, he tricked him into drinking far too many Martinis (with oysters, naturally) at lunch and made him climb the stairs to the top of their Madison Avenue office. Betty herself favours a glass or three of burgundy, especially for the days moping around the house, while the office drones are content with sipping beer and cocktails at swinging bars like PJ Clarke’s.

Probably the best way food was used to illustrate an understanding of the characters happened back in series two when Betty hosted a dinner party for some Heineken executives. Don used this as an opportunity to demonstrate the appeal of the beer for upmarket housewives. Betty made a fabulous gazpacho from Spain, hors d'oeuvre of rumaki "from Japan", a leg of lamb from Dutchess County with mint jelly and egg noodles the way Grandma Hofstadt made them in Germany; all served with a choice of burgundy and the Heineken that Don had strategically placed in their suburban grocery store. Betty helped to highlight a marketing opportunity without even realising it. For more about Mad Men home-cooking, take a peek at the mainly food-focussed Welcome to the Drapers blog.

Even with recipes that have stood the test of time like chicken Kiev and Martinis, Mad Men’s dietary habits still seem a world away. If you remember the 60s, was your diet anything like the spirits and mignonette sauce-drenched one of the Mad Men?

Will Dean writes an episode by episode Mad Men blog for the Guardian. He has also featured as a guest blogger on the BBC TV blog writing about why Mad Men needs no hard sell.

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While making this week’s edition of The Food Programme, I found myself walking across a patch of land in Husthwaite, a village nestling on the southern slopes of the North Yorkshire Moors. The reason for the trudge was to look at an old, gnarled apple tree that had toppled over due to its weight and age. But, even with its roots exposed, each year it blossoms in the spring, then fruits in the autumn. And having looked at the tree, and its apples, no apple experts currently have any idea what variety it is.

 

Our great national apple varieties often started as random acts of nature.  Apples are either diploids - requiring fertilisation by pollen from two other apple trees - or triploids - requiring three - which means when you plant a pip, you're taking genetic pot luck. And that's a truly wonderful thing for lovers of apples as infinite varieties are possible. The towering Bramley Apple began life as a tree grown from pips in the Nottinghamshire town of Southwell, and many other well known apples started life as chance seedlings and benefited from a mixture of care, science and good luck: Granny Smith, Braeburn, even the Cox's Orange Pippin.

Husthwaite is now trying to revive its status as an orchard village, one of the few such villages in the north that grew specifically for the market. They've replanted a lot of land with fruit trees and now produce their own juice and cider. This is light years away from the commercial apple orchards of Kent, where serried rows of dwarf trees allow for high yields, uniformity and easy picking - perfect fruit for the supermarket shelf.

So, should we allow the sad specimen in Husthwaite to die anonymous? The villagers don't think so - grafts have been taken, and experts are working away at finding out once and for all if this is a newly discovered local variety that ought to be catalogued and its characteristics listed for posterity. Who knows what tomorrow's apple growers will need to cope with, and to date it's the chance seedlings that have had a better strike rate in making it big than the research stations. Maybe this broken down tree holds the genes to something we just might need in future? After all, it clearly knows a thing or two about disease resistance and climate change to have got this far.

As for apple-lovers in the Capital, inspired by the idea of flash mobs, we've now got flash harvests - the mobilising of groups of growers and pickers to improve London’s wastelands with orchards. Organised groups get together to harvest fruit trees on public ground and split the bounty. Get involved in time for apple day.

 

Have you found any interesting varieties growing in surprising places? And what's cooking? Is a Bramley apple tart your windfall gain or do other varieties make you crumble?

Simon Parkes is presenter of Radio 4's The Food Programme this week.

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