Changing flavours of the city streets

Cities are living organisms which shift and change dramatically during the normal lifespan of their inhabitants. It is not so much that the architecture changes, but that populations shift. What used to be a district inhabited by the poor, or the relatively poor, such as parts of Notting Hill in London, can suddenly become well-off.

Most of the world's cities, and this is a proof of their being cities in the true sense of the word, undergo such transformations. The district of Berlin where my father lived and studied as a young man lay in the Soviet sector and suffered a 45- year degradation as a human living space. Whole working- class districts of Berlin became first Turkish and, more recently, full of refugees. As the people migrate in and out of these areas, so the food moves, too.

A large immigrant population not only provides new kinds of food, it also extends its influence into the heart of the city. Thus Turkish restaurants became, in Berlin, the places where Germans could eat cheaply and with just a touch of the exotic.

In New York, whole districts are ethnically divided. No one 'cleansed' them. They just became, variously, Italian or German or Polish. My wife tells me of the Polish butcher whose signs were all in Polish: Poles knew where to get what they wanted. Then, within a generation, the 'old' Poles moved into middle-class respectability. Their children would not be caught dead miming the manners of the old country and the Polish butcher went under.

During the war, in New York, I lived in what was the fringe of the German district, Yorktown. It was full of saloons heaving with beer and oom-pa-pa Bavarian music; the food shops all sold bratwurst and every other imaginable kind of sausage. Now, alas, that is where you find Elaine's - the so-called 'literary' restaurant and a place to be assiduously avoided.

Later, as a young musician, I lived in what was once New York's ghetto and ate in delicatessens - pastrami and giant pickles. In a similar way, London's Soho was clearly divided on old country lines. One knew where the Italians congregated or the Chinese - where one could find fresh noodles or dried mushrooms.

I have been in Boston (for part of the year) a scant four years but within a few blocks of my house, which once lay in a solid Irish district, I have seen dizzying transformations in food. When we came here, English was the fourth language in our local church. The first was Spanish, and the food stores reflected that: decaying yams favoured by Cubans and Dominicans lay in battered boxes on the counters. The second language was French, for there were many Haitians - some of whom, for want of their own produce, lived and ate as their Dominican neighbours did. The third was Portuguese, meaning that we could get linguica, the Portuguese sausage.

Now we are Vietnamese - or more broadly Asian. But the amalgam of cultures continues. Our local Korean fishmonger is largely patronised by blacks (Caribbean and otherwise) buying up catfish and other cheap fish. Down the road we have a Vietnamese market whose mysterious products, all labelled in Vietnamese and ranging from fish sauce to foul-smelling entrails, no doubt retain, for its customers, memories of Saigon and Hanoi. They welcome non- Asiatic customers (for they are sharp business people), but the whiff you get as you walk in has nothing at all to do with America. It is not just exotic, it is purely foreign.

The shift of populations brings in its wake economic change. Boston had its yuppie period and a grocery chain called Bildner's, with a dozen stores. Now it is reduced to two or three as the yuppies have gone into economic disintegration. Bildner's still delivers the kind of food you cannot find elsewhere, but only to a diminishing population.

But what we see and buy and try out in a mood of experimentation ultimately also enters our kitchen. Immigration not only caters to its own, it brings variety to those of us who are utterly unexotic, and I think that is why food in cities is almost inevitably - save for a few posh places artificially created in a countryside mansion - superior to food in the country. The influence of availability - of raw materials, of culinary influences - remains fundamental to that unending recreation of cooking which is at the heart of true gastronomy.

The pleasures of discovery are also the pleasures of creation; as the city recreates itself, so do we renew our palates. Just imagine how dull life would be if we were still eating the cuisine reflected in countless cookbooks (from Mrs Beeton onwards) and followed by generations of 'traditional'cooks.