My Year Without Meat Read online

  ‘And how many vegetarian options?’ I asked. This is also a standard question. It reflects just how much the chef has embraced vegetables in their cooking, as well as their overall attitude to hospitality. If you find yourself in the disabled toilet in a restaurant or hotel, for example, and you can’t move for mops and boxes of toilet paper, then you have a fair idea about the manager’s attitude to accessibility.

  When I asked the owner about the vegetarian options you could almost hear her eyes rolling around her head. ‘We can do a risotto for them,’ she said, dropping her words like she was trying to shake something wet from her hands.

  ‘Anything else?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said curtly, watching me take notes. ‘Well, it’s their own fault!’ she added.

  I didn’t make a comment. I took some photos of the rather good beer and left. But consider that change in language: ‘It’s their fault’. Pull this apart and repack it in a manner that explains the underpinning philosophy and thought and you get something like this: ‘Well, we go to a lot of trouble sourcing and making the meals we like eating ourselves, which are based around 50 per cent animal protein by mass on the plate. But when it comes to cooking food that doesn’t involve meat, we are not that enthused. To tell you the truth, we resent people not eating meat. They’re not trying to fit in. They are making extra work for us and for themselves. So we prefer to dissuade them because, after all, it’s their fault.’

  THE CHEFS WHO GET IT

  One of my favourite old cookbooks is New Standard Cookery published by Odhams Press Ltd, London, in 1933. The one I have must be the Australian edition, for it has an ‘Australian Kitchen’ chapter that has such classic dishes as Illawarra mushroom pie and stuffed baked pawpaw (or pumpkin), a recipe for both stewed and creamed bandicoot, and a roasting method for black swan, bush turkey, wallaby and Mallee hen. (The Mallee hen, or Malleefowl, is a large, mostly ground-dwelling bird that lives, as the name suggests, in the Mallee and is now listed as a threatened species). The book is out of date and out of print. It may have been out of touch, listing recipes such as Tasmanian pineapple whip, based, of course, on the great pineapple plantations of the subtropical Derwent Valley.

  The book suggests that meat ‘is the substantial course of the dinner, and many people would not consider the meal complete without it’. Over eighty years later the thinking in many restaurant kitchens has not changed.

  There is a cooking gag that goes something along these lines: Diner to top chef: What do you have for vegetarians? Top chef to diner: Contempt.

  Dining out by a person who does not eat meat is often made easy by the absence of any choice at all. The dated dining model of a bistro-style menu generally works on five or more choices in entree, main and dessert. There is generally a ‘vegetarian option’ in the entree and the main. When a waiter describes the menu, the words are loaded with coded intonation. ‘Vegetarian OPTION’ is pronounced like a game-show voice-over man describing the consolation prize. As in ‘Thanks, Jim, sorry you didn’t do so well tonight but Jo has something for you.’ And ‘Never mind, Jim. You don’t go home empty-handed. There’s the board game from Crown and Andrews, the stickpin from Germani, plus our very own “vegetarian option”.’ The vegetarian option is generally a pasta or risotto dish, the kitchen logic being that customers need to walk out the door feeling full. If they won’t get full from animal protein they can get it from starch. And dairy.

  Melbourne chef Matt Wilkinson famously declared that when it comes to knowing where food comes from and what is seasonal and fresh, most Australian chefs were ‘lazy and ignorant’. Wilkinson got a lot of flak for his vehement views. Other chefs took to social media to tell him to shut his mouth. I applauded his bravado and mocked up a range of kitchen wear, which included a poorly photoshopped image of Matt wearing an apron with the words ‘lazy and ignorant’ scribbled in with digital ink. Wilkinson laughed. I agreed with his sentiments. Chefs who know where food comes from are in the minority. In many kitchens you will find a list of suppliers: butcher, seafood, fruit and veg, dry goods, frozen goods. Sometimes the list is that short. Go into Matt’s kitchen and he’ll be on the phone to his pork supplier, consoling them about the lack of rain, or, the wild-dog attack on their free-range herd. Chefs like Matt go to farms on their days off and holidays, to learn about food, how it is grown, when it is at its seasonal best and how they can manage their kitchen around the supply. Another really good cook is Stefano de Pieri, cooking in Mildura on the Murray. He prepares a degustation-only menu that changes daily to take into account what comes in to his kitchen each day. A lot of the food is grown by his local mates in their small gardens. I don’t think Stefano would know how to prepare the frozen goods from a food-service truck if one hit him.

  The best Australian chefs are hardworking and hungry for knowledge. They know meat is a shortcut to yumminess. But to produce really good vegetarian food at a high standard demands chefs have a good knowledge of food and an understanding of how flavour works. This involves a broad range of skills and understanding of ingredients from a range of cultures. These were key lessons I was to learn regarding my own kitchen. I don’t come from a culture that celebrates meatless meals. Meat is a celebration in itself. I had to cherrypick from cultures that don’t have meat at the centre of the meal.

  Unburdened from the shackles of expecting that a meal contain meat, I was free to explore the extraneous sections of menus. And this is where, I discovered, good chefs are at their best. Raymond Capaldi is a Scots-born chef who grew up in Prestonpans, on the outskirts of Edinburgh. When I lived there I was told it wasn’t a place one visited unless one intended to score class-A drugs. Capaldi is known as much for his colourful tongue as he is his rich brogue. What outshines both is his ability to cook. He is sensational. Perhaps the best soup I have ever had is his butternut pumpkin soup. ‘You get butternut pumpkin,’ he told me. ‘You cook it in fuckin’ goat’s milk. You fuckin’ season it. You put it in the fuckin’ Thermomix. You serve it. Fuckin’ delicious.’ At his now-closed Melbourne CBD restaurant Hare & Grace he served an inspired dish of mock pasta to appease the gluten-free crowd from the surrounding business towers. He took thick rings of onion, cut them so they formed broad fettuccini-width strips and blanched them to soften them and remove the sharp tang of onion. He dressed the hot onion ‘fettuccini’ in cream and egg, seasoned with a little cayenne, which thickened when it hit the hot onion, to form a sauce. He called the dish ‘low carbonara’. It was fuckin’ delicious.

  Another chef of note is Riccardo Momesso. Momesso is a natural-born killer. He is never happier than when he has a shotgun to his shoulder, blowing small birds out of the sky. Now a restaurateur, he combined his love of hunting with his skill at cooking traditional Italian food by sneaking some of his wild game into the ragout and sausages when he was working with the team at Sarti. This is a modern Italian restaurant in the east end of Melbourne. The notes I made from just one meal list wild mushroom and caprino suppli—beautiful golden bullet-shaped croquettes of rice flecked and flavoured with pieces of pine mushroom and porcini, with the clean finish and lactic tang of caprino (soft goat’s milk cheese). There was also baked artichoke with pieces of crisp almond and soft buffalo mozzarella. And a masterpiece in umami—pasta al farro with eggplant, tomato, slow-cooked Spanish onion and pecorino. The low, slow braise of the vegetables reduced them to a sweet and savoury, but thick and delicious, sauce that clung to the pasta, handmade spirals rolled tight around a wooden skewer. Bringing it together, like a culinary von Karajan, was the deft addition of salty pecorino cheese. Amazing flavour and without any mention that the meal was vegetarian.

  As Matt Wilkinson explained to me:

  Chefs use animal protein as a crutch. They will finish a meat dish with jus, which is basically super-concentrated broken-down protein (amino acid). It tastes very, very nice and is all very yummy. But try to get most chefs to be able to deliver that amount of flavour on the plate without using meat and they won
’t be able to. Why? It is because they either were not trained properly or are too arrogant to embrace the truth that the best cooking reflects a deep understanding of all ingredients, including, of course, vegetables. Vegetables should be the cornerstone of every meal. I would like to have a restaurant with a menu where meat doesn’t feature. It is part of the dish but it is used as just another ingredient. My biggest fear would not be that the staff and customers wouldn’t take kindly to it but that I would be labelled a vegetarian chef. Or a meat-free chef. Getting past the lazy thinking of general consensus is very hard.

  Wilkinson went on to write Mr Wilkinson’s Favourite Vegetables and Mr Wilkinson’s Simply Dressed Salads, books that have sold over 100 000 copies worldwide. There is a lesson in that for resistant chefs. Wilkinson is way ahead of the pack when it comes to thinking about food and is always a good soul to bounce ideas off.

  Another chef who is never frightened of letting vegetables do a solo act is French-born Nicolas Poelaert. Almost as a swan song, in his own restaurant Embrasse, he produced a 6-course vegan meal, in concert with Tomato social media head Ed Charles, that didn’t use any animal products. This was in September 2011. Anyone who has tried to grow veg in Victoria knows that September is the leanest month of the year. It is right at the end of winter and the spring flush is yet to begin.

  The evening started with some smoked bread, a portion of grassy and fruity Mount Zero biodynamic olive oil piped inside. Then there was a dish of pumpkin, bergamot, Meyer lemon and horseradish. He was able to send out a dish that you would have sworn was fish, it was so redolent of the sea, but was in fact made with broccoli, brussels sprouts, grilled zucchini, sugar beet, warrigal greens and seagrass juice.

  ‘Vegetables play an important role in Embrasse’s kitchen and fill more room on the plate than is generally the case in other gourmet restaurants,’ wrote Poelaert at the time. Nowhere on the menu of that truly memorable meal was the word vegan used.

  Then there was the degustation at Jacques Reymond, a dozen courses of modern French cooking prepared with Zen-like elegance and no fish or flesh. It was a year later and the French-born chef was at the height of his powers, with an exit strategy in the back of his mind. Just over six months later, he announced he was retiring from three chef’s hat fine dining.

  One outstanding dish was a simple terrine of potatoes layered with Beauforte cheese. This is a French cow’s milk cheese that is smear-ripened with a mixture of salt and salt-loving cultures and left to mature. When warm, it sings of the high altitude pastures on which the dairy herds grazed. Reymond and his team finished the dish by slicing the terrine and searing it in a pan, adding a glazed savoury caramel crust to the cheese and potatoes. It was an understated triumph exhibiting a lifetime of understanding. It was simple and delicious. He extracted the maximum possible amount of flavour from that dish. There were the natural savoury elements from the cheese that were highlighted by the deft use of what is known as the Maillard reaction. This is when starch and amino acid recombine at high temperature to create new compounds with darker colours, more savoury flavours and a lovely bittersweet balance. Think skin on roast lamb, or the very outside of a crust of dark sourdough.

  To understand why Reymond knows how to cook food so well, it helps to understand where he came from. He was raised in the small town of Cuiseaux in Jura, France. His house was above a mill where his grandfather milled walnuts and hazelnuts for oil. In Reymond’s words:

  I was brought up in a stone house in the village where, under the house, there was a huge stone driven by a donkey going around and around, crushing the nuts in season. We grew up with black hands peeling the walnuts. The first extraction of the oil was pure perfection. Then my grandfather pressed the ground nuts. The second extraction. Then he had a small wood fire and he would take the pressed nuts—imagine something similar to the plug of coffee you have in an espresso machine—and he would gently roast these, engulfing the village and the villages for five kilometres in the aroma of wood smoke, walnuts and hazelnuts. After the oil was pressed from these we went fishing in the river, with the roasted nuts to use as bait. Nothing was wasted.

  Reymond grew up with the aroma of nut oil filling the house each autumn. His grandfather was also the regional rabbit butcher. He went from village to village, preparing the rabbits according to the wants of the housewives. When Reymond was young he showed enough interest in his grandfather’s trade for the older man to take him aside, telling him, ‘Jacques, you are an interesting young man, you show talent and observance’. Reymond’s grandfather left him the leather bag of knives he used when butchering the local rabbits. Reymond was, decades later, painted with that bag for the Archibald Prize.

  Reymond trained at the 3-Michelin-star restaurant L’Oustau de Baumanière in Provence, and the restaurant at Hotel La Verniaz at Evian, near Geneva. He became deeply proficient and knowledgeable not only about his native French food but about Asian ingredients. This knowledge was gained by working in the Amazon and the north-east of Brazil, with the descendants of black slaves who used ingredients such as ginger and kaffir lime leaves in their culinary vernacular. It was here that he decided to work these ingredients into his personal cuisine. He returned to France and opened his own restaurant in Cuiseaux, obtaining a Michelin star. ‘But I was frustrated that I couldn’t get those fresh exotic ingredients,’ he told me in a later discussion, after the degustation event.

  This was the impetus to move to Australia—a place where the exotic Asian ingredients were easier to come by. When he arrived in 1983 he worked with Mietta O’Donnell at her eponymous restaurant. He opened his first restaurant in 1986 and his mansion-based restaurant in 1992. He remained true to his classic French training and cooked according to the seasons. But he had given himself permission to employ the other influences that informed him, as he cooked the light, thoughtful and considered dishes he became known for. He never veered towards fusion, instead simply creating a cuisine that was a generous and playful extrapolation of nouvelle cuisine.

  ‘I let product express itself and only add other ingredients to complement the flavour,’ said Reymond, his eyes lighting up at the mere mention of vegetables. ‘There should only be three or four ingredients in a dish. It is about understanding and respecting the ingredient. With vegetables, some need a good kick, some need some acidity, some will need some element of fat, such as the grandfather’s oils [walnut or hazelnut]. Then there is the cooking technique—roasted, steamed, braised, or wrapped in paperbark or silicon paper. Sometimes you want to concentrate the flavours, such as cooking the celeriac in a salt crust.’ When he said this he puckered his lips as he remembered the flavour and texture. ‘This is such a wonderful way of cooking celeriac. Outside is a thick, almost impenetrable crust but inside the flesh is soft and intense and delicious,’ he said. But, focusing, he hammered home his point. ‘It is essential to understand vegetables much more than meat or fish because of the water content of the vegetable,’ he said. ‘Because you have to extract the water without killing the flavour of the ingredient. That is where you have to understand each vegetable. You have to draw out the moisture to concentrate the flavour and you have to find the right cooking technique to do this without killing the very essence of the vegetable you are trying to highlight. It is a very fine balancing act but it is not difficult to understand. It just takes time.’

  One of the other great dishes Reymond prepared in that degustation was a simple tempura with enoki mushrooms, matched with a bright and lively young sage and stinging nettle puree, a little segment of poached nectarine and some granules of fresh wasabi. It was stunning.

  Thankfully there is a turnaround in the attitude chefs have towards vegetables. This will only increase as animal protein becomes more expensive. The price of beef has increased by 20 per cent and the price of popular cuts of pork by 25 per cent in the few months leading up to the end of 2015 alone. I watched this economic effect on the kitchen of a chef near Madrid, Fernando del Cerro from Casa Jos�
� in Aranjuez. He has a restaurant near the market in the old summer capital of Spain. I dined there in September 2008 and then six months after the GFC first hit. His menu had changed from whole fish on the bone and great prime cuts of pork to vegetable braises and much smaller portions of lesser-loved cuts of meat. He dropped his costs, dropped his price but kept his profit margin. He is a chef who knows how to cook and knows how to cook vegetables. He is lucky. He works with some of the best growers in the country. He is still in business while many others in the top end of the industry have closed their doors.

  For some time the relationship between chef, or cook, and grower has been truncated and tenuous. Most chefs don’t know where their food comes from. There has been no feedback loop for cooks and chefs to get growers to raise the bar, and no way the growers can educate those in the kitchen about the way fruit and veg change with the season. In the last decade and a half we have seen the rise of farmers’ markets, where real farmers drive to the towns and cities to sell what they picked from their farm the day before. There is also the neo-peasant arm of the hipster movement that sees young people return to the land or take up farming. While this might not be sustainable in the long run, with many young couples deep in debt with shallow returns, it is in the short term providing some really excellent quality produce to the food system.

  It is an appealing option to many. Former Longrain chef Marty Boetz gave up a dazzling career in a popular Sydney restaurant to become a farmer. He’s a good example of the new dialogue that is happening between chefs and their growers. Out on the fertile flats of the Hawkesbury River he grows quite sensational vegetables on his farm, Cooks Co-op. Picked each morning, they are hand-delivered to restaurants by his team. Beautiful greens, marrows, tomatoes, beans. He knows what chefs want and has taught himself how to grow it accordingly. It’s a 2-way street: he can also offer ideas on how to prepare more novel veg.