BAOKLIST
I liarry Bantsden’s Coals to Newcastle you may well say, but Leeds-based ‘World Famous’ fish and chip restaurant chain has come to Edinburgh. Apart from the licensed bar and separate takeaway area. the restaurant also boasts 120 car parking spaces, a fisheries and heritage museum and is in the process of constructing children's play areas inside and out. The Gala Opening takes place this weekend (l7/l8 July) from eleven till six. the harbour front will be jumping with jazz and pipe bands. kids entertainers. face painters and waitresses handing out samples. There will be flotillas on the water, and atolunchtime on Saturday. Blue Peter's John Leslie will jet in on board a lifeboat for the official
opening.
FLAVOUB OF THE FORTNIGHT
Perrier Richardson of the Glasgow ililton Is one of the founding members of the Scottish Ghefs Association, and will be hosting meals and workshops for other chefs in the autumn. this is a most delicious and impressive looking dish - I know, late a howlful at the Perth' Food Proms, where Ferrier was demonstrating this spring.
leek, Potato and Smoked Haddock Soup with an Orkney Cheddar Souffle
Serves 6 white of three leeks 60g onion 250g potato 30g butter 875ml vegetable stock 125g smoked haddock fillet salt and pepper
Iilce leeks, onions and potato. Sweat off in butter - do not colour. Add stock, season and cook until vegetables are soft. Add haddock and cook for five more minutes. Blend in Ilquldlser.
Souffle 30g butter 30g flour 400ml milk 4 egg yolks 125g Orkney cheddar 3 tsps chopped chives 6 egg whites
Melt butter in a saucepan, stir in flour and cook for 3 mins. Add In milk gradually, stirring with a wooden spoon. Season. Cook over medium heat, stirring all the time until the sauce thickens. Set aside to cool. Stir in egg yolks, chives and cheese. Whisk egg whites with a pinch of salt until soft peaks form. Gently fold into sauce.
Fill six ovenproof soup howls two thirds full of soup and top with souffle mixture. Me at We for 8-10 mlns, or until souffles are well puffed and golden. Serve immediately.
Glasgow illlton, 1 William Street, Glasgow, 041 204 5005.
et cooking
Catherine Fellows welcomes a twin pronged attack on our increasing dependence on instant packaged food.
The end of June was a promising time for cooking — and not because the shops were full of new potatoes and British strawbenies. On 22 June. the Department of Health’s Get Cooking! campaign was launched in the House of Commons. with cross-party support. A few days earlier, the first ever Scottish Chefs’ Association was born and a programme of events for the coming year announced.
There is still nothing to beat good home cooking.
Get Cooking! is the brain child of the National Food Alliance. an umbrella organisation promoting the interests of a number of consumer pressure groups. and is being promoted in the BBC's Good Food magazine. it is a reSponse to fears that basic culinary knowledge traditionally handed down from generation to generation is being lost - that children today are simply not learning how to cook. Not only are fewer and fewer kids spending their time licking out bowls. learning tricks and crowding their mums out in the kitchen. but in school. home economics has been relegated to a minor position outside the new core curriculum and has to compete for students with other options such as modern languages and information technology.
The situation is rather better in Scotland than in the rest of the UK. home economics lessons being
compulsory for all in senior one and two, but a recent Mori poll of school children aged between seven and fifteen, found that whilst 75 per cent knew how to use a microwave. only 54 per cent could boil an egg.
The aim of Get Cooking! is to nurture existing enthusiasm (8l per cent of the kids interviewed agreed that cooking is fun), and to help give them the opportunity to put that enthusiasm into
In Scotland all children get at least two years of home economics tuition at school
action. Apart from general publicity, the Get Cooking! team has published a starter pack for Food Clubs, which it hopes will spring up all over the country. The pack includes advice on ‘everything from shopping to chopping' along with twenty step by step recipes selected for their child appeal and the basic skills which they span. Making spaghetti bolognese. for example, entails ieaming how to chop an onion properly, and when to start cooking your spaghetti so it is ready at the same time as your sauce. The recipes also suggest alternatives — leave out the meat, add garlic. use fish instead — in order to encourage improvisation. The idea is that at the same time as equipping children with a basic repertoire of meals that are cheaper. tastier and healthier than those they could get from a packet, the pack will give them confidence of a more general son, greater control over what they put into their bodies. and. not least. give them access to one of the great pleasures in life.
As Derek Cooper argued in a recent response to the campaign. however hard the food industry tries to beguile us with alternatives, there is still nothing to beat good home cooking - take the mouthwatering smells: you just don’t get them from boiling up a sachet or sticking a frozen offering in the
70 The List l6—29 July I993