Book Reviews

Kitchens: Kitchen Culture

The old kitchen is dead, says the acclaimed kitchen designer, Johnny Grey. “Rooms in today’s houses have few restricted zones, and the kitchen is becoming the active multi-purpose space choice as we go beyond the era of small rooms and segregated activities”, he writes in “Kitchen Culture: reinventing kitchen design

There is a great deal of radical thinking in this book, as Mr Grey pioneers new ideas of just what kitchens are, and just what they should be. The alliance of text and glorious kitchen spaces makes for an exhilarating book, and one that no one embarking on a big, expensive piece of remodelling or redesigning should take the first step without having digested carefully. There are new parameters of design here, underpinned by Grey’s signature soft geometry. Marvellous stuff, and beautifully produced by Jacqui Small publishers.

Whiskey: Peat, Smoke, and Spirit

Andrew Jefford is the most lyrical and imaginative of wine and spirit writers, a bloke for whom the mysteries and evanescence of a drink is just the starting point for an analysis and an exploration that fuses hard-headed research with lyrical flights of fancy, all in an attempt to better explain just why alcohol is so alluring.

If Joanna Blythman (see Supermarkets) is a Scottish dissenter, then Andrew Jefford is a Christian Mysticist. Time and again, in his new book on the malt whiskeys of Islay, Peat, Smoke and Spirit, distillers tell him that there is nothing mysterious in the water, or the wind, or the peat or the terroir of Islay. Jefford listens respectfully, and recounts their sober assessments. But, it soon becomes clear, Jefford doesn't believe them. Science and experience, he suggests, can't explain magic.

Describing a new-make Laaphroaig, for instance, he writes of how "a natural spirit sweetness which, mingled with the soapiness of all new make, contrives momentarily to suggest bluebells in cool spring woods or hyacinths in a moist conservatory". Later, describing his favourite 10-year-old Laphroaig, he writes of how the whiskey has "the dignity of scented moss, or of young seaweed freshly uncovered by the tide. The oily peat, meanwhile, slaps the tongue with a calving seal's strength…".

That is great writing because it is about things other than just the dram in the glass, a skill Jefford showed in great abundance is his classic wine book, "The New France".

Best of all, this beautiful, absorbing book drives you to the malts, so we went to the Celtic Whiskey Shop on Dublin's Dawson Street to buy a bottle of what seemed to us to be Jefford's most admired malt, Bruichladdich. Ally McAlpine suggested that the 12-year-old was the best bet and pulled a handsomely packaged bottle out from amidst the labyrinthine assortment of malts that this smashing shop stocks.

Later that night, with two friends, we opened the bottle. Now, on page 185 of Jefford's book, he mentions a 15-year-old Bruichladdich, "an entrancing combination of barley and orange and a dram as closely woven as any plaid, drunk at one sitting between three of us… as the shadows lengthened on Midsummer's Day 2003". A whole bottle between three? Impossible!

But, three of us on a recent evening after dinner managed to account for half of the Bruichladdich without even trying, such is the subtle, teasing, provocative enchantment of this fabulous malt, with its ability to dance a jig around your senses. Peat, smoke and spirit, but what Jefford is after is not simply the whiskey spirit, but the magic spirit. Read the book, buy the Bruichladdich from the Celtic Whiskey Shop, and mainline some magic.

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Supermarkets: Joanna Blythman: Shopped

Recently, John McKenna of the Megabytes parish was part of a Taste Council delegation who presented their ha'penth worth of opinions to the Oireachtas Committee on Food Prices, along with a smattering of other bodies. One group who presented on the same day was a coalition of vegetable growers, who supply to one of the major multiple retailers.

What was most startling about these fine, polite men was a particular feature of their business that seemed blindingly obvious: they had put all their eggs in one basket. They had invested massively in their operation, and their one multiple customer took their produce. They carried out quality checks, and their one multiple customer took their produce.

They carried out testing for MRL's (minimum reside levels for pesticide use), and their one multiple customer took their produce.

Sitting there, listening, it seemed that the fine growers did all the hard work, and their one multiple customer took their produce. They professed themselves happy, their business was healthy, so all was hunky-dory.

"Do you do business with any other multiple?" questioned one curmudgeonly member of the Committee, perhaps thinking, like the rest of us, that a situation where all the power is on the one side of a relationship, and where one party has done all the investing and seems to be doing all the work is, perhaps, not entirely healthy.

But, if you read Joanna Blythman's startling, scarifying and brilliant book on supermarket practices, Shopped you will realise that such a lop-sided relationship with suppliers is just how big multiple supermarkets like it. Except, as Ms Blythman points out, they go even further:

"In the past decade supermarkets have established a near feudal relationship with their suppliers, tightening their control over them, effectively dictating what they produce and screwing down prices, yet offering no security in return", writes Blythman

Partners together? No way, says Ms Blythman: the real relationship is one of master, and servant.

Shopped is a brilliant piece of polemic from the most gifted and analytical food writer in the U.K. There is something of the Scottish dissenter and socialist in Ms Blythman: she is annoyed by unfairness and greed, she is disturbed by low standards and underhand practices, she is passionately on the side of the underdog, so much so that she even spends a week as a checkout operator, just so she can understand what a crap, badly-paid, useless job it is. Shopped is an exhilarating book, so long as you don't mind the exhilaration coming from sheer anger. Some books manage to show things they way they really are, the whole, unalloyed, and unappetising picture.