Shrimp brains, raw sea urchin… that’s not my idea of good food! CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV
Remarkable places to eat (More4)
Earth (BBC2)
Unable to bear the relentless sadism of ripper-thriller Wolf on BBC1, I flipped channels and discovered something even more gruesome.
Dermot O’Leary taught Fred Sirieix in Remarkable Places To Eat (More4) how to suck the contents out of a shrimp’s head. ‘Mm,’ Dermot slurped, ‘clever!’
The foodie friends explored Puglia, the heel of Italy, where This Morning presenter Dermot claims to be a ‘part-time resident’. What this actually means is that he has a holiday home there, although he doesn’t seem to come often enough to pick up the language: Fred had to translate.
They were both enraptured by the cucina povera or “kitchen of the poor” – the vegetables, pasta and seafood eaten for centuries by locals in the poverty-stricken villages. ‘Authentically rustic, in honor of their ancestors,’ Fred purred.
It is, of course, wonderfully pretentious. You won’t see Dermot and Fred dining in the ‘kitchens of the poor’ in Britain, queuing up for a cheeseburger and £1.19 chips at a fast food chain in Asda.
But their mouths watered when they made orecchiette, tiny thimbles of pasta, by molding the dough over the tips of their thumbs.
Dermot O’Leary taught Fred Sirieix in Remarkable Places To Eat how to suck the contents out of a shrimp’s head. ‘Mm,’ slurped Dermot, ‘clever!
And they salivated as a fisherman with a Poirot-like mustache demonstrated how to pry open a sea urchin with the tip of his knife, cut out its mouth, scrape away the semi-digested algae from the shellfish’s last meal, and scoop out the orange flesh to eat it raw, use a clam shell for a teaspoon.
Both of our galloping foodies declared this looked delicious. Back on BBC1, Wolf’s psychopathic captors had just gutted a deer and decorated a tree with guts. I wonder if Fred and Dermot are watching and licking their lips. One person’s horror movie is another’s recipe book.
Raw mollusks are not my idea of fine dining, but the scenery was irresistible. The boys arrived by speedboat in Gallipoli, a pre-Roman fishing village on a promontory, under a clear blue sky.
The olive groves, the hillside farms, the rocky coves, and the sun-drenched seawall were all impossibly picturesque. Not that Dermot and Fred paid much attention to it – they were too busy competing with their lavish tasting notes.
Fred cried with joy over a sheep’s milk cheese called pecorino, eaten with capocollo cured meat and orange jam: “I’m not a fan of marmalade, but actually it pairs perfectly with both the greasiness and the slight smokiness of the pork.”
Dermot trumped him by inhaling the scent of an oregano sprig. It grew, he claimed, next to the beach where he took his morning swims, at Porto Selvaggio. “The smell, half pine and half oregano,” he groaned. ‘It is so beautiful.’ Fred forced a smile. ‘Is the?’ he asked briefly. He had been out to dinner.
Chris Packham embarked on his own poetic ecstasy when he related how our planet acquired its life-giving atmosphere on Earth (BBC2).
Chris Packham began his own poetic ecstasy when he related how our planet got its life-giving atmosphere, in the earth
‘The great bowl of heaven,’ he grumbled, ‘just so beautiful. I like the fact that I can stare into a sky that the dinosaurs stared into, that Neanderthals stared into.’
Framed at dawn and dusk in a succession of romantic shots, Chris made a series of complex scientific developments seem easy to understand with his mix of enthusiasm and pithy sentences.
He pointed to a red line in a rock and called it a “geological tattoo” from a time when the oceans were murky with rust.
The only mystery he didn’t explain was why this story, which charts the first billion and a half years of Earth’s existence, wasn’t the first in the series. Next week, in the final part, it’s the extinction of dinosaurs and the arrival of humans, so this episode didn’t seem to be in chronological order.
Not-not of the week
Liquor boss Tom quoted Napoleon’s comment, ‘Perry is the English champagne’, as he sang the praises of pear cider, on A Cotswold Farmshop (Ch4).
“I’m not allowed to do the French accent,” he added.
Why not? Is ‘Allo ‘Allo now a hate crime?