LIBRARY: Becasse. Inspirations and Flavours by Justin North

neat. Photograph taken at Becasse by Xiaohan Shen at Flickr.

A few days ago, for the first time in our history as a species, the human population of the planet Earth became predominantly urban, not rural. Some bold researchers pinned down this epochal moment of passage to May 23, 2007. The date was of course a polite statistical fiction, based on a United Nations estimate of how fast people worldwide are shaking off the dust of the countryside and moving into town. In any case, nobody stood up to ask the important question: What does it mean to become a city-dwelling species?

Richard Conniff. ‘The Greening of the Urban Animal’. 11.6.2007 New York Times. ‘Select’

Becasse is the Sydney Morning Herald’s “Good Food Guide” Restaurant of the Year for 2007. Justin North has been mentioned as a ‘chef to watch’ by Food & Wine magazine, published in New York. His wife Georgia, the restaurant’s manager, has won awards as a sommelier and the quality of the service at Becasse has been praised. The entire enterprise sits at the pinnacle of a rarefied European artform.

So what does it mean when he says “it’s all about the produce”? The book Becasse: Inspirations and Flavours opens with a question: “Where are the traditional craftsmen, the skilled and passionate individuals? They are vanishing in a world of vast, overly simplified foods.” This isn’t a sentimental conceit, a classical artist revering an ancient instrument freakishly preserved beyond its own time. Or the way that the couture branch of fashion makes theatre of painstaking old-fashioned handcrafts applied to clothing made for an individual customer in an industry whose manufacturing process is otherwise completely automated to produce goods for an anonymous everycustomer. What Justin North does is align farming and food production with the precision and refinement of his own skills as a chef. He’s brought a contemporary, complex sophistication that’s generally thought of as something urban to the consideration of the practices of farming and food production. He introduces us to people who are at the pinnacle of their own branches of food production: many of them have large-scale businesses that are successful in export as well as local markets. He shows that that technology, through the development of new tools is no enemy to craftsmanship and tradition. For instance, Tim Terry trains dogs to search for truffles on his farm in Tasmania, but he’s working with a researcher in chemosensory science, Professor Bryn Hibbert, at the University of New South Wales, to develop mechanised detection systems, an “electronic nose.”

When Justin North opened Becasse in 2001 (in its original location in Surry Hills, it moved to Sydney’s CBD in 2005) he deepened his knowledge of the produce he was purchasing by visiting the farmers and producers. Becasse: Inspirations and Flavours is organised around the building blocks of his cuisine: lamb, beef, game birds, pork, seafood, and European delicacies: truffles, cheeses. He’s chosen a farmer or producer to embody each of these categories, and each section leads in with a description of their methods. He also sketches how these foods have become culturally important to us through history. He has a poet’s sharp eye for selecting a symbol that unlocks a whole world. These introductory texts could be excerpted as a book that stands on its own as an overview of food production in Australia as well as primer on the research and inventions that are maintaining the quality of fine foods, in challenging environmental conditions, as thriving businesses, in the twenty first century.