Luke Mackay

I recently had the good fortune to eat some of the best food in the world, in one of  the most stunning  places in the world, sitting  close by to three of my favourite people in the world. The food, I shall tell you all about below, I was deep in the Basque country and I was surrounded on all sides by my exceptionally brilliant nieces and nephew.

I went to Spain, you see, with the lovely girlfriend-  for my little brother’s wedding to Saray Marcos Otxoa……..or Saray Mackay as she is now. Which makes me laugh – like Anna Spanner. Or Claire Bear. Why Aye Saray Mackay.

That might just be me?

Anyway. Their wedding was magnificent and I shall tell you mainly about the food because it was generous and delightful and, with the speeches and Rioja, made me cry like a little girl. On the table there were platters of the acorn fed pig that I raved about in a previous blog, along with meltingly smooth foie gras and chewy bread. We were brought roast langoustine which I ripped apart with my fingers and greedily sucked brains and fishy goodness from their heads- then tender octopus, prawns and whole grilled lobsters.

When all 130 guests were stuffed to the gills with the finest, most luxurious food Poseidon himself could offer up, we were brought beef. Now then……..This was not just any beef……. This was aged fillet of beef- lovingly hung, assertively seasoned and flung with gay abandon onto fierce heat until charred and smoky without, and scarlet juicy perfection within. Served simply on a pillow of ethereal potato puree, it was sublime. My non-fish eating brother-in-law ate six.

So thank you brother Ben, sister Saray (Mackay), Mum and Dad and of course and indeed particularly, Saray (Mackay’s)  fantastic parents too- it was the best wedding food ever and, Havana in hand, looking out over the Bay of Biscay, I was flushed with familial pride and incredible cask-aged Rioja.

 A shimmering trout pulled with a yelp from a loch, cooked by dusky moonlight on a just made fire- stuffed with ripped handfuls of wild chives and garlic shoots.

A hut of mud, a woman who weaved, through a battered pot of only beans and water- something  magic that made it good. With chapatis from a glowing rock- then sublime.

A salty shack clinging to an Adriatic island- octopus, charred and with lemon. Tiny crunchy, stiff-fresh fish, head and guts- one bite- with the intensity of deep ocean.

So drunk with pints and shots and laughing. Hunger. All consuming, then bright lights and greasy meat and lacerating chillis and pungency of garlic. So important.  Feed me now.

These are a few of my favourite things.

Expense skull-duggery is the new swine flu (remember that?)  I did see 2 Japanese girls wandering round Borough Market wearing face masks on Friday.  Although this could perhaps be explained by Asian bird flu. Or SARS. Or Ebola. Or child obesity. Or foot and mouth.  Or global warming in the form of flash flooding. Or drought. Or amphibian precipitation. Or infanticide. Or polar bears looking a bit sad on marginally smaller ice bergs. It’s possible I suppose that  they were in fact not terrified of media/apostle invented catastrophe,  but were Japanese roofers on the hunt for a chorizo roll and a pear cider between insulating cavities. Who the hell knows.

Any hoo, those MP’s are scamps aren’t they?

 It’s a perfect storm. Recession, highest unemployment for decades, terrorism, pandemics, global warming and a total duffer of a Prime Minister has combined with parliamentary capriciousness and a soupcon of investigative journalism to create a stinking miasma of fury and frustration. On the plus side, Question Time has been absolutely brilliant recently. Dimbleby for Speaker, I say. Poor Maggie Beckett was just all over the shop, it was like Christians being thrown to the lions, except the Christians all had fourteen Bang and Olufsen TV’S in six houses and the lions were poor, angry, slightly unwashed looking people from some awful northern enclave like Hull, Scunthorpe or Watford.

I would give them £150,000 per year and no expenses and tell them to get on with it. And I don’t care if you are the Right Honourable Member for northern chippiness and lard accrual. When you have to come to the House of Commons, stay in a hotel and pay for it out of your handsome salary. It will all work out in the end because London MP’s have to spend more money because London is very expensive and Thurso isn’t.

London is expensive. Unless you eat at my new pet restaurant. My new favourite place. You might have me down as a middle class white boy who lives in Putney, works in Notting Hill, goes shopping in Borough Market and enjoys the afternoon play on Radio 4. And you’d be right. However, my new pet restaurant, about which I am about to lyrically wax, is in Tooting. Not only that, it is quite close to Colliers Wood.

I had the best curry I have ever had at the Lahore Karahi on Tooting High Street- www.lahorekarahi.co.uk. It looks rubbish- really rubbish, like if Miss Millie’s Chicken opened a curry house. But bejesus it’s good. It is so, so good it makes me happy in ways usually associated with guilt, sweat and hedonism. I ate mutton chops and chicken tikka and mushroom rice and lentils and spinach and fried masala fish. Look at the menu on their website- £1.95!! £2.00!! £4.95!! it’s ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous for any food in a restaurant in London. But it is soooooo good too. I am almost angry with them for the ridiculousness of it all. Not half as angry as I am with crap pubs who think it appropriate to charge £14 for a rubbish lamb shank. Lahore Karahi is always full. Everyone is happy- sating and sated. The staff are funny and fast and the football is on the flat-screen in the corner.

It’s really brilliant, it really is. It’s 5 star, top of the class, Britain’s got talent, super dooper, wonderful. Go there and have the Keema Nan- you will never eat better protein stuffed carbohydrate in all your long days.

A chef’s greatest asset is their insecurity, their need to please.  A good chef is generous, giving- of time and ingredients. I try my best to only ever send out plates of food that would make me feel happy, should I be the recipient. Most importantly I want people that I cook for to like me a little bit. And to say nice things about my food. And ANY chef that says otherwise, is a damnable liar and a cad. And I’m one of the more normal ones, with previous careers and qualifications and things. And friends. Some Chefs go into a big hotel kitchen when they are 15, are brutalised by a moustachioed German  (all  characters are fictitious and any resemblance to Anton Edelmann is coincidental), smoke 50 Marlborough reds and drink a litre of cooking brandy per day and then kill cats, mug Chelsea pensioners and burn old Gurkhas. I am not even really a Chef- if you stuck me in a professional restaurant kitchen I wouldn’t last 5 minutes. Life is too short to spend 18 hours being shouted at and scalded by ginger douche bags with OCD (all characters are fictitious and any resemblance to Tom Aikens is coincidental). I just like cooking. Close friends of mine call me a cook rather than a chef to wind me up- but I like being a cook- it is hearty and warming. Chefs are clinical and psychotic.  Cooking is like a hug. And it makes me more popular. I am lucky that I can eke out a living from cooking food having not spent 2 years at a catering college in Westminster learning how to mainline crack. I didn’t even spend 3 years separating prawns from their faeces in some poncified temple to fine dining, whose menu is only written in lower case, and which by now is sending out emails offering 15 courses for sixpence. I just cooked an omelette one day when I was seven, spent 18 years in education, did 12 random jobs and then told a load of old porkies on my CV to get a job cooking on a yacht.

Anyway…. I started talking about generosity, I was reading this weeks restaurant review by Jay Rayner in the Observer and he mentioned how good Richard Corrigan’s fish pie was. Because of his ‘overly developed instinct to feed’  Thats brilliant isn’t it? What a great epitaph that would be. Generosity is the key to fish pie- think about the FISH IN BOLD UPPER CASE and the pie in little baby letters. This is my recipe. If you cook this for someone, they will like you more and quite possibly think you rather dishy/coquettish. Let me know how it goes.

Ingredients

• 2 fillets of pollack (which I see has been renamed ‘Colin’. Desist.)
• 1  fillet of undyed smoked haddock  (Not the luminous yellow crap that is always (ALWAYS!) on sale at small Tesco shops attached to garage fore courts.)
• 12 big raw prawns
• 6 scallops
• 1¼ pints milk
• 1 medium onion cut in quarters
• 1 stalk celery, roughly chopped
• 1 bay leaf
• bunch fresh parsley
• a few peppercorns
• 1kg Maris Pipers
• 135g butter, plus extra to grease the dish and dot on top of the pie
• 75g plain flour
• salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

1. Put all the fish (not prawns or scallops) in a saucepan. Add the milk, onion, celery, bay leaf, a couple of stalks of parsley and the peppercorns.
2. Place the pan on a low heat and bring to simmer- take off heat and leave aside
3. Peel the potatoes, cut into chunks and put them in a large pan. Cover with water  and bring to boil. Lower the heat and cook till they split when you stick a knife in.
4. Drain the potatoes and return them to the pan and mash them, adding 60g of the butter, cut into cubes, loads of butter (about 70 g) and 4 tablespoons of the fishy milk.
5. Remove the fish pieces and take off any skin and manky bits. Flake into largish chunks. Pour milk through a sieve into a jug and discard bay/onion etc.
6. Add remaining butter to a lean sauce pan and melt over low/medium heat. start adding the flour , mixing in until paste like. Cook out for a five minutes so it smells a bit like biscuits.
7. Pour in the fishy milk bit by bit (a quarter at a time) until you have a thick creamy sauce. Add the juice of  half a lemon if you like and plenty of salt and pepper. Let it simmer gently for 2 minutes- do not let it burn at this stage.
8. Add the scallops, prawns, parsley and fish to the sauce  and cook gently for 5 minutes. Taste and season if necessary.
9. Consider adding sliced boiled eggs.
10. For the love of all that is decent and true, don’t.
11. Or Peas
12. Pour all the fishy bechamel (for, get you, that is what you have made) into a pie dish and evenly distribute potato over filling, plugging all the gaps.
13. consider topping with cheese.
14. Don’t. Just fork it prettily and chuck on some more butter. Cook for about 30 minutes or until it looks nice and golden.
15. NOW cook some peas and have them all nice and bright and green and buttery on the side.

The smell of Dominican coffee makes me feel like smoking. I won’t though, because I dont have any cigarettes and am not buying a whole packet just to satisfy a pavlovian urge, that if fulfilled would only make me feel slightly sick and would negate the taste of the Dominican coffee. I would also lose my seat. I am sitting on a Friday afternoon,by an open window in the corner of the Monmouth Coffee Company, opposite Borough Market. The suited and booted fraternity, having luncheoned flirtatiously, have gone back to the office to solve the credit crunch and the atmosphere changes to reflect the fact that those left in the market have little to do on a Friday afternoon but ponder the correlation between roast Dominican coffee beans and nicotine cravings.

I love Borough Market. It is almost a cliche to say now, but having wandered around many of Europe’s great food markets, I am drawn above all else by Borough’s astonishing personality. Sometimes it is dank and moody, at others vibrant and ecstatic. Come here at 9am on a Saturday morning in Spring to find her at her pearly best. I love how cosmopolitan this place is and yet how fundamentally British. From my Monmouth vantage point, the window frames a microcosm of the very market- Brindisia, with its exquisite jamon, chorizo, olives and almonds sits next to the quintessentially English ‘Ginger Pig’ butcher- sausage rolls, Scotch eggs, wonderful streaky home cured bacon and huge black aged beef ribs…… And there it is, right there-  through my little window- the charm of Borough Market in a nutshell- continental and prosaic, proletarian and passionate. I can see lamb sweetbreads, a tenner a kilo and English asparagus flying off the stalls at £4.50 a bunch. There is New Forest cider and fine Bordeaux. Everyone I can see is eating and a happiness pervades as friends, lovers and colleagues bustle and meander under the great wrought iron arches.

Trendy folks, friendless geeks and Gucci-clad WAGS mix freely. There are the handsome and the plain- moustachioed queens and doting chinoed fathers. There are tramps and lords and the glorious democracy of Borough makes each and every one feel that this place, this temple to all that is good and worthy, is their own discovery and solace.

I got bored of  people watching from the coffee place and went for a stroll around the progressively more peaceful market. I had a chat about Albarino with a moustache, to which was attached a small Spaniard and ate a pot of creme caramel on the move- like a sweet-toothed gurkha. Now I find myself drawn, as ever to the restaurant bit of Brindisia- on the corner of Stoney and Southwark streets.  I am sat on exactly the seat on which I was photographed for my biography page- a favourite place for contemplation and watching. The stupendously oily coffee and faultless tapas is a bonus, as is the blazing sunshine on this gorgeous afternoon in early May. I order pork belly tapas which arrives as two small slabs (can you have small slabs? or are slabs, like americans, inherently large?) which are unctuous and melting, all the fat rendered away to leave perfect wafer thin bubbly, salty, crackling. It has the faintest smear of sweet quince puree and a tiny green salad with enough acidic dressing to just balance all the fatty, sweet, crispy goodness.

I am not one for watching what I eat, but in the spirit of blogging, I have today consumed, in chronological order:

x4 native oysters, x1 sausage roll, x1 Dominican Coffee, x1 creme caramel, x1 Spanish coffee, x2 small slabs (yep) of pork belly and countless small tasters of things like white truffle honey, cheeses, elderflower cordial, rhubarb chutney and a tiny bit of chocolate brownie. I am a little bit full, but have room, possibly, POSSIBLY, for another oyster or two on my way back to the tube station and who knows? falafel? chorizo? potted shrimps? Shall I buy something delicious to cook my lovely girlfriend for dinner or shall I suggest Star Trek at Putney Cinema followed by Gourmet Burger Kitchen? Decisions, decisions. A good Friday. And we won the cricket.