Laura Goodman - Carbs: From weekday dinners to blow-out brunches, rediscover the joy of the humble carbohydrate

PUBLISHING DIRECTOR Sarah Lavelle

COMMISSIONING EDITOR Susannah Otter

COPY EDITOR Rebecca Woods

DESIGNER Katherine Keeble

PHOTOGRAPHER Louise Hagger

FOOD STYLIST Emily Kydd

PROPS STYLIST Alexander Breeze

PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Vincent Smith

PRODUCTION CONTROLLER Tom Moore

Published in 2018 by Quadrille, an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing

Quadrille

5254 Southwark Street

London SE1 1UN

quadrille.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Cataloguing in Publication Data: a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

text Laura Goodman 2018

photography Louise Hagger 2018

design Quadrille 2018

cover illustration Elena Torre Dreamstime.com

eISBN 978 1 78713 295 5

CONTENTS

Proper food people open their books by whizzing you, the reader, back in time. With words, they paint rich, romantic snapshots that set the scene, right down to what the air smelled like and what the leaves on the trees were doing. I knew Id work in food when, aged six, I tasted a beef tomato Id personally plucked from the plant. My parents were keeping house in the eastern Loire at the time, and it was a very good year for Sancerre. I ate the tomato as a handfruit and its guts spewed over my fathers chinos. Oh, how we laughed! Someone else cleaned up the mess. I will never forget it.

But there is no poignant potato here; no single item that taught me carbohydrates were the food group for me. Like most people, I wasnt born into carbs; I had to learn what they were first.

For the first 12 years of my life, I only wanted to eat tagliatelle with cheese sauce and torn up ham for dinner. I was a fussy eater I didnt like fish or peas or carrots or lemon chicken from the Chinese takeaway. I tucked my school lunches in yoghurt pots to throw in the bin. I loved my mums chocolate cake, salad cream sandwiches, Alphabites, cream cheese bagels, strawberry yoghurt and secretly swigging from open tins of evaporated milk. I considered all of these things to be food. Nice food versus gross food, sure, but ultimately, just food.

I was a teenager when the message reached me in frantic whispers that carbs were to be avoided at all costs; I still wasnt clear what they were, but apparently they bore some relation to the fit of my BHS school skirt and my right to exist as a woman in the world.

I absorbed a bit of propaganda (it was very easy to come by) and I understood that many everyday items Id previously thought of as foods were actually best categorized as dark, illicit substances. Potatoes, pasta, bread and rice were to be taken when I was feeling absolutely outrageous. Really, they should be reserved for Friday and Saturday nights, or special occasions. They could, at a push, be ingested in mounds, mid-week, but only as long as I never mentioned them again.

Nevertheless, I persisted with eating carbs as part of an ongoing commitment to greediness and what is known, in modern parlance, as FOMO. As time wore on, and I spent the length of my twenties performing a painful daily dance I called Establishing A Career In The Media, it gradually became clear I couldnt deprive myself of another thing the men in my life seemed able to enjoy with abandon. I wasnt going to order a starter and eat my boyfriends chips. I would order whatever foods I wanted to eat.

A carby penny did drop in my thirties, though. You are holding it in your hands right now. Thank you for picking it up. I hope it brings you only good luck.

It occurred to me that carbs held a secret super power no-one was talking about: they could make any meal better. It was absolutely typical that the fun police had convinced so many people not to eat them.

On the best travel writing assignment of my career in the media so far, I ate jerk crab by the sea in Jamaica and it was ridiculous and I felt horribly unworthy. Afterwards I mopped up the hot, dark, sticky sauce with festival, an aptly named dumpling that is just deep-fried dough. Now that is eating, as far as Im concerned swiping through jerk sauce with a hunk of glistening dough; thats what it means to absolutely throw yourself into the eating. You can rinse your face with the ocean.

Similarly, on the rooftop of a riad in Marrakech, I got hysterical over coffee and msmen buttery, flaky breakfast breads as the sun rose up into a Fruit Salad sky, over palm fronds and ramparts. I dont remember anything else. What else happens in Marrakech? Rugs? I cant tell you. Why do you need to know? Isnt msmen enough?

Finally (because this bragging is vile), when I went to Texas to write about burgers, I ate nine lovely cheeseburgers, but have you ever had someone serve you tater tots through your car window? Have you slurped a milkshake between handfuls of fries on the open road? The cheeseburger is incidental. The cheeseburger is absolutely incidental.

And when I look way back when I attempt to do that thing proper food people do I realize I am rooting through potato waffles, holding a light up to Pop Tarts and visiting the ghosts of pancakes past. I am considering my daily countdowns to hash brown o clock at West Herts College and I can see, now, that carbs have always been important. Maybe its the same for you.

I wrote Carbs not just because I wanted to celebrate the power of carbohydrates to the point of delirium, but also because I wanted to return them to their rightful position in the world. Carbs dont have to be whole, complex or good, but they dont have to be monster crack pizza burrito burgers either. They can just be food. Really good food.

I couldnt kick off this intro with an epiphany but I can end with one. And Id like to do it in the style of the Spice Girls, who bodyrolled and high-kicked into my life just before those frantic whispers started to swoosh down my lugholes.

Carbs are what we want. What we really, really want.

It was the answer all along. Its obvious when you think about it.

LONDON, 2018

The world is a mess and sometimes I wish I could go to sleep until its over, but I cant because I really like eating and so does my dog. We could all do with feeling a bit better, which is why you bought this book, I think, or why someone bought this book for you. The healing powers of bread are well documented its not just the toast or the glowy feelings you get once youve baked it, they say, but the therapeutic kneading you have to do to get there. Personally, I dont adore the kneading process. Just as dough requires a convergence of conditions to achieve soaring, golden glory, so do I. If Im not in the mood, or Im tired, or the kitchen is a floury hellscape, a sticky dough will render me so worked up that neither I nor it will be tamed.