Five-Spice and Fire: Summer Knows What It Wants

There is a particular quality to August cooking that has nothing to do with restraint. I don't mean the abandonment of technique — I mean the opposite. August is when the cook who understands their ingredients most precisely gets to strip everything back to what matters: heat, char, contrast, and the specific pleasure of eating something that knows exactly what season it arrived in.

Meera Sodha's oyster mushroom burger stopped me in the way that only the most honest recipes do — not because it is clever, but because it is correct. The five-spice slaw is the kind of move that looks like seasoning but is actually argument. Five-spice on a slaw is an act of conviction. Star anise, Sichuan pepper, cloves, cassia, fennel seed — a spice route compressed into a single jar, and Sodha uses it the way she uses everything: with the precision of someone who has eaten deeply and remembers every bite. The mushroom itself — oyster, always oyster — has that particular umami collapse when exposed to high heat, that moment when the gill structure softens and the moisture releases and the exterior catches. You are not making a substitute. You are making a thing.

But it is Benjamina Ebuehi's Dutch baby that I keep returning to, because a Dutch baby is a kind of small miracle of kitchen physics that I have loved since my father first made one on a Sunday morning in Lyon, baffled and delighted by the way the batter climbs the sides of the cast-iron pan like something alive. The summer berries she pairs with it are doing what summer berries always do when they are properly used: bleeding, acidic, generous. There is a moment, when you pull the Dutch baby from the oven and it hasn't yet deflated, when it looks impossibly tall and proud, and you understand why people have been making versions of this thing since at least the early twentieth century. Then it settles. Then you eat it. The settling is part of the pleasure.

The news behind all of this is darker, and it deserves to be said plainly. The UK is turning to imports because drought and heat have hit domestic vegetable crops with a severity that growers are calling the worst they have known. This is not a culinary inconvenience. It is a preview. When the crops that have grown in British soil for centuries fail because the soil is too dry and the air is too hot, we are watching something that no import substitution solves. The courgettes and salad leaves that Sodha and Ebuehi and every home cook reaches for without a second thought are becoming contingent. They depend on conditions that are no longer reliable. The honest cook — the cook who pays attention — notices this. Files it somewhere important.

And then there is this: Malta sent forty CPD firefighters to Portugal to help battle the wildfires tearing through the Iberian peninsula. Forty people who train to fight fire, crossing the Mediterranean to stand in someone else's disaster. I think about the kitchens in the villages near those fires, the olive oil that will not be pressed this autumn, the herbs growing on hillsides that are burning. I think about how food culture is always one catastrophe away from interruption, and how the people who care about tables also care about the land that makes tables possible. The Malta firefighters are doing what the best cooks do: showing up for something larger than themselves.

The Culpeper's papa doble — a daiquiri variation built on grapefruit and maraschino — is what you make at the end of this kind of evening. Hemingway drank the original in Havana, at La Floridita, in quantities that suggest he was trying to solve something that rum cannot actually solve. The Culpeper in Clerkenwell took it, refined it, gave it a house name. A good cocktail, like a good dish, is always a conversation with something that came before.

Go find oyster mushrooms. Build a burger you are not apologising for. Add five-spice to something you would not normally add it to. Watch the Dutch baby rise.

*— Alexandre Noir is Gastronomy & Culture Editor at News Beast by FreeMalta.com*