Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall desires everybody to know we’ve been swindled. And the perpetrator? Sugar.
“We’ve been conned into eating more sugar than we even have a genuine appetite for,” he says, good-natured outrage effervescent from his phrases.
“Of course, a lot of us have a sweet tooth – I would say I have a really sweet tooth. But what I found is even my sweet tooth is completely satisfied by much less sugar than conventional recipes, and certainly industrially produced biscuits, cakes, sweets and puddings tend to include. We definitely need a sugar rethink.”
Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage has been re-evaluating its relationship with sugar for just a few years now. “We started taking some of the sugar out of our bakes and treats and desserts several years ago, and nobody even noticed. If anything, we were getting more feedback saying, ‘God, that’s so delicious’,” he says.
Recipes in his new guide, River Cottage Good Comfort, might need a much less tooth-rotting quantity of sugar in them, however you gained’t essentially miss something. “Dialling down the sugar and the refined ingredients is part of it, but dialling up the whole ingredients is what the book’s more about,” Fearnley-Whittingstall provides.
And don’t fear – the desserts are nonetheless candy. After all, that is the one who admits to whipping up bins of candies as a toddler: “I used to make coffee and peppermint creams and dip them in chocolate – and truffles, things like that,” Fearnley-Whittingstall remembers. But the sweetness is adjusted, and different components are added – akin to parsnips or carrots into desserts, or a date syrup as an alternative of a “knee-trembling amount of fudgy toffee”.
This is all a part of the 57-year-old chef and meals author’s mission to get us consuming a bit extra healthily – and that doesn’t imply you need to miss out in your favorite, stodgy consolation meals. “We shouldn’t be guilt-tripping people into eating healthy food, we should be tempting people to healthy food,” he says.
After a “strange few years”, it made sense for Fearnley-Whittingstall to dedicate his newest guide to comforting, nostalgic recipes. “During lockdown, a lot of people began reaching back to those favourite family recipes, those reliable cockle-warmers – the things that make us feel good, and make us feel that family is close by,” he displays. “Enjoying something which not only do we love to eat, but has some kind of resonance and a little bit of emotional goodness to it.”
For him, the problem was having the ability to “healthify” traditional consolation dishes – like spag bol, shepherd’s pie or crumble – with out compromising on the style. Some dishes took a bit extra testing than others. “People think, ‘today I’ll be virtuous, and tomorrow maybe I’ll kick up my heels and put my feet up and indulge’,” he says. “Actually, we can have both on the same plate and both in the same dish. We can enjoy treats, foods that are really well balanced – they’ve got lots of good things in them. Often that means a few little tweaks, and sometimes there are some bigger tweaks, but it’s all very doable.”
Ultimately, Fearnley-Whittingstall needed to maintain all the important thing tenets of consolation meals intact. “We can still capture the cockle-warming, saucy, gooey, whatever the particular characteristic is – crispy-topped, or a gooey brownie, or a crumble with custard and lovely fruit underneath. We can have all those things and they can be truly delicious – and yet better for us than perhaps some of the old-school or conventional versions of those recipes.”
But why are we so drawn to consolation meals? “I’ve got a slightly highfalutin answer to that, I hope you’ll bear with me,” says Fearnley-Whittingstall. “I think the idea of comfort food is incredibly deeply ingrained in our entire food history, and it goes way back to when we were hunter-gatherers, where basically the entire human race – wherever you were on the planet, such as it was then – woke up to the same problem, which is what are we going to eat today?
“For millennia, that was the human race’s relationship with food, and it was pretty much all you thought about all day. Often, it was very hard work, and sometimes it was scary, because food was scarce. I think comfort food comes from that moment when, once in a while, there was enough, there was plenty to go around. For the duration of that meal, everybody could relax, everybody could tell a story and everyone could smile.”
For this prepare dinner, the identical applies as we speak. “Fast-forward a few thousand years, and going back down the generations of the comfort foods we eat, those ones represent those moments of family togetherness, plenty, we’re not too short of everything, we’ve got what we need, and we’re content.
“Even as I say that, I’m aware that is a notion that’s under challenge at the moment from the really tough times we’re having. But for me, that means finding these moments of comfort around the table becomes more important.
“It becomes tougher sometimes to find the ingredients and turn on the oven – all those things are becoming harder and more expensive. But we still need to do that, because it’s what keeps us sane and warm and together.”
‘River Cottage Good Comfort’ by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (printed by Bloomsbury, £27; pictures by Simon Wheeler), obtainable now.
Source: www.impartial.co.uk