First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Always around this time of year, my mind turns to ice cream. I like eating the stuff when I’m out and about; I’m not the kind of ice cream eater who sits at home in front of the TV nursing a tub on his lap (although I have been known to do that too). Until recently, however, there has always been a rather large cloud on the horizon of my spring-time ice cream delight: the knowledge that, in order to get a proper Italian gelato—which must surely be acknowledged to be the supreme type of ice cream—I would have to wait until my next trip to Italy, which might not come around for…I don’t know, years!

However, I’m pleased to say that such gloomy reflections no longer trouble me, because these days London’s Covent Garden boasts an ice cream parlour serving Italian gelato that is the equal of what you might find in the best parlours of Florence or Venice (well, perhaps not quite that good, but really not far off). Scoop, on Shorts Garden, is an excellent addition to the capital’s food scene, and must be visited and supported by as many ice cream enthusiasts as possible, as often as possible. (Handily, it’s not far away from the Prospect office.) Gelato, incidentally, is a very different thing from the ice cream you usually find in this country. It is usually made with milk rather than cream, and doesn’t tend to be stabilized with egg (so it’s lighter and healthier). It needs to be stored in a special gelato freezer that keeps it at a higher temperature than a conventional freezer—which means that it is semi-soft when it is served, and melts quicker.

By the way, if you are in Florence any time soon, I suggest a visit to Vivoli’s, near Santa Croce, for what may well be the ultimate ultimate ice cream.

In this week’s New Yorker, Bill Buford has written an article about the revival of carnivore culture. It contains the following passage: “Meat comes from an animal—a banal connection that has been obscured by the way supermarkets prepare and present our food—and the animal has to be killed. If you fear the sight of a carcass, you shouldn’t be eating from it.” This logic has become virtually axiomatic among right-thinking carnivores, but I wonder if it really makes sense. I agree with the first part. We shouldn’t take the fact that we kill animals to eat lightly. If a society forgets (or pretends to forget) that meat comes from animals, then it is more likely to turn a blind eye to their mistreatment—as has undoubtedly happened.

But what about the second part of the above passage: the idea that for it to be justifiable for a person to eat meat, he or she should not “fear” the sight of a carcass? By this logic, there is a kind of hierarchy of entitlement to meat-eating, corollated to how unfearful one is. At the top would be those actually prepared to kill an animal themselves. Then would come those prepared to butcher a carcass. Then would be those prepared to at least stand the sight of a skinned animal hanging upside down in a butchers’ shop. And so on, all the way down to those who shrink from anything other than a processed sausage. But surely this is all so much romantic baloney. The reality of modern technology means that we are, to a large extent, detached from the sordid business of killing animals. We don’t live in caves any more. Why should we not be entitled to eat meat if we are squeamish about carcasses? Buford might claim that squeamishness about dead flesh suggests an unwillingness to confront the fact of death squarely in the face. Yet one might just as easily argue it the other way: a desire to chop up an animal could be taken as evidence of indifference to—even delight in—the fact of death. But in any case, does it really matter either way? Rather than basing entitlement to meat-eating on a somewhat arbitrary conscience-based yardstick, surely we should base our judgements solely on behaviour. And if we do this, then it seems to me that we can conclude little more than the following: it is better to eat meat from animals that have been raised humanely than from those that have been caused unnecessary suffering.

I have just returned from Italy, where, as tends to happen when I go on holiday there, I spent a large portion of my time cooking (most ambitious dish: ravioli stuffed with rabbit). Not for the first time, I was struck by the fact that cooking in Italy, as compared with cooking in Britain, is almost ridiculously easy. In Italy, any klutz can throw together, say, some tomatoes, onion, carrots and garlic, serve it on pasta, and the result will be delicious. In Britain, the most accomplished of chefs can construct a sauce from those same ingredients, and the result will always lack a certain something.

Why is this? Undoubtedly, raw ingredients—the fact that they tend to be so much better in Italy—are part of the answer. But I do not believe that they alone account for the difference. After all, if you go to the right places, and are prepared to spend money, it is possible to get extremely good raw ingredients in Britain—Neapolitan tomatoes, the best Ligurian olive oil—and I guarantee your pasta still won’t taste as good. No, there must be something else, some mysterious X factor, which accounts for the ease of cooking in Italy.

I can’t say exactly what this is, but my guess is that it is environmental: something to do with the quality of the air—and even the water—in Italy. The pasta tastes different because it is cooked in different water, and is then mixed with the sauce in different atmospheric conditions from those that pertain in Britain, atmospheric conditions that, perhaps, are more conducive to the coalescing of flavours, the perfect marrying of pasta and oil. And then, remember, the person who eats the pasta is breathing different air as he or she does so, inhaling different smells, which mingle with the aromas of the pasta, and result in an altogether different flavour. None of these factors on their own would have much impact; but, taken together, there’s an accumulation of small differences.

If this theory seems outlandish, I would say this: flavour is a more complex, less definable thing than is commonly realised, and achieving it is never simply a matter of following a recipe. There is a mysterious—almost spiritual—aspect to cookery, which expresses itself in questions such as why things taste one way in one place, and another somewhere else. In our globalised food culture, we would do well to bear these less tangible aspects of cooking in mind. We should not expect, for example, that a cuisine can be transplanted from one country to another without there being a cost in terms of taste. Who, after all, would want to eat Yorkshire pudding in Rome?