Beetroot juice could help musicians hold breath

Participants who drank the juice lasted an average of four minutes and 38 seconds before resurfacing compared with four minutes and 10 seconds for those given a placebo – an improvement of 11 per cent

Clarinet and trumpet players should drink beetroot juice before playing because it could help them play for longer without running out of breath, researchers claim. 

Taking a shot of concentrated beetroot juice could help divers and swimmers hold their breath for up to 11 per cent longer and enable musicians and singers to sustain notes for a greater length of time, a study suggests.

The juice helps the body perform more efficiently because it contains high levels of nitrate, which once inside the body is broken down into a compound called nitric oxide.

This helps our muscles to perform to the same level as normal while using up less oxygen, meaning each breath can keep us going for longer, scientists explained.

Researchers from Mid Sweden University and the University of Exeter were asked by the producers of BEET-IT, a brand of concentrated beetroot juice, to test its effects on trained divers.

In an experiment described in the Respiratory Physiology & Neurobiology journal they found that participants could hold their breath for almost half a minute longer if they were given a 70ml shot of the juice before going underwater.

Participants who drank the juice lasted an average of four minutes and 38 seconds before resurfacing compared with four minutes and 10 seconds for those given a placebo – an improvement of 11 per cent.

Researchers said the benefit could also be transferred to other groups who rely on their lung power including swimmers, opera singers, woodwind and brass players and even high-altitude climbers.

It follows studies in the past year which showed that beetroot juice can improve the performance of athletes including runners and cyclists.

Harald Engan, who led the study, said: "Apparently by enabling the body to reduce oxygen consumption, drinking concentrated beetroot juice has delivered significant extension of breath holding time.

“We are currently experimenting on if this may also be able to help climbers at high altitude and hope to report on the results soon.”

Rose Prince's Baking Club: Diamond Jubilee Special

The Baking Club comes over all patriotic for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee with Saxe Coburg Cake and Crown Jewel biscuits. 

Rose Prince has baked up a storm in aid of the Queen's Diamond Jubile

I have unashamedly succumbed to a serious attack of patriotism. What part of my mind is not fluttering foolishly in anticipation of flotillas and fly-pasts is occupied with devotional baking for Her Majesty. 

This week the Baking Club is honouring the day with jewel-like subtleties and enough buttercream and strawberry jam to launch a fleet of Royal barges (or at least enough to feed a small party of about 20). In sugar, butter, vanilla and eggs; in gooey cake, marzipan, crystal jelly and crisp pastries – Ma’am, we honour you. 

Queen's Diamond Jubilee: classic party snacks

Party like it’s 1952: Xanthe Clay's selection of slightly twisted tea-party classics

If ever there was an excuse for a party, a jubilee with an extra bank holiday is two. Bring on the bunting, invite round the neighbours and remember a time when socialising didn’t involve a social media website.

With immaculate timing, the Fifties and all things retro are cool again. That includes the food. Restaurants such as Quo Vadis in Soho revel in serving up proper pies and smoked eel.

But leafing through a 1952 issue of Good Housekeeping, I found many dishes that are best consigned to history. You could blame rationing, which didn’t end until 1954, but porcupine salad – a confection of gelatin, fish, prunes, radishes, pineapple and melon? I don’t think I will, thank you.

Happily, there are plenty of simple classics that are well worth reviving, and are perfect for soaking up the delicious wine and beer suggested by Victoria Moore. Take “home-made” sausage rolls and pork pies (buy them in) with a pot of piccalilli for an extra kick, cucumber sandwiches, of course, some English asparagus and scotch eggs livened up with extra spice.

And talking of spice, we couldn’t leave out the dish designed for Her Majesty’s coronation. Mind you, the original coronation chicken recipe can seem cloying these days: we like brighter, sharper, stronger flavours.

My version uses fresh coriander, limes, pomegranate and curry paste. I fancy that if the originator, Rosemary Hume, had had easy access to those ingredients, she would have used them too. 

Everyday Chinese cooking: alchemy on a plate

The Chinese have an ancient tradition of gastronomy

Everyday Chinese cooking is the art of turning the most humble ingredients into culinary gold, writes Fuchsia Dunlop in her new book Every Grain of Rice.

The Chinese know, perhaps better than anyone else, how to eat. I’m not talking here about their exquisite haute cuisine, or their ancient tradition of gastronomy. I’m talking about the ability of ordinary Chinese home cooks to transform humble and largely vegetarian ingredients into wonderful delicacies, and to eat in a way that not only delights the senses, but also makes sense in terms of health, economy and the environment.

Not long ago I was invited to lunch in a farmhouse near Hangzhou, in eastern China. In the dining-room, the grandmother of the household, Mao Cailian, had laid out a selection of dishes on a tall, square table. There were whole salted duck eggs, hard-boiled and served in their shells, fresh green soy beans stir-fried with preserved mustard greens, chunks of winter melon braised in soy sauce, potato slivers with spring onion, slices of cured pig’s ear, tiny fried fish, the freshest little greens with shiitake mushrooms, stir-fried eggs with spring onions, purple amaranth with garlic, green pepper with strips of tofu, and steamed eggs with a little minced pork, all served with plain steamed rice. Most of the vegetables on the table were home-grown, and the hen’s eggs came from birds that pecked around in the yard.

The ingredients were ordinary, inexpensive and simply cooked and there was very little meat or fish among the vegetables, and yet the flavours were so bright and beautiful. Mrs Mao had laid on more dishes than usual because she was entertaining guests, but in other respects our lunch was typical of the meals shared by families throughout southern China.

Across the country, a vast range of plant foods are used in cookery. There are native vegetables such as taro and bamboo shoots; imports that came in along the old silk routes from Central Asia such as cucumber and sesame seeds; chillies, corn, potatoes and other New World crops that began to arrive in the late 16th century; and more recent arrivals such as asparagus that have become popular in China only in the past few decades. And aside from the major food crops, there are countless local and seasonal varieties that are little known abroad, such as the Malabar spinach of Sichuan, a slippery leaf vegetable used in soups, and the Indian aster leaves that are blanched, chopped and then eaten with a small amount of tofu as an appetiser in Shanghai and the east of China.

In the past, it was economic necessity that limited the role of meat in the Chinese diet but, coupled with the eternal Chinese preoccupation with eating well, this habit of frugality has encouraged cooks to become adept at creating magnificent flavours with largely vegetarian ingredients. In Chinese home cooking, a small quantity of meat is usually cut up into tiny pieces, adding its savouriness to a whole wokful of vegetables; while dried and fermented foods such as soy sauce, black beans and salt-preserved or pickled vegetables – seasonings I’ve come to think of as magic ingredients – bring an almost meaty intensity of flavour to vegetarian dishes.

Chinese cookery has something of a reputation in the West for being complicated and intimidating. It’s true that banquet cookery can be complex and time-consuming, but home cooking is generally straightforward. Keep a few basic Chinese seasonings in your larder and you can rustle up a delicious meal from what appear to be odds and ends. Not long ago, I invited a friend back for supper on the spur of the moment and had to conjure a meal out of what felt like nothing. I stir-fried half a cabbage with dried shrimps and leftover spinach with fermented tofu; made a quick twice-cooked pork with a few slices of meat I had in the freezer; and steamed some rice. Cooking a few bits and pieces separately, with different seasonings, made a small amount of food seem exciting and plentiful.

Chinese home cooking is not about a rigid set of recipes, but an approach to cooking and eating that can be adapted to almost any place or circumstance. I regularly use Chinese methods to cook produce I’ve bought in my local shops and farmers’ markets. I have given purple-sprouting broccoli the Cantonese sizzling oil treatment, slow-cooked English rare-breed pork in the Hangzhou manner with soy sauce, sugar and Shaoxing wine, steamed Jerusalem artichokes with Hunanese fermented black beans and chilli, and prepared mackerel I caught on holiday in Scotland with soy sauce and ginger – all to splendid effect. Sesame oil, soy sauce and ginger may already be on your shopping list, and mainstream supermarkets are now stocking Chinese brown rice vinegar and cooking wine; just add Sichuanese chilli bean paste and fermented black beans and you will open up whole new dimensions of taste.

Which? research reveals sandwiches from some retailers contain twice as much salt

The Government began a consultation this week on 'front of pack' nutrition labelling

The consumer group said that the traffic light system – where foods are labelled green for healthy and red for unhealthy – was needed to give customers clarity. Which? found that a Morrisons chicken salad sandwich contained 11.7 grams (0.4oz) of fat, compared with a Waitrose equivalent which had 6g. Waitrose uses the traffic light system while Morrisons does not.

A Lidl BLT has 3.36g salt – red on the traffic light system – but one from Boots has an amber level of 1.5g. Boots uses traffic light labelling, Lidl does not. An Aldi egg mayonnaise sandwich contains 22.3g fat (red/high) while one from Asda contains 10.1g (amber/medium). Asda uses traffic lights, Aldi does not, said Which?

The consumer group said the survey showed that, not only was there scope for levels of fat and salt to be reduced, but also a need for greater clarity in labelling.

The Government began a consultation this week on “front of pack” nutrition labelling.

Which? said it should insist that all food retailers and manufacturers adopt clear, “front of pack” labelling, including traffic lights, which it said was “the system found to best enable consumers to easily compare products with simple green, amber, or red colour coding of nutrient levels”.

Richard Lloyd, executive director of Which? said: “We want to see the Government insist that all food companies use traffic lights on their labels, so there is a clear, consistent system that makes it easier for people to make informed choices about what they eat.”

The new rules of wine

The new rules of wine

For a business that has been around for more than 8,000 years, the wine trade still manages to evolve at an impressive speed. Money, politics, climate, fashion and science are remaking that glass in your hand in ways both discreet and radical, and the speed of innovation is increasing as never before. In this changing world, power is on the move, consumers decide what goes, and the old aristocracies of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Piedmont and California are scrambling to adapt. But adapt to what? The first new rule of wine is that there shouldn’t be any rules. Here we offer a guide to the latest developments on Planet Grape.

The next great wine will come from China 
 

China is now the world’s biggest importer of fine wine, much of it sold through Hong Kong, the new wine auction capital of the world. For today’s image-conscious Chinese, a pot of tea, or even a flask of fiery baiju spirit on the restaurant table no longer cuts the chilli sauce. A £1,500 bottle of Château Lafite rather does – even given the distressing local tendency to mix it with Coca-Cola or Fanta. Rupert Hoogewerf, the British compiler of China’s “Rich List”, nevertheless reports that: “Consumers are gradually becoming more appreciative of wine, and less driven by snobbery,” and forecasts that when the current market madness (the latest must-have vintage being Romanée-Conti 1990 at around £23,000 a bottle!) calms down, China will become a huge but mainstream wine-drinking nation.

Not that Europe’s vineyards will necessarily benefit. The first home-grown Chinese “superwine” has already arrived to both rave and apprehensive reviews. Jia Bei Lan, a silky cabernet sauvignon blend, produced in Ningxia, a central province previously best known for its goji berries, recently became the first Chinese wine to win a major international trophy. Judges at the Decanter Awards in London described the £30-a-bottle brew as “supple, graceful and ripe”, and praised its “excellent length and four-square tannins”.

 

Unless it comes from England 

 

This is a remarkable moment in the multi-millennial history of wine, and all the signs are that England will play a big part in its future. The great wine regions of France and Italy may look to have it made with their perfect summers and contented vignerons scoffing confit de canard on shady bistro terraces. It won’t stay like that for long, though, because the real wine action is heading for somewhere south of Basingstoke. 

By the end of this century, on expert projections, southern England will have the ideal climate for wine making, and the overheated vineyards of France will be producing the kind of delinquent plonk currently served up in pizza bars. According to Gregory Jones, one of the world’s foremost wine climatologists: “The best conditions for, say, chianti, will be in Germany and Belgium, and those for making fine bordeaux-style wines will be in the English Home Counties.” The movement is already under way. Vine cultivation in England has soared by 40 per cent over the past five years, and last month work began at Rathfinny in East Sussex, an estate that is projected to become, by 2017, England’s biggest vineyard. Its owner, former hedge fund boss Mark Driver, left the City to pursue his dream of creating “the British Bollinger”, and confidently forecasts that England will soon be setting the global standard. 

Other challenges to the old hegemony are arising everywhere from the Middle East, where, despite such hindrances as war and Islamic proscription, wine is undergoing a renaissance, to Eastern Europe, where cult wines from Georgia, Russia and even Kosovo are hitting the market. 

‘Terroir’ means nothing 

 

Wine’s current war of liberation (as the romantic school of oenology likes to see it) is being fought against an establishment steeped in ancient, but frequently suspect, nostrums. 

A favourite one is the French concept of “terroir” which roughly translates as “sense of place”. The basic shtick is that grapes growing on a picturesque slope beside, say, the River Saône, will taste detectably different from those growing a quarter of a mile away, let alone in Chile or Bulgaria. 

Viticulturalists increasingly regard this not only as bunkum, but as a cover-up for bad wine making. What really matters is the quality of the grapes and the skill of the winemaker. The terroir myth has, nevertheless, worked astonishingly well to maintain the perceived specialness of traditional wine areas. Now its credibility is collapsing: “Terroir,” says the wine writer Malcolm Gluck, “is utter b-------.” 

The ‘Frankengrape’ is lovelier than it sounds 

 

Wine buffs don’t like to admit it, but the world’s main grape types – cabernet, chardonnay, merlot, riesling et cetera – are, essentially, the same thing. All are descendants of a single species, Vitis vinifera, which was domesticated in Asia Minor in ancient times, and slowly spun off into the varieties we know today. 

The problem is that these otherwise estimable vines have lost their appetite for sex. According to groundbreaking recent research by Prof Sean Myles, a geneticist at Cornell University in California, the industry’s centuries-old obsession with “varietal purity” has fatally weakened the plants’ gene structures, destroying their natural resistance and making them increasingly vulnerable to infections and changes in atmospheric conditions. 

The growers’ stopgap answer has been to bombard their vineyards with ever-larger doses of chemicals, but such practices will be mostly banned by the European Union from next year. The only real answer, says Myles, is Frankengrape — genetically engineered vine varieties with built-in immunity to the many pests and diseases that tend to afflict such highly-strung plants. The problem is that the wines of the future are likely to taste different. And that is a tough thing for classicists to swallow. 

It’s always worth spellchecking the label 

 

For all the flowery prose that garlands the subject of wine, the fact remains that even the greatest palates of the age find it impossible to consistently identify the good stuff. Tales abound in the trade of blind tastings where experts have proclaimed planted glasses of plonk to be the products of fabled châteaux, while dismissing the finest vintages as undrinkable. Along with the reluctance of prominent collectors to admit to being fooled, all this plays beautifully into the hands of today’s sophisticated wine fraudsters. 

Con artistry is nothing new. The oldest and simplest racket is to slap a fancy label on a bottle of something ordinary. Today, though, with a global wine market worth billions, the ruses are becoming more and more ingenious. Counterfeiters can produce near-perfect copies of bottles, corks, capsules and boxes complete with forged paperwork attesting to authenticity. 

In China, where loss of face is fatal, fraud has grown to what one expert calls “jaw-dropping levels”. Even in the United States, where collectors are far more willing to report sharp practice, there have been dozens of scams. In a current lawsuit, the billionaire Bill Koch, an avid collector, claims he has been defrauded by up to $5 million. (The dealer selling to him, Rudy Kurniawan, was tripped up by a bottle of Domaine Ponsot he tried to sell at auction in 2008 which was passed off as having been made in 1929; the winemaker didn’t begin estate bottling until 1934.) 

But the rip-offs aren’t all at the high end of the market. Last year thousands of counterfeit bottles of Britain’s bestselling brand, Jacob’s Creek, turned up on grocery store shelves in Greater London. The fraudsters, however, gave themselves away with an elementary spelling error on the label, which read “Wine of Austrlia”. Perhaps it really does rot the brain. 

Have wine, will travel 

 

For the lady who doesn’t want to be seen tottering out of Oddbins with a bottle under her arm, here’s the ingenious new Volére wine handbag. Styled to resemble one of those chichi Milanese shoulder bags, it holds 750ml of Italian red, white or rosé, which can be accessed by a discreetly concealed side-tap. Premiered earlier this year by the Californian wine retailer Volére, the bags, sadly, are not yet on sale outside the US, but the enthusiastic reception that has greeted them hints at how far the market is moving beyond the idea of wine in conventional glass bottles. 

Later this year, the world’s first recyclable paper wine bottle should begin appearing on Britain’s supermarket shelves. The brainchild of the inveterate Suffolk-based inventor Martin Myerscough, the bottle gets around its most obvious difficulty with the help of a thin foil “bladder”. 

Myerscough, who has set up a company, Greenbottle, to market the design, claims its carbon footprint is 10 per cent of a glass bottle’s, and that it can be tossed on a compost heap when finished. “We’ve done a lot of testing with consumers,” he says, “and people are pretty happy with it.” 

Wines have star signs too 

 

The hottest new trend in wine is “biodynamics”, although those trumpeting it happily admit that the idea has been around for decades. It flows from a belief that mysterious energy forces, cosmic rhythms, lunar movements and natural earth patterns can make what is grown “vibrate in harmony with the universe”. 

The standard theory is based on the work of the Austrian “spiritual scientist” Rudolf Steiner, who outlined his ideas to broad scepticism in the Twenties. Modern winemakers have proved more enthusiastic, though. Steiner’s foremost disciple, the famed Loire grower Nicolas Joly, is prone to baffling hard-nosed buyers’ conferences by saying things like: “For a vine, spring is the victory of sun forces over earth forces. In autumn the law of death comes into force.” It’s hard to argue with his wines, though. 

Alcohol is not compulsory 

 

Blame it on faddism, the nanny state or good sense, but the days of those limb-numbing, oak-soaked, beast-in-a-bottle wines are numbered. Last year sales of lower-alcohol wines rose by 66 per cent in the UK. 

The trend towards sky-high booze levels really began with the New World wine invasion, led by Australian shirazes and chardonnays that regularly weighed in at 15% abv. Today, “lifestyle concerns” are reversing it. Sainsbury’s is committed to doubling its sales of lower-alcohol wines by 2020, “and we intend to reduce average alcohol content across the board”, says a spokesman. 

And nor are grapes 

 

Although the European Union, with characteristic lack of imagination, stipulates that anything describing itself as “wine” must be made from fermented grapes, there is an expanding school of freethinkers which feels otherwise. China already markets a popular fish wine, described as “zingy with overtones of squid”, while the Los Angeles Times recently reported on the popularity of cannabis wine among California’s middle-class baby boomers. The brew is made – allegedly behind the scenes by some of the state’s premium vintners – by dropping a pound of marijuana into a full cask of fermenting cabernet or zinfandel. Sadly, Britain’s sole act of rebellion is buying a bottle of sweet elderflower from the W.I.

Grub's up in Hokitika

Sustainable snack: Xanthe prepares to eat a huhu grub

Live insects and griddled calves’ brains.... just some of the delicacies to test the tastebuds at a New Zealand food fair. 

In every food writer’s life comes a time to face her fears. My fears were about the size of a chipolata sausage, fat and buff-coloured, and I had them by the tail. The huhu grub reared its black beak towards me, its body writhing in my grasp.

“Bite the head off first,” advised Rusty, the mustachioed huhu salesman in a black leather sheep shearer’s hat. “Otherwise it’ll give you a nip.”

Now, I’ll eat pretty much anything. Camel foot casserole in the Sudan, hake throat in San Sebastian, pig’s brain in my own kitchen, to name a few. But I have issues with bugs, huhu or otherwise.

I know, it’s not rational. After all, I’ll gobble up shrimps happily, which are essentially just sea-insects, all wriggly legs and miniature alien looks. And it can’t be a hygiene issue either. I regularly eat food I’ve dropped on the floor (five-second rule, right?), pick blackberries below the crucial dog-leg-cocking height, and just the other day, I took two grubby aspirin along with six scuffed Smarties I found down the back of the seat in the car. Needs must. Bugs, though, bring on a gag reflex.

But right now, it seemed churlish to refuse. This, after all, is what the Hokitika Wildfoods Festival is all about. For one weekend every year, the pretty seaside town on the “Wild West” coast of New Zealand’s South Island triples its population of 5,000, as the town’s rugby pitch is taken over by marquees and stalls selling wild and outlandish foods.

The event had the air of a village fete on acid. The crowd, mostly in their twenties, was in party mode and drinking hard. Dressing up was de rigueur, with superheroes of every hue, Roman soldiers, sumo wrestlers and plenty of less than politically correct creations, all accessorised with plastic vats of beer.

The stalls, though, had more serious aims. Most were fund-raising for the community. Rusty and his mates were from the Roddy Nugget fishing club, raising cash for “important things like fishing”; the Rotary club was selling “moonshine”; and the hockey team had collected a pile of huhu-infested rotting tree trunks and were extracting grubs to order in aid of their club.

There were small-scale commercial operations too. Not far away was a stand selling horse semen (choose your stallion). Further along, across from a stall selling slushy drinks made with boulders of ice collected from nearby Fox Glacier, Tony Kerr of Curly Tree Whitebait was cooking up a storm. A 6ft 4in part-Fijian who lives on the banks of the Waita River, he is the fifth generation to gather the tiny creatures.

Whitebait is a New Zealand institution, the young of local freshwater fish. They are sometimes crumbed and fried as we cook our saltwater whitebait; but more often they’re mixed with beaten egg and cooked like little fishy omelettes with a mild flavour and a soft, noodle-like texture.

Some of what’s on sale wouldn’t be unfamiliar to British diners. The Girl Guides’ “Westcargots” are just snails with garlic butter, and other stalls sell venison burgers and wild boar. Offal features widely (sheep’s testicles being a favourite); but there are duck hearts on the menu at my local wine bar, and Racine on London’s Brompton Road serves tête de veau, albeit in more refined form than the griddled brains I was offered.

The genially tipsy crowd at Hokitika is half a world away from the middle-class foodies who patronise high-end metropolitan establishments in Britain. But when a crowd of boys cheered on a mate as he dangled a grasshopper above his open mouth, it didn’t seem so different from the frisson of tacit admiration around a table when a London sophisticate at Smithfield’s St John orders rabbit offal and spinach. Both are doing their bit to make eating overlooked foods — offal and bugs — acceptable. It’s an important issue.

Recently, governments have been taking insect consumption seriously. With the world population growing at a terrifying rate, the planet is increasingly stretched to produce adequate nutrition. In 2009, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation predicted that we would need to increase food production by 70 per cent by 2050.

Insects and buglife may come to the rescue as a cheap, sustainable way to source large amounts of protein, and far more efficient, in terms of converting feed to edible weight than, say, beef cattle. There’s a centre at Wageningen University in the Netherlands headed up by “insects as food” crusader Marcel Dicke.

This is unlikely to raise many eyebrows in south-east Asia. Snacking on scorpions, silkworm grubs and locusts is commonplace in countries where a bag of bugs is the local equivalent of a packet of crisps.

In parts of South America, too, they form a normal part of the diet. As Alex Atala, the charming Brazilian chef who specialises in jungle food, told me, “if you give an Amazonian Indian a piece of lemon grass or ginger, they’ll say that it tastes of ant”.

Nor are we Westerners immune to the charms of the six-legged. One of the stalls at Hokitika was selling chunks of tangy, bittersweet manuka honeycomb – like all honey, made by bees from nectar and their enzymatic secretions.

But, ready source of nutrient aside, can insects or bugs themselves be as delicious as honey, or a packet of crisps, for that matter? Is there any other reason to eat creepy-crawlies?

There was no more time to prevaricate. I lifted the huhu grub to my lips and bit its head off, like some hideous sci-fi jelly baby. It tasted woody, not dirty or unpleasant. Rusty nodded. “If you were lost in the bush, you’d be glad of that.”

Maybe. But I’m not trying the horse semen. A girl has to draw the line somewhere.

Bug tasting notes (I ate them so you don’t have to)
 
• Huhu grubs tough, chewy outside and a middle ranging from liquid to creamy and slightly grainy. Mild, clean, woody flavour, like chewing on a pencil, which varies according to the type of wood the grub has been eating. Gastronomic value 3/5

• Grasshopper dry texture with an unfortunate tendency to stick in the throat. They are meant to taste like cashews but I couldn’t detect any flavour. Gastronomic value 1/5

• Snails earthy flavour with mushroomy notes. At their best only slightly chewy, but tinned ones are rubbery. Said to taste of their terroir. Gastronomic value 3/5

• Ants tangy, lemon-sherberty with a touch of heat. Good eating. Gastronomic value 5/5

Rose Prince's Baking Club: dairy-free lemon drizzle cake

Our column shows you the way to beautiful bread and consummate cake. This week: dairy-free lemon drizzle cake.

No dairy here: Rose finds that goat’s butter 'makes an outstanding cake’

Being fortunate enough not to be intolerant of anything except horrible food, I realise the Baking Club thus far has been somewhat butter-centric. Butter is to cakes what grapes are to wine, little else will do. But for some, another type of fat must do. Lactose intolerance is not unusual, and those that suffer it cannot eat dairy (cow’s milk) butter. So what to replace it with, especially if, like me, you know that hardened oils such as margarine are arguably less healthy than butter?

How about “vegetable” oil? The wonderful Italian food writer Anna Del Conte famously makes a cake with extra virgin olive oil (Amaretto, Apple Cake and Artichokes, Vintage 2006). Her cake, which includes apple and cinnamon, has an intense flavour and a firm crumb. It had never, however, occurred to me to make a cake with goat’s butter until a letter addressed to the Baking Club arrived from reader Christine Lamsonby, from Romsey. Christine is lactose intolerant but loves to bake for friends. She sent me a recipe for a dairy-free lemon cake, suggesting using either goat’s butter or pure sunflower oil.

I was wary about goat’s butter. A few bad experiences with fresh goat’s cheeses that have more than a ''whiff of the tail’’ made me hesitate. But I do use it in a dish I learnt to make in Crete, with aubergines, and love it. St Helen’s Goat’s butter, available in supermarkets, smells beautifully clean and has a lovely white cream. It also, having used Christine’s cake method, makes an outstanding cake, with an incredible, fluffy texture. I have adapted her recipe to a drizzle cake, having made a thin lemon syrup to glaze the cake with. It is essential to cream the goat’s butter and sugar until very light and pale.

A seafood safari: oysters and lobster in darkest East Anglia

From the oyster bed to the smokehouse, Jake Wallis Simons rediscovers our seafood traditions on a seafood safari. 

I am heading out on safari. This may conjure up images of mosquito nets, giraffe and pith helmets. But let’s not get carried away. I am in Suffolk.

Since 2009, a former Londoner called Polly Robinson has been organising “food safaris” along the East Anglian coast. These are safaris in the loosest sense: clients are not seeking wildlife, but farmers and fishermen in their natural habitats.

“People have lost the connection with their food,” Polly tells me as we board our boat, a traditional wooden clinker, at Orford Quay. “Food has become heavily sanitised and packaged. I’m bringing people back in touch with proper food, made by artisan producers, the way it has been done for centuries.”

East Suffolk is particularly rich in independent producers and retailers. The 40-mile triangle that encompasses Lowestoft, Martlesham and Stowmarket has not a single big supermarket. This, according to Polly, has enabled small-scale operators to thrive in the area.

The engines groan into life and we strike out on to the waves. Under a vivid blue sky, a lobster fisherman grabs a succession of briny buoys and hauls them into the boat. On the end of each rope is a lobster pot. The first few contain nothing but crabs, which are tossed nonchalantly into a box. Finally, in the last one, there they are: two black, writhing lobsters with vivid cobalt markings.

The fisherman, Dave Rolfe, imparts some wisdom. “If you’re going to buy a live lobster like this,” he says, “make sure the shell is old-looking, covered in barnacles and crust. They grow to fill the shell, then shed it and develop a new one with room for growth. So the older the shell, the fuller it will be of meat.” 

In this part of the world, it is not uncommon to catch one’s own lobsters, although you do need to obtain a licence. The people around this part of the county eat loads: the taxi driver who picked me up at the station confessed 

to having a lobster “pretty much every week”. He ate them, he said, “as is”: no fancy sauces, just a little butter and seasoning, a dressing of which I heartily approved. 

Lunch is at the Butley Orford Oysterage. We start with angels on horseback, made with oysters that are too large to be eaten alone, washed down with a good, appley, medium dry white from Staverton Vineyard near Ipswich. 

This is followed by a big platter of smoked mackerel with sweet mustard sauce, smoked trout with horseradish, smoked salmon, smoked cod roe, smoked fish pâté and smoked prawns. You guessed it: the safari is about to visit a smokery. 

Pinney’s smokehouse, near Orford, was founded in the Fifties by Richard and Matilda Pinney. They pioneered whole oak log smoking, a method now known around the world as “the Pinney technique”. These days, the business is run by their son, Bill, who shows us around. 

“Traditionally, fish loses a third of its weight through smoking,” he says, throwing open the wooden doors to reveal fragrant rows of trout, mackerel, salmon and eel. “Many mass producers, however, smoke it only very briefly to keep the moisture in, because they sell by weight. Some even inject it with fluid, which ruins the taste.” 

It is time for a tour of the oyster beds. Oysters, I learn, come in two types: native and rock. Natives, Bill says, are more expensive and sought after, taking five years to grow and being edible only “in a month with an ‘r’ ”. Rock oysters, by far the more common variety, are hardier, cheaper, and can be eaten throughout the year. Their taste, however, varies with the season. 

“As they accumulate eggs, they get creamier,” Bill continues. “But once these are released – usually around July – they become thinner and more translucent.” 

Back at Butley Oysterage, food production manager Irene Lockwood demonstrates how to shuck oysters. Holding the oyster cup-down, you carefully push the shucking knife into the “heel” – that’s the pointed end – and twist. Then you sever the muscle connecting to the shell. This kills the oyster, and it is ready to eat. 

Trimming and slicing a side of smoked salmon, Irene explains, is a more intricate job. The ribs are skimmed out, then the “pin bones” are removed with tweezers. Lastly, the hard layer of flesh, which was in direct contact with the smoke, is removed, and the soft flesh beneath it is sliced thinly. 

The trip comes to an end, and I head home. H Rider Haggard, the great adventure writer, might be spinning in his grave, but this has been a safari with a difference.