A Dish of Eggs

'îles Flottantes'
from How to Boil and Egg
with illustration by Fiona Strickland 

Art and food - never the twain shall meet, according to some.  When I thought about starting this blog I felt sure it would not be long before someone uttered the the words "what has food got to do with art?"  When it happened - and it took only one posting to trigger it - I stuck to my resolve to answer by a dozen postings.  I hope these have gone some way to convincing readers that food has a lot to do with art.

A battered tin-glazed 18th century earthenware dish was my starting point.  A flat-bottomed Char Pot, hand-painted with naive representations of fish in grey, red and manganese-purple, specifically produced to contain a delicacy - potted char.  With the art of photography there were so many options but I chose to write Tintype Tomatoes, struck by the way the Tintype process points up the sheer beauty of food whilst playing with our perceptions of what we are looking at.  I chose a painting of Three Pears by Paul Cézanne from a glorious roomful of his works at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.  Azulejos to Bacalhau was the subject of my ninth posting.  The tiles of the Portuguese cozinha catching my attention at Lisbon's Museu Nacional do Azulejo.  Food illustration inspired November's posting A Dish of Apples.  An appreciation of the work of Patricia Curtan, whose simple monochrome line drawings and colourful studies of fruit and vegetables sometimes burst the boundaries of their drawn frame.  

So, to my twelfth Dish.  Fiona Strickland studied Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art where she received a travelling scholarship to Italy and France.  She is a member of The Society of Botanical Artists, an RHS Gold Medallist and a member of the American Society of Botanical Artists.  Surprisingly, it wasn't until 2008 that she made her first submission to The Society of Botanical Artists' Annual Exhibition.  Awards quickly followed and her botanical paintings grace many specialist and private collections.  Capturing the vibrancy of colour and detail are key elements in Fiona Strickland's work.  She has a passion for painting plants and flowers at all stages of their growth, seeing beauty as much in their decay as when in full bloom.  Having spent most of her adult life teaching, she now concentrates on her botanical painting.  Except, now she has made an intriguing diversion into food illustration.

In 2013 she accepted the challenge to produce 43 hand-painted illustrations for Rose Carrarini's second book, How to Boil an Egg.  Co-founder of Anglo-French bakery and restaurant Rose Bakery in Paris, the self-taught Carrarini has never been one to follow the herd and her choice of Fiona Strickland must have intrigued the artist as much as it did me.  The project provided some new challenges for the artist and the results are all the more remarkable because her source material was mostly 2-D photographs of the finished dishes.  Her usual choice of transparent Winsor & Newton watercolour mixes for her botanical paintings couldn't achieve the required effect. Different painting techniques had to be explored, including the use of opaque watercolour mixes and a lighter weight of paper.  Shades of white had to be painted-in rather than Strickland's usual technique of allowing the white of the paper to shine through colour to provide highlight and contrast.  The results are, mostly, astonishing.  From the moist crumb and sticky glaze of Purple Corn and Blueberry Cake, to a luscious dish of caramel-drizzled îles Flottantes, you can't quite believe what you are seeing.  My favourite illustration, perhaps, accompanies a recipe for Egg in the Middle where the crispness of the fried bread and the just-cooked egg are so perfect you want to reach for a knife and fork.

Here's a taster from the book.

Green Fried Eggs
(Serves 1)

150-225g (5-8 oz) spinach, coarse stalks removed
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 eggs
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Add the spinach to a pan of boiling water and cook for 2 minutes.  Drain, squeeze out the excess moisture and spread the spinach out on a plate.
Heat the oil in a frying pan over low to medium heat.  
Break the eggs into the pan and cook gently for 1 minute.  Sprinkle the parsley over the eggs and season with salt and pepper.  Cover with a lid and cook for about 1 minute more to allow the herbs and eggs to steam together until the eggs whites have set.
Lift out the eggs and place on top of the spinach to serve.


Sources:
The Society of Botanical Artists
Jonathan Cooper Gallery
Herald Scotland
Fiona Strickland D.A. (Edin) S.B.A.  G.M.
How to Boil an Egg by Rose Carrarini - published by Phaidon


I hope this one year project Take One Dish has convinced at least some people that food and art belong on the same Dish.  This is the 12th and final posting in the series but the blog will continue to be available and I may return to the subject at a later date.  I hope you've enjoyed the postings as much as I've enjoyed researching and writing them.  Thanks for reading.

A Dish of Apples

Photograph of page from Chez Panisse Fruit by Alice Waters
with illustration by Patricia Curtan

I photograph because I can't illustrate.  Given the choice I would almost always favour illustration, and food illustration doesn't come much better than the work of Patricia Curtan.  An artist, printer and designer, my first introduction to her work was more than 20 years ago when I was handed a menu at Alice Waters' iconic Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California.  Chez Panisse opened its doors in the summer of 1971 based on a conviction that food grown organically, locally and sustainably was worth striving for.  Paying a fair price to the growers for top quality, super-fresh produce and cooking it simply and sympathetically was central to their philosophy.  Such uncompromising ethics come at a price but it's one plenty of people are prepared to pay, me included.  The current trend for 'local, sustainable and fair' owes a huge debt to Alice Waters and all associated with Chez Panisse.

Patricia Curtan began her association with Chez Panisse working in the kitchen and producing letterpress and linoleum-block printed menus for the restaurant.  Cooking led on to consulting, menu and book design.  The connection with Alice Waters has continued for four decades, with Curtan's illustrations enhancing books such as Chez Panisse Vegetables and Chez Panisse Fruit, The Art of Simple Food and The Art of Simple Food II. The writing and recipes are outstanding but Patricia  Curtan's illustrations add so much to the desirability for me. Curtan's work encompasses simple monochrome line drawings and colourful studies of fruit and vegetables, which often burst through the boundaries of their drawn frame, as full of energy as their subjects.

These days you can buy a Patrica Curtan linocut print from her website. Once a drawing is made, linoleum blocks are hand-carved, a separate block for each colour, then printed one block at a time on a 100 year old 10 x 15 Chandler & Price platen press.  Fine papers are sourced, mostly from Europe and Japan.  There is one more book I covet.  Menus for Chez Panisse: The Art and Letterpress of Patricia Curtan - this link offers the best on-line view of the content.  The book traces the development of the artist over 40 years through 100 menus prepared for such luminaries as Merce Cunningham, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Diana Kennedy.  This is also the book which offers some insights into how Patricia Curtan works.

The softly blushing apple illustration which introduces the chapter on Apples in the Chez Panisse Fruit Book is a particular favourite.  In the English alphabet, A is always for Apple.  Yet the domestic apple tree is not native to the British Isles at all.  There is evidence that Malus (apple) trees grew wild in the UK in the Neolithic period but they would have been of the sour Crab apple variety.  Malus coronaria, native to North America, is an exception being a wild, sweet Crab apple.  Now that we can make them palatable by the addition of copious quantities of sugar, we value the crab apple for preserving, mostly as a jelly.

"God gave the crab apple and left the rest to man."

from Jane Grigson's Fruit Book

Discovery Apple
© Take One Dish

The domestic apple, Malus domestica, originated in Eurasia, thought to be in the Kazakhstan region. Cultivated apples can be broken down into the high-acid Cider apple; the tart, low sugar Cooking apple; and the ideally crisp, juicy, usually sweet Eating apple.  Known to have been cultivated in Arabia and Greece, it was the Romans who introduced the domesticated trees to the rest of Europe. Malus domestica reached the Americas with the early settlers.  A climate without extremes of temperature and adequate rainfall suits the Malus perfectly, making it the ideal fruit for the UK climate.  The development of new varieties reached its peak in the 19th and early 20th centuries and now numbers several thousand.  However, as Jane Grigson pointed out in her 'Fruit Book', in the case of many later varieties, flavour and texture has been sacrificed for uniformity of size and yield.  In the UK, Brogdale, which documents the National Fruit Collection, offers an A-Z of Malus domestica from the sweet, aromatic English Adam's Pearmain to the juicy, nutty German cultivar Zabergau Renette.

My favourite eating apple?  It would have to be the firm, sweet and juicy Worcester Pearmain, though the deliciously perfumed Discovery - always the first to market in the UK - is a close second .  There are so many recipes for apples I could have chosen but it's hard to beat a Tarte Tatin so here it is.  Purists look away now - I use rough-puff, not puff pastry and not just because it's easier to make.  It produces a pastry with 'bite' to perfectly balance the filling.  I must have consulted a recipe the fitrst time I made Tarte Tatin but it's so long ago I no longer remember who to credit.  Still, it's a classic and it's lovely and my pastry recipe is courtesy of the Roux brothers.

Tarte Tatin
© Take One Dish

Tarte Tatin
(Serves 4 or two greedy people)

You need 150g (6oz) Rough-Puff pastry
This makes double the amount you need but pastry freezes well:
125g (4 oz) soft plain flour
125g (4 oz) cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes
Pinch of salt
60ml (2 fl oz) iced water

4 apples (preferably Braeburn or similar), halved and cored
60g (2 oz) unsalted butter
60g (2 oz) unrefined cane sugar

To make rough-puff pastry, add the salt to the flour and place on a work surface.  Add the butter and rub it into the flour.  When the butter cubes are small and half squashed, form a 'well' and pour in the iced water, gradually mixing with a knife until everything holds together - do not knead or your pastry will be tough.  Roll out on a lightly floured surface to a rectangle about 1cm thick.  Fold in three, bottom to mid-point, then top to bottom, and turn 90 degrees.  Roll out again to a rectangle and fold in three again.  You have now completed '2 turns'.  Wrap in cling film and refrigerate for 30 minutes.  (If you only want enough pastry for one tart, cut in half at this point and freeze the unwanted half for later and, when you want to use it, defrost, roll and give it 2 more turns).
Roll out the pastry to a rectangle again and repeat the folding process to complete two more turns.  Rest in the fridge for a further 30-60 minutes.
Roll out the pastry thinly (cut in two first if you decided to make two rounds) to a rough circle and cut a disc(s) of around 22cm/9".  Place on a lightly floured tray in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Heat the oven to 220C (Fan 200C)/Gas 7
Melt the butter in a 20cm (8") heavy-based, oven-proof pan.  Add the sugar and cook on a medium heat for 5 minutes to caramelise.  Add the apples, round side down, and cook for 5 minutes.  Top with the chilled pastry disc, tucking the edges down inside the pan, and cook for 2 minutes.  Place the pan in the oven and cook for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool for 4-5 minutes.  Place a serving plate on top of the pan and invert to turn out (take care not to burn yourself with hot caramel).

Good served with double cream or vanilla ice cream.

Sources:
The National Fruit Collection - Brogdale
English Apples and Pears
patriciacurtan.com