Go shout it from the mountain top
1. Thou shalt eat with thy hands
2. Thou shalt always worship leftovers
3. Thou shalt covet thy neighbour’s oxen
4. Thou shalt cook – sometimes
5. Thou shalt not cut off the fat
6. Thou shalt choose thy dining companions bloody carefully
7. Thou shalt not sneer at meat-free cookery
8. Thou shalt celebrate the stinky
9. Thou shalt not mistake food for pharmaceuticals
10. Honour thy pig
A biblical prophet writes
Acknowledgements
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Jay Rayner is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and musician, with a pronounced love of pig and a fine collection of flowery shirts. He has been the restaurant critic for the Observer for over fifteen years, presents the culinary panel show The Kitchen Cabinet for BBC Radio 4 and is a regular on both The One Show and Masterchef. He performs live all over the country, both with his jazz quartet and in one-man shows. A new live show based on The Ten (Food) Commandments will be touring Britain throughout 2016 and 2017. He lives in south London with his wife and two sons. This is his ninth book.
For my sister, Amanda, who had to budge up at the table when I arrived.
The prophet Moses was many things: rebel leader, font of morality, poster boy for dodgy orienteering. On the tricky matter of your dinner he was less helpful, at least if the Ten Commandments are anything to go by. If we assume they really were dictated by God and not something Moses cooked up when he was alone on the mountain top after having stomped off in a huff, the first four reveal the Maker to be a touch self-absorbed. It’s all ‘You shall have no other gods before me’ and ‘You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God.’ Really! Some people!
That’s followed by boilerplate stuff prohibiting murder, theft and lying, before you get to the only one which in any way pertains to ingredients: the instruction not to covet thy neighbour’s oxen. Always tricky: there are some damn attractive oxen out there.
This is the great failing of the original Ten Commandments. They really don’t offer those of us located in the twenty-first century much in the way of guidance when it comes to thinking about our relationship with our food. And Lord knows we need it.
Rabbinical scholars will point out that those original Ten Commandments were actually only the headlines, rather than the full text. This is true, in as much as anything in the Bible is true. According to the great rabbis, Moses was not given just ten rules on the mountain top. He was given 613, which would have presented a serious challenge to the masons charged with carving them into tablets of stone, let alone to Moses, who would then have had to carry them down off the summit. No wonder he decided to stick with bullet points and leave the fine print in his back pocket.
An examination of those 613 as listed by the twelfth-century scholar Maimonides reveals them to be curious and, in places, eccentric. Some of them – the ones about making sure to lend to the poor, or the imperative for judges to be honest – are about the construction of civil society. Others read like building regulations: ‘494. You must make a guard rail around a flat roof.’ That’s just basic health and safety. And then there are those that appear to be predicting the rise of www.pornhub.com and are designed to prohibit a few of the more recondite categories: ‘146. You must not have sexual relations with a woman and her daughter’; ‘151. You must not have sexual relations with your father’s brother’s wife.’ Thank God my dad was an only child or I might have found the latter seriously challenging.
Elsewhere, however, these 613 do actually include an awful lot on how and what to eat. Numbers 176 to 208 are all about food choices. For example, number 192 is the instruction not to eat blood, the commandment which underlies the koshering of meat, by the removal of all plasma. It is also therefore the commandment which has made centuries of bar mitzvah dinners an ordeal by dry rubber chicken. Many of the rest seem at best odd and at worst proof that the Jewish God was just the pickiest of eaters. Number 185 is an instruction not to eat non-kosher maggots, which presumably means it’s okay to eat the kosher ones. Number 194 declares that we must not eat ‘the sinew of the thigh’. Really? But that’s my favourite bit.
As a diehard atheist, it’s all proof to me that He simply doesn’t exist. The French philosopher Descartes argued that God is perfect, the concept of perfection including existence, ergo God must exist. For Descartes, philosophy was a fairground ride that just went round and round.
But if He is genuinely perfect He would also have to be the perfect dinner guest, rather than the nightmarish faddy eater the 613 commandments reveal Him to be. God would be all ‘No crab for me, please’ and ‘You know FULL WELL I don’t do cheeseburgers.’ The God of the commandments, 613 or otherwise, would not be the perfect dinner guest.
Certainly none of this provides the guidance people need when it comes to making modern food choices. Both the headline Ten and the remaining 603 commandments were devised at a time when ‘street food’ meant discarded offcuts found in the gutter by the destitute; at a time when the word ‘dirty’ was reserved for things like a chap having sexual relations with a woman and her daughter, rather than for a hamburger with seven too many toppings; when people still bought ingredients rather than ‘sourced’ them. It was all so much simpler then. After all, the vast majority of decisions around food in Moses’ day were to do with basic nourishment, trying not to poison yourself and avoiding upsetting a vengeful god.
In these, the early years of the twenty-first century, how and what we eat is so very much more important than any of that. Forget upsetting a vengeful god. There’s worrying about what your friends would think if you tried to eat a hot dog with a knife and fork. There’s the complex business of knowing whether the global food multinationals are trying to turn a quick buck by killing you one sugar-infested meal at a time. And there’s the dismal, soul-destroying experience of sitting in front of the fridge just before you pack it with the new weekly shop, and wondering whether the amount of things that you didn’t eat last week and are now wasted mark you out as an EVIL PERSON. (I’ll keep it brief: they do. Sorry.)
What does all this tell us? It tells us that we need a new set of hand-tooled, subject-specific food commandments, custom-engineered for the modern food-obsessed age.
Which in turn means we need our very own culinary Moses; someone with the scholarship, dignity, insight and teeth to stand in judgement on everyone else.
I know just the man.
Oh, come on. Who else could it be?
I have a beard flecked with grey. I have shaggy hair and, though I say it myself, I look super-hot in flowing robes. (They rather flatter the more generous figure.) And yes, I really do have all my own teeth. I wouldn’t mind having someone else’s teeth, but I’ll settle for mine. They’ve seen me this far.
So come with me as I lay down the law; as I deal once and for all with the question of whether it really is ever okay to covet thy neighbour’s oxen (it is), how important it is to eat with your hands (very important indeed), and whether you should cut off the fat (you shouldn’t).
I will give you guidance on worshipping leftovers and why you should not mistake food for pharmaceuticals which can cure you of all known diseases, especially cancer. (A quick heads-up: there is not a single foodstuff the eating of which will protect you from cancer. Not even a little bit.) I will insist that thou shalt cook while also not running from the stinkiest of foods, even if they smell of death. The best foods in life smell lightly of death.
I will insist that thou shalt honour thy pig. Or anybody else’s pig for that matter. Because everything is improved by the application of a little pig.
In this I recognize that I will be somewhat at odds with Moses and the original commandments he handed down to the children of Israel. But I swear that if he’d ever been introduced to a proper bacon sandwich, one made with soft white bread, and crisped, still-warm streaky and a smear of brown sauce, he would have been with me. The whole prohibition-on-pork thing would never have been in there.
I am a TERRIBLE Jew.
Traditionally, the creation of moral codes like this has been thought experiments, philosophical exercises conducted more in the head than in the world. And there will be a bit of that. I have long been a fan of sitting down. It’s part of my skill set. But to get to grips with the intricacies of these new commandments requires a more expansive approach. That’s one of the great things about food. The act of eating well, of understanding our food and the part it plays in our lives, demands an inquisitive mind. All ingredients have stories of their own, and I intend to tell them. So come with me as I frame a set of commandments based not just on lofty ideas, but on clear-eyed experience, a bit of reading, and talking to the right people, which is to say, the ones who agree with me. And appetite. I have appetites like south London has urban foxes. (South London has an awful lot of foxes, which are constantly turning over the bins. This is why it’s such a good simile.)
Obviously you also have appetites or you wouldn’t have read this far, and as you read on those appetites will only increase. You will want them sated. You will be desperate for ideas about what to eat, and I will give them to you. This is not a cookbook, designed to be kept in your kitchen, but it does include recipes – instructions for food that illustrate the points I’m making. There are one or two recipes per commandment, ideas that turn theoretical notions into something that makes sense on the plate rather than just on the page. It’s the kind of cooking I actually do at home, rather than the aspirational stuff contained in all those glossy big-name cookbooks on your shelf which you thumb through from time to time but never actually use for fear of failure. Most of the recipes in this book are for things that don’t make more washing-up than is strictly necessary, which I know is the kind of cooking you like. Not all of it is straightforward, because cooking isn’t always easy or simple (see Commandment 4). But all of it is designed to satisfy appetites rather than intellectual curiosity.
For example, right now you need something to nibble on, something to keep you going as you turn the pages. So here’s my recipe for pimped granola. I could call it muesli, but that makes it sound in some way healthy and this really isn’t, even before you’ve added the nuggets of fudge and the chocolate chips.
This makes over 1.5kg. Yes, that’s a lot, but you have friends and you are desperate for them to like you. Plus this stuff is addictive. And if all else fails there’s always Tupperware.
140g butter
250g demerara sugar
150g honey
100g golden syrup
zest of 1 orange
1 tsp vanilla essence
275g rolled oats (use jumbo oats if you can)
125g flaked almonds
190g mixed nuts (pecans, macadamias and cashews)
220g shredded or desiccated coconut
100g vanilla fudge, chopped
100g salted dark chocolate, chopped
You like the sound of that, don’t you? You really want to be eating it right now. In the old days you would have dispatched servants to go get the ingredients and bake it for you straight away. But who has servants any more? So either you go get the ingredients and make it yourself, or you buy some cheap substitute and eat that instead. It won’t be the same, but at least it will stave off hunger as you read.
Although that is not one of my food commandments, it is a commandment.
Do as I say.