Month: November 2023

Does it get any better?

It’s been aggressively beautiful outside this week, after an age of brown mud and torrential rain. To make the most of the frozen ground and dry skies, I went to Appletreewick in the Yorkshire Dales on Sunday to visit a pub I’ve been meaning to visit for years. The Craven Arms is an historic inn decorated with an abundance of curiosities and artefacts; I particularly liked the original oil paintings of Sir William Craven, a local lad who, in the 16th century, moved to London as a tailor and became the Lord Mayor of the city. There is a snuff box for all to use, if they so wish. A range fireplace roars over the main bar area, a happy sight for our fingers and faces which were numb from a November ramble around Wharfedale.

When process meets pleasure

Ever since I first saw an advert for Galaxy chocolate in the mid-90s, it has seemed as special to me as Ferrero Rocher. A beautiful woman in a latte-coloured silk slip dress floats down the stairs at night to sneak a delicious bite of smooth milk chocolate. That’s the dream, I used to think. A bar of chocolate of my own whenever I want it. That’s what being an adult will be like.

And so it is. I don’t crave chocolate as much as I used to—I’m more of a bread and half a block of butter gal—but every so often I’ll have a few weeks where it’s all that I desire. When the desire strikes, I want Galaxy. I have a little padded book sleeve on the top shelf in my office where I keep one big bar at a time. I don’t need to hide it, but it’s the principle. I’m making my own dreams come true.

It doesn’t taste anything like chocolate, let’s be honest. My whole life I’ve sucked on squares of Galaxy and enjoyed the cosy, chocolate-adjacent sweetness of it, but I know, like Dairy Milk, it doesn’t taste much like real, decent chocolate. I decided to make some tasting notes the last time I ate some:

• Milky cocoa with golden sugar

• Honey

• Golden syrup

• Vanilla essence and butter, like a sticky homemade fairy cake

• Condensed milk

• Scottish tablet

All of these things, I have to say, are some of my favourite flavours. What I found most interesting was how strongly I felt I could taste vanilla—this is a flavour I also taste in Dairy Milk, and I wonder if this is how chocolate makers try to give the impression they’re using thick cream in their formulations rather than milk powder. As you can see from the list, chocolate is not mentioned. When I use chocolate in a tasting note for beer or wine, I mean the crack of a dark, cocoa-rich chocolate, deep and tempestuous, and often with a slight bitterness that lingers. It melts slowly. Your cravings are satisfied quickly.

Not so with Galaxy. It’s made to be devoured, and melts almost instantly. There is no bitter note, no complexity—just soft, smooth milky, sugary flavours that combine to produce hot chocolate in your mouth. It’s comfort food, but it isn’t real. Since when has that ever bothered me.

Another thing I noticed about the texture of Galaxy chocolate is that it’s not as powdery as other milk chocolates when it melts down. Surely that’s down to the refining process, I thought. It has to have been a purposeful result of years of research. Little did I know that it was also down to some pretty fascinating uses of traditional chocolate making and mechanical engineering.

First, cocoa nibs are winnowed to remove their shells, and then roasted in a process called “Dutching”. This process was invented by 19th century chemist Coenraad Johannes van Houten, the son of the inventor of cocoa powder. Galaxy chocolate is made from Dutched cocoa nibs, which means they have undergone a process of alkalisation, taking away its bitterness and giving it a darker colour. This is also how hot chocolate powder is made.

The nibs are then ground into cocoa powder, then “roll refined” to mill it down to micron-level particles, which is how Galaxy chocolate manages to have such a smooth texture (or mouthfeel if you’re nasty.)

I promise I’m not being paid by Galaxy here, I’m just really interested in how processed food is manufactured. It’s no different to any other manufactured product.

After the roll refining/milling process, the super-fine Galaxy cocoa powder is then freeze-dried with sugar and milk, as well as vanilla (yes! I was right!) and passed through an industrial oven and then into moulds.

What’s interesting about the moulds is that even the shape of each square of chocolate has been researched, designed, and tested to try and produce the most pleasant sensation of eating and melting in your mouth. You’ll notice that Galaxy chocolate squares aren’t really squares—they haven’t been since 2007. Instead, they are rounded and curved, with indentations meant to form around your tongue with as much area touching the inside of your mouth as possible. Wow. I just find it incredible to think about, that even the shape of a square of chocolate has been processed in such a detailed way. Science. Engineering. Chocolate.

Perhaps one day I will simply be able to enjoy something without having to research its every molecular detail. Somehow, knowing all this about Galaxy makes me enjoy it more. Perhaps it shouldn’t—perhaps something more natural should make me more excited. And I do get excited about natural products! How amazing is small-batch, artisanal chocolate? But Galaxy isn’t in their league. It’s barely even the same food. It’s a highly-processed, super-thought-out product that has been designed for ultimate pleasure. How can I say no to that?

Finally listening to Florence Given.

My friend tells me to laugh out loud more. She says that she can trick herself into feeling better about her day, even if her brain isn’t in the game. I believe her—I know her. I know it works.

Faking happiness hasn’t been something I wanted to try. Authenticity, my therapist used to say, was the rule I lived my life by, and it was a curse as well as a mantra. She said that like a perfectionist expects perfection from everyone around them, I value total and complete authenticity over everything else. Pretending to be happy wasn’t something I could do. This is why, she pointed out, my stints of behavioural therapy never worked. Changing the way I think, augmenting my reactions, it all felt so fake.

The freedom and shame, the agony and the ecstasy

The brand of oven chips you had at teatime was a status symbol when I was a kid. McCain’s Home Fries were the holy grail—if you were having those with your Turkey Drummers, you’d really made it. It’s really strange, I didn’t consider oven chips and deep fryer chips and chippy chips as the same thing. It didn’t occur to me until much later on in life that oven chips were meant to be approximations of the soggy, vinegar-coated potato hunks I was used to from Sam’s Bar on Morecambe seafront. Don’t get me wrong, I loved both of them. But they just weren’t the same food at all. They didn’t even speak the same language.

There’s something shameful to me about not cooking tea, and instead bunging a tray of frozen chips and chicken kievs in the oven. Why? I guess it’s a deep-rooted patriarchal expectation. Maybe I feel like I’m letting myself and my family (Tom) down. Or maybe it’s because of the onslaught of fresh food propaganda we’ve had over the past decade. If you forfeit freshly prepared food for pre-prepared options you will surely succumb to high blood pressure and heart disease. It’s also certainly something to do with my unhealthy relationship with food that I’ve lived with most of my life. If I peel the potatoes, chop them, I have control. If I pour them perfectly portioned and prepared from a bag, I could be eating literally anything.

It’s so strange, this idea of convenience food being the enemy. It was invented as a liberation of sorts—to enable busy people to eat hot meals when time was short and money was tight. Microwave meals took off in the 80s, especially in the US, but for me as a northerner during the early 90s, what really changed the landscape was oven-ready food from the freezer section. Even then during the heady days of oven pizzas and fish fingers, there was a nasty tone to the way people talked about them.

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Convenience has such a glamorous ring to it, as though you were picking up a few bits on the way home from the office, still dressed in a pink powersuit, clutching a phone the size of a Sky remote. Laziness, on the other hand, became the connotation. It’s hardly fair that food produced to suit a demographic, food that had thousands of pounds spent on it over development hours and consumer testing, solely to save time and give busy people part of their lives back became something of an easy insult. Like Pam in Gavin and Stacey bitching in hushed tones about a mother “stuffing” her kids “full of Findus Crispy Pancakes” proves, there was no glory in finding time to work, nurture, and play. If you took the convenience route, you weren’t making clever, timesaving decisions, you were giving in.

Which begs the question: why were frozen foods generally so bad for you? If they were invented to feed the nation’s families, why were they also so widely known to be packed full of sodium and fillers as to have a negligible nutritional value? And then later down the line, why was the nation’s health issues brought on by poor diet laid at our doors? To be shamed for not preparing fresh, nutritious meals three times a day when we were busy working, schooling, doing after school clubs, night school, weekend jobs… Were we not just eating what was available to us during the era of so-called financial equality? To my mind, it’s yet another way to belittle women’s work—allow us to enter the workplace under the guise of womens lib, then shame us for either working too hard and neglecting our other duties, or not working hard enough and remaining a housewife, an affront to working women everywhere. Oven-ready meals were a godsend to overworked families during the 80s and 90s, while poverty was on the rise and food was becoming more expensive. Could an average suburban parent really still grow a few tomatoes and potatoes in the back garden just as their parents had done? Did they have the time? Did they have the space? Supermarkets offered options that gave them their lives back, and saved them from the dreaded third-or-fourth-day leftovers of their youth. Oven chips as emancipation.

My beloved oven chips, which I still always have in the freezer (Lidl’s Crispy French Fries, always) are, admittedly, as far away from their natural state as they could possibly be. They make me wonder with wide eyes, as the most simple of freezer-to-oven foods, how a potato could be tweaked to this level. Do you know why they are so good? They’re often tossed in flour and seasonings before they undergo their first flash of cooking in the factory—once mixed with the oil sprayed on them through the cooking tunnel, that’s pretty much a batter, isn’t it? Lovely crispy battered chips. Ideal with beans. Even though I know they aren’t good for me, that’s not always the point of my food. I still see oven chips as a sort of freedom. Some days I don’t want the burden of choice, I don’t have the energy or vitality of mind to grab an onion and a carrot and see what wonders come to be in the sizzle of a pan. I just want to eat, to be comforted. Bread and butter, oven chips, comfy sofa. Sometimes that’s all I need.

What do we want from a brewery profile in 2024?

When I first started writing about beer, what interested me most was how people enjoyed it. I started off writing about pubs and their cultural impact—what makes towns unique, in my opinion, is its local pubs and the crowds that drink in them. I thought this would always be my niche within the sprawling world of beer.

As time’s gone on, I’ve found—through my interest in wine, weirdly enough—that I’ve become more and more interested in how beer is made. Not in its component parts, but from the brewer’s point of view. Why was a certain malt bill written up? Why did they choose this hop, or that one, when others would create a similar effect? When I read a brewery profile I find myself drawn to the nerdier aspects of the piece these days—their water, their equipment, their personal reasons for brewing in such a way. It’s a job of choices, brewing, just like cooking, or painting. You choose the ingredients, the spices, the paint, the colours. In this way you affect the outcome. After that, it’s up to the people to decide what you meant by it all.

I’ve been writing a brewery profile on one of my favourite breweries for almost a year, and I’m adamant that I’ll finish it today. What I’ve been wrestling with is the content. There’s so much of it. Do I take out detailed information on hop choices to tell the brewer’s personal anecdote? Would it be better to leave in 100 words bordering on brewing academia or skip it for brevity and levity? Is there room for florid storytelling?

This level of doubt is obviously clouding my judgement because it’s been so long since I wrote consistently, and about subjects that require deeper research. I’m out of practice. But I’m also feeling a little out of sync with the beer world since leaving Twitter and, admittedly, extracting myself from the scene for a while. Things have changed, drinkers have become more demanding, perhaps more sophisticated. Or am I wrong about that? Do people still want good old fashioned stories?

Katie Mather’s The Gulp is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Other Stuff

• Pioneering sports photographer Gerry Cranham passed away this week. Here he is speaking to Amateur Photographer magazine about his incredible career.

• Baby snow macaques make snowballs.

• Lecker’s newsletter has a very interesting piece this week about breadmaking, and using proper wheat.

• Brazilian guitarist Bruno Takashy is a vioiliero—a specialist of the Brazilian ten-string guitar or “viola” who experiments with rattlesnake tails as percussion. Obviously after seeing this I went on a deep dive to learn about the history of putting rattlesnake tails into your guitar. It took me to Appalachia.

• In Bologna, men of retirement age who enjoy spending their time watching roadworks and construction sites are called “Umarell”. I am adopting this word.

• If you’re not already subscribed to Rachel Hendry’s newsletter J’adore le Plonk, what are you doing? Sort it out.

My Stuff

• Me, on Dolmitic Limestone

• You might have seen that I have started a new series of features on this newsletter. PROCESS began this week with an essay on Spam.

• I have written a—yes!—brewery profile on Bushy’s which will be printed in the next issue of SIBA’s magazine.

• Pre-order the upcoming Hwaet! zine to read a story by me about witchcraft, brewsters, ale wives and women’s work.

Thank you for reading Katie Mather’s The Gulp. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Spam is love, spam is life.

Welcome to PROCESS, a ten-part series on processed food in which I discuss my favourite, much-maligned mainstays of the British shopping list. This is part one, all about Spam.

My paternal nana and grandad were as working class as it’s possible to get in deepest Lancaster. Mill workers from childhood, I remember visiting nana at work in Nisbet’s factory on North Road in the centre of town when I was very small, tubes of red and royal blue knitted sleeves spooling out of the machines, the smell of detergent and dye rising in the steam from her pressing table. She used to drink tonic water at her station, and wear a blue press-studded tabard to protect her elaborate 80s knitwear.

My nana’s kitchen is one of my fondest childhood memories. Brown and cream, it was hot with boiling potatoes in winter and open to the elements in summer, a colourful plastic strip curtain hung over the door to keep the flies out. I was under strict

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instruction every visit not to mention that I might be peckish. She would put the kettle on (I was not allowed tea or coffee,) and get the chip pan out immediately, or boil a hundred eggs, or, my favourite, let me make Spam butties. I would stand at the counter buttering lethal quantities of Flora onto round milk loaf or unstable Danish white, occasionally stopping to spoon Coffee Mate into my mouth. I would need help getting the Spam out of its tin—like corned beef, I was given many warnings about how sharp those tins were, and how few fingers I would have if I messed about with them. That iconic tin, it turns out, was designed for the meat to be packed into it raw, then cooked inside it. That’s why it’s so tightly packed. That’s how the pork pie-like jelly forms.

Salt is still my major weakness. I loved the softness of the completely nutrition-free bread my nana always had to hand, and the squidge of margarine against it. The Spam itself was a strange flavour to me, something peppery and extremely salty, more like the insides of a hot dog sausage than a slice of ham. I have never been squeamish about Spam. It’s just pork, ham, salt, sugar, potato starch, water and sodium nitrate. It is pasteurised, you know. It lasts forever. It cannot make you ill. Even now, when I’m not feeling my best, I crave Spam sandwiches as white and pink as a block of seaside nougat. They remind me that no food is truly off-limits, that I can eat what I want, when I want to. That I deserve to be comforted.

Spam came to Britain during WWII, after becoming a national staple in the US where it was invented. A bit of Spam trivia here for you—the name came before the product. It turns out that someone, an actor called Ken Daigeneau, thought Spam, a portmanteau of spiced ham he made up, was just a funny word, and that there should be a food called that. Hard agree. This word hung around in his family’s vocabulary until his brother, an executive at Hormel Foods allegedly pitched the idea of convenience pork made in a similar way to the already popular American store cupboard favourite, tinned corned beef, and they ran with it. Its portability and stability meant that Spam quickly became the go-to meat for wartime ration packs. Soldiers quickly got sick of eating it from the tin, but at home during the Great Depression, that rosy pink kinda-meat was a household saviour. 

I like to think that Spam became popular in Britain not due to necessity—wartime rationing was strict but Spam was not the only meat product readily available, we also still ate tripe and had the Dig For Victory campaign that encouraged households to have their own garden chickens, remember—but because of our unparalleled, weird sense of humour. Spam is, as Ken Daigeneau knew, a funny word. And it’s a bizarre product when you think about it. For it to become embedded in popular culture enough for Monty Python to write a whole song about it, and then much later a West End musical, there was more to this meat than its utility. It’s bright, almost pop art branding and its ubiquity on grocery shop shelves was something that everyone could relate to. It was a meme. Its adverts were wild, and incredibly catchy.

Later in the 90s, electronic mail’s scourge of the technological high seas, the unsolicited cold-call of the inbox, was named Spam for this reason. It was everywhere, and it had little to no substance. Bit offensive to Spam, but clever all the same.

Spam seems to be able to take the joke. The official website is set up with lifestyle brand photography and bright, punchy design. They say “when days end with y, we end them with “mmm”.” Their merch is unbeatable. There is a Spam museum in Austin, Minnesota, with the tagline “Puts a whole new spin on cubism.” If you truly love Spam, you can become a Spambassador. “At first glance, one might assume SPAM® products are produced through magic,” They say. “But it’s actually a relatively simple, conventional process.” I am crying. This is wonderful copywriting.

Outside of Britain, Spam isn’t a joke, it’s an integral part of local cuisine. In Hawaii, Spam was brought over by American GIs and never left, just as it was in South Korea, which happens to be the world’s second largest consumer of Spam. An invasive pork product? Maybe. But Anne Kondo Corum’s “Hawaii’s Spam Cookbook” first published in the mid 1980s remains a bestseller throughout the island state, showing the prevailing popularity of Spam 2000 miles away from mainland USA. This wonderful book also has recipes for Hawaii’s other tinned favourites too—sardines, corned beef and vienna sausages. Their popularity makes sense. They are convenient, they are shelf stable, they are cheap, and they have long expiration dates, which is all very important to isolated and hard to reach communities, especially if food has to be shipped or flown in at great expense. Hawaii is one of America’s most poverty-stricken states thanks to high cost of living and low rates of pay. Is it any wonder that Spam continues to have the nation in a chokehold?

Take a look at some of the recipes and you’ll see Hawaii’s culture reflected in the preparation of each dish. Spam Musubi combines Japanese techniques with the product: a slice of SPAM is sandwiched around a layer or between layers of rice and sesame seeds and wrapped in seaweed. It’s a form of sushi. Papakolea Hawaiian Goulash combines Spam and corned beef in a stew form, which is served atop a steaming bowl of rice. Spam Manapua or mea’ono-pua’a is a type of dumpling or bao-type bun with a spam and cabbage filling. Delicious!

What’s more, there are varieties of Spam in Hawaii, the Philippines and South Korea you can’t get elsewhere, such as Teriyaki, Jalapeno (!!!), and Tocino, a type of Spanish bacon that’s super popular in the Philippines. For homestyle American diner vibes, there are maple and hickory smoked varieties. I would gladly taste test them all for you if I could get hold of some. 

What I think is important about Spam is that it represents everything that people hate about processed food, but yet it endures. There is nothing natural about it, neither in form or presentation, and still it is loved by millions all over the globe. While it’s not cheap in Britain anymore (please tell me, what food is actually cheap here in 2023? I bought a white cabbage for a pound the other day, A POUND) it’s still a lingering part of our food heritage, a food that reminds us of chippy teas, school dinners, and our grandparents. I’m not calling for a renewal of our interest in tinned meats, I’m just asking to give Spam its dues. It is what it is, and nothing else. It still does exactly what it set out to do back in the 1920s. And it still goes hard when fried and paired with egg and chips.

When life is an ice shelf, get into the sea.

It’s no secret that my 2023 has been less a road through my life and more like a cross-cross of farm tracks and half-built bypasses. I’ve been stuck in other people’s driveways more times than I’d have liked. As the year rolls out to its inevitable festive end, one of my favourite times, I’m actually in a much better place than I expected to be.

Living to work was my whole method of survival until this year. I always described myself as an icebreaker—an unstoppable force, always moving forwards facelessly and monotonously. The only thing I focused on was what was in my way at that moment, and how to overcome that obstacle. The thing about living this way, is that it stops you from creating memories, or enjoying having a project to feel satisfied with when it comes to an end. Always moving. Always.

Katie Mather’s The Gulp is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Two months since the closure of my bar, I find myself forgetting that it actually existed. It turns out, apparently, that this icebreaker life I was living was actually a response to long-term stress—a stress I’ve lived with and coped with and even, surprisingly, thrived off, like a little deep-sea bug that turns toxic thermal water into a cosy home. During the past two years I was working essentially three jobs, seven days a week, and when two of these three jobs ended at the same time in September, I lost control over my sense of self. What am I, if I’m not busy?

Having time to consider who you are instead of what you do is transformative. I’m still in the early stages of it yet, but it’s exciting. I’ve gotten off the boat. I’m walking on the ice. I’m seeing what’s around me as well as what’s ahead.

Other Stuff

• Portishead’s lifechanging Live at Roseland NYC performance turned 25 last week. They released a remaster of the whole performance.

• In Pellicle this week, Robbie Armstrong wrote about The Laurieston, and it is a belter

• Photographer Dmitry Kokh documents polar bears making a home in an abandoned polar weather station on the isolated island of Kolyuchin

• A stained glass rose window made from lettuce, wood and paper by artist Selva Aparicio

My Stuff

I am launching a new project via this newsletter on Tuesday 14 November. Called PROCESS, it will be a ten-part series of essays on processed food, starting with a piece all about my favourite childhood sandwich filler—Spam.

This series will only be available to paid subscribers to The Gulp. You can amend your subscription by heading to your homepage, I have tried to find an easier way to explain how but I’m sorry, there isn’t one. Here are Substack’s official instructions. Hopefully you manage to find it!

I suggest you choose the ongoing subscription rather than the annual one, so you can pause the payments once the series is finished if you like.

To get you started, here is a piece on cheese singles which I wrote a year ago.

I’m excited about starting a project that’s just for me, for my own platform, and for you. I hope you’re looking forward to reading it.

Katie Mather’s The Gulp is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Be the first to read my new series of food essays, “Process”

If there’s something you must already know about me, I am a northern 90s kid, and therefore was brought up around some of the most processed foods ever created. as an adult in the health-conscious 2010s, I still have a huge place in my heart for convenient, brightly-packaged food, and I believe that it deserves to be written about. It’s what most of us eat on a daily basis. It’s what brings us joy. It’s a part of our lives.

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about how to write about the topic without being bound to a single feature. Here is what I’ve come up with:

Process: A Series of Essays on Processed Food

Starting next week, I will be releasing one full-length essay on a different item of processed food every Tuesday on this newsletter, only available to paid subscribers of this newsletter.

How to upgrade your subscription from free to paid.

I plan to share 10 essays over 10 weeks, talking about my personal connections to certain snacks, and discovering the mysteries and interesting histories of some of our most taken-for-granted and newly hated foods. I want to show how integral to modern life processed food is, and how interesting it is that we’ve be taught to find the idea of refining ingredients into convenience food repulsive.

My usual Gulp newsletter, which I am still aiming to release every week, will remain free and available to all. Nothing is changing other than this extra series of work which will be released every week.

If you’d like to upgrade your subscription in order to receive these stories over the next 10 weeks, please follow these steps in order to do so. Sorry, there’s not an easy way for me to link a button or something, but if you need any help, let me know and I’ll help you sort it.

I’m excited about this project and I hope you are too!

Lots of love
Katie xox

Bringing in the dark nights with fire.

Over the past week I’ve celebrated Samhain, the start of Christmas (it’s November, I can now watch bad films about stressed business women moving to small rural towns to run Christmas present farms) and a gorgeous full moon. The full moon happened to light up the sky above Penrith’s Winter Droving festival, bringing an extra dimension of symbolism to the flame torch processions.

The Winter Droving is relatively new in its current form, but is in fact a reimagining of an ancient tradition in Cumbria. This is the time when, as the weather worsens and the nights elongate, farmers would drive their cattle down from the highest, furthest fells to be closer to home, protecting them from storms, exposure, and wolves.