For all Gainsbourg fans (and not only) the movie can be a catalyst to go home and listen to his records: both his own work (the Histoire of Melody Nelson, but let’s not forget his contribution to Jean-Claude Vannier’s L’enfant assassin des mouches) and also the album Monsieur Gainsbourg revisited, a project coordinated by Jane Birkin in 2006 (15th anniversary of Serge’s death) in which his most famous songs are interpreted in English by the likes of Michael Stipe, Marianne Faithfull, Franz Ferdinand, Jarvis Cocker, Cat Power, Carla Bruni and Beth Gibbons.

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Most popular of all is undeniably ice cream. A typical ice cream mix contains milk and cream, sweeteners, sometimes eggs and of course flavouring. This mixture is briefly heated and homogenised before it is subjected to rapid freezing. Surrounding the bowl containing the mix with a medium at subzero temperature achieves swift removal of heat from the mix. Cooling the mix in this way ensures the formation of only small and uniformly distributed ice crystals in the cream, while at the same time, vigorous stirring further prevents ice crystals from forming into large clusters. But most importantly, churning is necessary in order to trap air bubbles in the mix while it freezes. Ice cream is effectively foam that has been stabilised by freezing the liquid and therefore air bubbles are necessary in order for the final frozen product to be ‘scoopable’ rather than ‘sawable’! Various frozen desserts are made from different mixes-for example, sorbet and granita mixes are based on fruit instead of dairy products-but the preparation is very much the same.

The history of ice cream is laced with intriguing stories about its eastern origin and nobility-exclusive hush-hush formula. Some of these stories are probably true and without doubt some are just charming fairy tales. However, rationally speaking, making ice cream is as close to chemistry as one can get on a white apron and toque, probably too close for comfort! Therefore, because the ingredients and way they are processed are all so specific, it is highly unlikely that someone could get it right by chance, at least not before scientists deciphered certain chemical processes. Most importantly, the low temperatures needed to freeze the ice cream could not have been easily achieved before, some 400 years ago, culinary circles got wind of the scientific discovery that salted ice induces considerably more cooling than ice alone.

I hope that the reference to chemistry will not intimidate any curious ice cream fans from making ice cream at home. It’s not difficult and it’s fun! But it would be better to avoid improvising and stick to the recipe, unless you understand well the underlying molecular processes. For example, you might be tempted to make ice cream without any sweeteners in order to reduce the calorific content. I recently learnt that this would not work so well, because the sweeteners are not just for taste, but they actually lower the temperature at which the liquid mix becomes solid (freezing point) and thus prevent it from becoming rock-hard in the refrigerator. Adding alcohol has a similar effect, but with a few extra drops you can easily cause your mix not to be able to freeze, because of the extremely low freezing point. Have an extra sip or two if you must, but leave the mix alone! If calories are not a problem and you feel like making an exceptionally rich dessert using only cream and no milk, you should reconsider because it’s the fats in the milk and not in the cream that facilitate the incorporation of air bubbles in the mix. You could end up with a very dense product that requires a drill and lots of muscle to break through it!

A vast assortment of ice cream flavours can be found around the globe nowadays, adapted for different cultures, climates and tastes. Growing a little tired of the typical vanilla-chocolate-strawberry trio, I turned …East and looked for inspiration. Here are some ideas for ‘ethnic’ ice creams that are usually received well by Western palates.

Matcha ice cream is a very popular ice cream in Japan and other countries of East Asia. Very refreshing and very… green! Matcha is the emerald-green tea powder traditionally used in the Japanese tea ceremony, but you don’t need expensive ceremonial-grade matcha to make ice cream. Red bean (azuki) ice cream is another very popular Japanese ice cream flavour, as well as Okinawan sweet potato, cherry blossom (for a limited season) and the nutty-tasting black sesame (goma) ice cream. Japan is also famous for strange ice cream flavours, so if you are feeling adventurous, this is the country to look for truly jaw-dropping tastes!

Kaimaki ice cream is a luscious ice cream, made with mastic and salep and is very popular in Greece. The ingredients are unique and give it a very distinct flavour. Mastic is the crystallised aromatic resin harvested from the tree pistacia lentiscus, mainly growing on the Greek island of Chios. Salep is a flour produced by grinding orchid dried roots and is used as a thickening agent for this ice cream, giving it also distinctive elasticity. Kaimaki ice cream is served with syrupy sweets, such as kataifi, or for something… ehm… lighter it goes well with sour cherry syrup and Aegina pistachios. Kaimaki ice cream is very similar to Turkish ice cream.

Kulfi is the Indian version of ice cream and is very popular in that part of the world. The technique for making kulfi is slightly different from ice cream in that you need to let your milk mix simmer slowly in an open pan until about a third of the water has evaporated, while you continuously stir. When the mix is ready, it is not churned during freezing, but instead it is frozen solid. Kulfi is a very dense frozen dessert that takes a long time to melt and can be eaten with knife and fork. Popular ingredients to add flavour and texture are pistachios, mangos, saffron, cardamom, rose water, cinnamon, almonds and malai (clotted cream).

If you are not after exotic flavours, but you just crave for something different, The Parlour Restaurant at Fortnum & Mason in London might inspire you! Their strawberry with balsamic vinegar and walnut with maple syrup scoops were so good that I still regret not trying stem ginger with honey as well!

So, whatever you do, stick to the recipe and… happy summer!

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Until recently we lacked the kind of reliable data necessary to analyze migrant characteristics and patterns of movement. There is however one indicator that remains a constant measure of one important aspect of migration: remittances; the money that migrants send to their families back home.

In 2007, the World Bank estimated remittance flow to have exceeded US $ 318 billion. In fact, the amount sent through formal channels, like Western Union for example, is a small percentage of the overall amount. Generally, migrants prefer to send money through friends or family, or to bring it personally when they go back, in order to avoid paying taxes on the exchange rates or loosing money with money transfers. If we add these informal transfers to the World Bank estimates it appears that the actual amount is almost double the official figure.

Some argue that remittances increase the inequality between people, and that they are not always well invested. Yet there is clear evidence that remittances generally reduce the level, depth and severity of poverty. How does this happen and why?

To begin with, remittances inevitably increase the GDP of the receiving country, injecting wealth into areas that might otherwise be left stagnating. In addition to this, remittances have been showed to efficiently do the job that official aid money so often fails to do. While aid and foreign investment often has to go through government channels, remittance money goes directly to the people in need, skirting corrupt officials or inefficient bureaucratic channels.

Remittances can also reduce some of the damage caused by natural disasters. Senders are likely not to be directly affected by those disasters, their income remains unchanged and so they tend to send more money at home. The Sri Lankan Central Bank, for instance, registered an increase in the amount of remittances from the Gulf State in the months following the 2004 tsunami that had devastated much of the country’s coastal areas.

There is evidence that suggests that people use the money they receive as a building block on which to develop their lives. Budding entrepreneurs can use remittances to invest in small enterprises, such as stores or restaurants, or on houses. Impoverished families can use it on the education of their children. In Nicaragua, for instance, a significant rise in remittance related self-employment has been registered. All in all, these strategies can lead to a long-term growth of capital and resources, which can benefit the country on a wider level.

People also send back money aimed at more than their immediate families but to the communities they came from. Many expatriate organizations now invest in community businesses and infrastructures from abroad, cooperating with community members and the governments of their countries. There are more and more hometown associations of this kind, like, for example, the French organisations de solidarité internationale issues de migrations (OSIM).

Although remittances are unpredictable, thus making it difficult for governmental economic policies to rely on them, their benefits on a macro-level are clear: they improve the creditworthiness of a country and stabilize its national balance of payment.

Let’s take as an example a Nicaraguan man who migrates to England. He sends back home some British pounds, which his wife converts at the bank in the local currency, Córdoba. This then increases the demand for Córdobas, and thus, according to the theory of supply and demand, makes its creditworthiness improve. As a result, on a large scale, the Nicaraguan government will be able to borrow more money abroad, and take part in the international market. In a similar way, remittances can improve the national balance of payment. In fact, the Nicaraguan worker will take money from England and send it to Nicaragua, which will have a higher money entrance and a lower money exit. 

Of course remittances can also lead to inequalities within the community. In fact, when the cost of migration is high, the worst-off often cannot afford to move. Again, we can fairly assume that even when they can migrate, poor or non-educated people will receive a low wage, and then send less money back home. However, whenever people leave their community, they enlarge the migration networks. It follows that even poorer families will be able to send migrants, decreasing the initial inequality.

Still, looking at the dark side, some may claim that emigration of skilled workers, the so-called ‘brain drain phenomenon’, damages host countries that have invested in the education of these people and do not receive any advantage after. Despite the undeniable importance and extent of this problem, the money that these workers send back home can still be used in the process of development of their countries.

Speaking of migration as a wholly positive phenomenon for both the country of origin and the host country, is obviously a blinkered approach as it excludes lots of the issues that accompany it. Yet it remains important to attempt to balance the problems and the benefits that it brings. From an economic angle however, it seems safe to assert that there is clear evidence that migration cannot but help the long-term development of both countries.

Image credits: Brandi Strickland

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The name seems to be very appropriate. A Història do Viajante. The story of a traveller. Travelling by means of flavours, where a Japanese market meets and melts with a local orchard. But also the result of the chef’s own travels, from California to New York, from native Portugal to Japan, eventually landing in London.

Launched two weeks ago in the context of the stylish Bethnal Green Town Hall Hotel & Apartments just off the Cambridge Heath Road, the interior has been tastefully decorated with Scandinavian furniture and by the time you are sipping a cocktail before the meal you are ready to embark on a culinary experience which has few comparisons in London. Serving exclusively surprise set menus (but you have the option to choose the number of courses), the chef guides you in a journey that is made of colour, texture, temperature and of course taste.

The apparent beauty of the dishes – some resembling an Abstract Expressionist painting, almost as if the imaginary roving traveller also included a stop at the MoMA to contemplate Franz Kline – is just one component and is not glamorous colourful appearance to compensate a lack in the substance. Instead, under the skilfully presented form, lies a layer of combinations of textures that renders Mendes’ food so interesting. Mixing and juxtaposing solid, creamy, granular; powder, puree, broth, mousse. “I want my food to surprise and delight my guests. It’s not about being shocking, but it is about being playful” says the chef. This sensory experience also involves temperature, with an intriguing use of granita both in the first course as well as in the dessert, granita being clearly an interesting element both in terms of texture and in terms of temperature. Last but not least, the taste. “Each ingredient should taste as perfect as it possibly can” says Nuno and the vegetable course that was presented as the “spring garden” was so fresh that it epitomized his belief perfectly. The journey is completed by almost crafted amuse-bouche, sorbet (lemon and Thai basil, just excellent) and optional wine pairing including selections from small vineyards.

Food experiences of such level can sometimes be daunting or excessive or insanely expensive. But Viajante is all about being intrigued by the food and the atmosphere is refined but most of all relaxed. From the open-air kitchen, the chef supervises his project conceived carefully and passionately (“I have devoted the last two years to Viajante, to planning and experimenting with each dish, each menu”) and he himself is a pivotal element in the success of the restaurant. Far more talented than other popular chefs, Nuno Mendes strikes for his modesty. This inevitably reflects in his direct creation, his food, which is so much more enjoyable and interesting because it is not perceived as pretentious, despite its sophistication.

Trained at the California Culinary Academy, with a CV which includes experiences at Jean-Georges in New York City and El Bulli, Nuno Mendes’ first London-based project was Bacchus, a converted Victorian pub in Hoxton in which he amazed his clients with sous vide food, with the ingredients sealed in vacuum and cooked in a water bath with carefully (to the 0.5°C) controlled  temperature. Then he moved (towards Dalston, so not very far) on to an exciting private dining project, The Loft, in which a spectacular tasting menu can be enjoyed in the intimacy of a private apartment by a maximum of twelve people (incidentally, the project is still running in the form of collaboration with other chefs). Finally, he opened Viajante, without abandoning the East End. In fact he says: “The East End is the place I now call home”.

Home. A strange feeling for a viajante, a wanderer. But sometimes it can just be the intimacy of four people around a table, the conviviality. Sometimes a flavour. Sometimes the memory of that flavour – la madeleine de Proust – while the mind keeps travelling.

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The novel consists of a series of letters and notes exchanged mostly between the central character, Juliet, and others over the course of a few months in 1946. Juliet is a successful authoress in her early thirties, living in the gloominess of the bombarded post-war London, feeling rather restless, seeking for love, lacking inspiration and subconsciously longing for a fresh start in life. A member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society comes across a second-hand book once owned by Juliet and writes to her a rather reserved but extremely dignified letter to ask if she could help him get hold of more material from the same author. She is a fresh, completely unpretentious and cheerful correspondent, encouraging replies and more correspondence from the people of Guernsey. Mostly farmers and fishermen and feeling quite isolated from the rest of the world, the islanders are simply thrilled to discover someone so uncondenscending to whom they can express, in the most delightful and candid way, their strong opinions about books, authors and every other matter conceivable. Juliet soon uncovers, piece by piece, a fascinating story and makes a life-changing visit to Guernsey to learn more and meet her new friends.

Apart from the immediate sense of exhilaration, the element that drew and locked my attention to this book in the long term was the ingenious way the narrative spotlight is passed from one character to the other. Depending on the sender of the letter, there is an amusing change of storytelling style and pace, page after page. Even letters by correspondents frugal in their use of words are complemented by information dispersed in other letters, so that the need for the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps never feels arduous. The epistolary style of the novel combined with the fact that the presence of books is so prominent everywhere has certain similarities to 84 Charing Cross Road by Helen Hanff: all correspondents – whether authors, publishers or readers – have in common their fondness of books and they form friendships through letter-writing that was initiated by literary enquiries. Compared to other books about books, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society might not be as autobiographical as 84 Charing Cross Road, nor as hysterically funny and surreal as the Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde, nor as heartbreaking as the Book Thief by Markus Zusak, but it combines just the right dose of all these ingredients into one lovely book.

As I was reading through, I could not get The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by Gerald B Edwards out of my mind. That is not simply because both storylines concern the Island of Guernsey while it was under German Occupation, although the prominent sense of historical background and geographical location in both books undoubtedly triggered the connection. It is mainly because the picturesque Guernsey that emerges from the pages of G. Edwards, could not be any more perfect in its provinciality, insularity and superb detail, as the natural habitat of the Guernsey people we meet in the pages of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It is very easy to imagine Ebenezer and the other members of the Literary Society being neighbours, quarrelling in loud Guernsey patois, gathering after curfew to listen to the wireless and deceiving the Germans in every way imaginable. In addition, the characters in both books are presented to the reader in similar detailed plainness, which, at some subliminal level, strengthens the associations made between them. Ebenezer, being an old fisherman who has spent all his life on the island, could not have anything but a raw and blunt narrative style as he recounts his life’s story, despite his unambiguous astuteness. Similarly, linguistic ornaments in the letters written to Juliet by members of the Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie Society would be out of place. To this effect, the wonderful prose of M. Shaffer and A. Barrows immensely strengthens the credibility of the letters. In fact it is thanks to the prose, that the detail in which the characters are defined is not in the least restrained by the fact that the story is told via letters only. A few, carefully-selected words are enough to provide a vivid picture of each Guernsey correspondent, even when they do not write about themselves, but rather about village news and gossip. The authors have succeeded in everybody’s unrefined and natural way of speaking almost literally be vocalised through their letters.

All in all, a book highly recommend to everyone with a love for books and reading. A splendid leisure book, that will both entertain and stimulate thoughts.

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There is a limited quantity available every day but you can try and place an order here.

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Ukoo Flani are rough, brutal and extremely powerful on stage. Kenya’s answer to the Wu Tang Clan have an incredible charisma and stage presence, coupled with enough self-assured confidence needed to take the Kenyan music industry by storm. Sung in a mixture of Kiswahili, the slang Sheng and the occasional verse sung in English by the recently returned from America Richie Rich, the first Ukoo Flani album is called Kabisa (Without a Doubt) and it really packs a punch.

Those of us not too familiar with Kiswahili are probably left wondering what the hell they’re on about but it is clear that they’re not simply rapping about pimps, guns and bitches. Their style combines funky hip hop beats with dark, synthy baselines and the occasional ragga sonority, while each of the band’s seven different members contributes his own unique lyrical style.

Kabisa canot yet be bought online but for a preview of some of the tracks contained in the album head to the band’s myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/ukooflani

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Looking at your paintings, it appears that light is a major preoccupation in your work. How do you approach light?
The most difficult question first! In fact, when I’m at work painting, the thought of ‘light’ as such never enters my head. There are just different pigments which I put on the canvas to make the figures and the environment in my image look the way they need to look – that’s how I approach it – and some of those combinations of pigments happen to be lighter, some darker. (I wonder if this is the kind of Cezanne meant when he said ‘For the painter, there is no such thing as light.’) And yet of course when I stand back and look at what I’ve done, what stays in the mind is the light. I realize that I’m typically drawn to scenes where low-angled sunlight jangles against strong artificial light, and for that very reason I try to break my own habit, avoid my own clichés – do scenes where the light is very muted; where it’s all artificial; or where it’s high in the sky and purely natural. One canvas just has sunlight falling from a window in the ceiling into a room where four men sit with their eyes closed. And thinking of that, the best way I can express my sense of how this theme operates in painting is to get paradoxical and to say that light is natural metaphysics. It is a physical load of pigment with certain optical properties, and equally it is nothing less than understanding and grace.

In terms of light, you have written an essay on Pierre Bonnard – has his representation of light (and light on the human skin) influenced you?
I first got a job to write about Bonnard in 1994, when I knew very little about him except that I liked him – I’d never seen a big show of his work. I’d already been painting for twenty years plus, so I guess my mindset was already basically formed. I think the things that Bonnard is trying to represent – the things he is trying to get an equivalent for – are chords or resonances within his own memory, he is two steps removed from the physical hue of the object. Whereas I’m the kind of painter who is always naively trying to match the pigment to the object’s immediate colour, you see me holding up a loaded brush or palette knife before a scene to check the correspondence and ‘get it right’. ‘Get it right’ in quotes of course, because the end results are not factual, they’re imaginative, even as Bonnard’s are. But the approach does remain fundamentally different.

Human beings, the interaction with the crowd and the surroundings, the human figure – these also appear to be important in your work
Yes, that is what I am mostly thinking about when I’m making the pictures – rather than ‘light’, per se. My general theme is how human beings occupy environments, occupy different types of space. Or I could turn that upside down by saying, what concerns me is that  a rectangular picture has got to have something in it, something that’s not simply coextensive with it, and that entity is generally going to be an analogue for myself or things of a similar nature, i.e. a figure, one way or another. Many of the present collection of pictures have become crowd-filled, as you say. Partly because I had the use of a big studio and thought I’d take the chance to try painting some big canvases – but more deeply because the artist I’ve always looked up to most is Bruegel, and I’ve always longed to imitate his panoramic sociological approach to humanity.

In terms of figurative art, can you comment the following statement by Richard Wollheim: “When the Impressionists tried to teach us to look at paintings as though we were looking at nature [...] this was because they themselves had first looked at nature in a way they had learnt from looking at paintings”?
That would apply to all attempts at naturalistic painting. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Here’s Fan Kuan worrying over the same issue a thousand years ago:  ‘My predecessors [in landscape painting] always found their own methods in natural phenomena. So for me to take those other artists as my teachers cannot compare with learning from natural phenomena. And it would be better still, if I were to learn from my inner self rather than from natural phenomena.’  – And in fact that’s what the Impressionists thought, that they were injecting inner self – sensation, the flux of immediate passing experience – into the representation of landscape scenes. But there was an extra party in the dialogue by the time they were working – the camera. They were trying to supersede photography or at least to distinguish its remit from painting’s. For me, inevitably, photographs are a fundamental given of the situation. But I use them chiefly thus: I search through other people’s photographs for suggestions or cues or reminders, telling me about the various configurations in which people and their environments appear in the world. I then draw and draw and draw on the basis of those photographically supplied cues, until I have a picture that represents what’s out there in the world in my own expressive language.

Your grandparents were art critic Clive Bell and painter Vanessa Bell: how much are you influenced by your family’s legacy in your painting and writing?
For the most part, very indirectly, I think. Because my father Quentin Bell – their son – reacted against their English versions of modernist art with a personal artistic stance you could almost call post-modernist (except that this was in the 1940s) – he explored a fascination with pre-modern craft traditions, at the same time he explicitly admitted there was something absurd and anachronistic  in doing so. He mostly did pottery and illustration, but I’ve taken that attitude of his over into painting. My painting is interested in things I think of as pre-modern, like narrative and naturalistic values. But maybe those are mad concerns for a contemporary painter to have? And so the paintings mock themselves a bit. Many in the current exhibition have clown-like protagonists. I’m very fond of Vanessa Bell’s and Duncan Grant’s art, but I don’t identify with it at all. One thing, though, that maybe runs through the generations of the family is a belief that paintings are largely to do with pleasure, and if a painting gives pleasure, that is an entirely satisfying reason for it to exist.

Is it correct to say that your approach to art history in Mirror of the world is based more on seeing art as the tangible product of the human creative process rather than an abstract aesthetic concept?
Well, I’m only interested in the concept of ‘art’ in a very peripheral way, as a theme that occasionally stimulates people to make interesting objects. Fascinating objects and how people made them and what those people were like and what they felt the world was like, those are the things that matter to me. I do tend to think of aesthetics as a thin, dodgy, not very convincing branch of philosophy, even when it’s got the intellectual weight of Hegel behind it, or the elegance of Croce.

Art and innovation (and this constant idea of seeing something “new”, making something “new”): but is it possible to reinvent the wheel in art?
This is what I’ve been saying about my own painting earlier, that it is trying to reinvent the cart-wheels of narrative and naturalism long after transport has moved on to… air travel, or something. It’s crazy. Yet painting is a business where being naive does make sense, I believe. In one sense you’re always bound to be doing something new, for better or worse, in another you are in the same position as every other artist in history, and ‘We have learnt nothing’, as Picasso said when he visited Lascaux.

As an artist, how do you relate to the art market, its changes and the idea of art as a commodity?
I have no problem at all with the idea of my pictures as commodities – I want them to be bought and to hang in other people’s rooms. It’s true that I don’t want them to be bought and get stacked in a storeroom as investments – but is that much worse than them lying stacked and unseen in my studio? The art market is a crazy system, sure, but also a very big and complex one. The fact that some mega-wheeler-dealer like Hirst dominates the media image of it doesn’t mean there aren’t all kinds of niches and corridors available for completely different acts, such as mine, to operate commercially also. One might wish that the media representation of what artists are up to wasn’t so monopolistic and narrow – but that’s where something like The Tamarind comes in, isn’t it? 

Francis Kyle Gallery
9 Maddox Street
W1S 2QE London
www.franciskylegallery.com

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