“When in doubt – you boil the kettle.”
“When you don’t know what to say – you boil the kettle.”
“When you’re discussing something big, like proposing marriage or divorce – you boil the kettle.”
When parents argue, they boil the kettle, and peacemaking starts with – you guessed it – the kettle.
Exploring tea in Kit Fan’s Goodbye Chinatown neatly summed up this talk: finding cross-continental connections through food, and exploring how eating within a community can look surprisingly similar in Hong Kong for Fan and Newcastle for chef and food writer Anna Hedworth.
For both authors, food seemed particular to time and place, but not in the insular or exclusionary way one may assume. There was a curiosity to learn from the foods of the world, then bring those techniques to available ingredients.
Fan explored the Westernisation of Chinese food through the five major UK Chinatowns less as colonisation and more as adaptation: “chaos and fusion, and kind of madness”. He delighted in the endless possibilities rather than lamenting the lack of authenticity.
Similarly, Anna, owner of Cook House in Newcastle, made a convincing case for how local ingredients make her food so yummy and, frankly, more enjoyable. She prioritises local suppliers as an ethos, but explained simply that a recently harvested local leek will taste better than a green bean off a plane from Kenya, which has lost its vibrancy in the quest for exact replication.
Audience questions probed the authors’ favourite comfort meals. Anna returned to a crème fraîche-stuffed chicken she had referenced as a star dish. I’m not sure whether it was her evocative description or the session’s midday timing, but the growl of stomachs and appreciative murmurs surrounding me were palpable.
Being told the ins and outs of incredible local food at lunchtime – both a foodie’s dream and worst nightmare come true!