Tuesday, March 12, 2024

CANNY EATING



 I’ve been reading The Uncanny Gastronomic: Strange Tales of the Edible Weird, an anthology edited by Zara-Louise Stubbs for the British Library. I think I understand what’s meant by ‘the uncanny gastronomic’ but I’m not sure I’d know how to use it in a sentence, apart from this one.

There are some big names in the anthology including Saki, Mark Twain, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Blackwood, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Roald Dahl, but it’s not just the usual suspects. I was delighted to find the story ‘To Serve Man’ by Damon Knight, which was the basis for the classic episode of the Twilight Zone.  Spoiler alert: It’s a cookbook!




There’s Kafka’s “A Fasting Artist,” which I’ve always known as “A Hunger Artist” and always thought was a bit of the cheat – the reason why the hunger artist can fast for so long is because he’s never found anything he likes to eat, or maybe that's the point.

 



I think my favorite story in the book is O. Henry’s “Witches’ Loaves.”  O. Henry is the king of the fictional twist.  You know the twist is coming but when it arrives it’s still surprising because it’s not the twist you were anticipating, which in this case is perhaps to say that it turns out not to be so weird or uncanny as expected.

 

A significant percentage of the stories involve cannibalism one way or another. I suppose most of us these days, if we’re not psychopathic anthropophagi, wouldn’t choose to eat human flesh, unless we really had to, but if history has proved anything it’s that when people really have to, they seem to get over their objections without too much difficulty.

 



And I started to wonder how I’d feel about being eaten.  I certainly wouldn’t like to be eaten while I’m alive but after I’m dead, what does it matter?  As we’re told by the song "On Ilkla Moor Baht'at" (Baht’at is supposedly Yorkshire dialect for “without a hat” though I think you could spend a great deal of your life in Yorkshire and never hear the expression) once we’re buried we’re eaten by worms, the worms will then be eaten by ducks, and then humans will eat the ducks, and so we’ll have eaten “thee.”  It’s cannibalism with three degrees of separation. I’m not sure if this is an absolute argument for cremation but it’ll do well enough.

Monday, March 11, 2024

SANDWICH MEN (AND WOMEN)


I used to say, and it’s become an ever less impressive boast as the years have gone by, that I thought I’d read every word Jack Kerouac ever published. Unfortunately, at a certain point, if your reading career has been as long as mine has, you start to forget as much as you remember.  

 



Even so, picking up Jack’s Book: an oral biography of Jack Kerouacby Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, I was surprised to see an interview with Carolyn Cassady, wife of Neal Cassady and lover of Kerouac, who appears in On the Road as"Camille,"and she was talking about sandwiches.

 


Kerouac and his girlfriend Luanne Henderson (Marylou in the novel) were in San Francisco and things weren’t going well between them, and Carolyn Cassady writes, “So then he went off on the bus with his fifteen sandwiches.”

Now, I’ve always been interested in literary depictions of food – “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls” and all that kind of thing, but I had no memory of Jack Kerouac and his sandwiches. 

 

And so I returned to On The Road and sure enough there are sandwiches galore.  This is in Part Two, Chapter 12,  “What I accomplished by coming to San Francisco I don’t know. Camille wanted me to leave; Dean didn’t care one way or the other. I bought a loaf of bread and meats and made myself ten sandwiches to cross the country with again; they were all going to go rotten on me by the time I got to Dakota … 

“At dawn I got my New York bus and said good-by to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care.” 


It does seem that Carolyn Cassidy miscounted the number of sandwiches.

 



And this is earlier, Part One, Chapter 13, when the fictionalized Kerouac is in Los Angeles, “With the bus leaving at ten, I had four hours to dig Hollywood alone. First I bought a loaf of bread and salami and made myself ten sandwiches to cross the country on. I had a dollar left. I sat on the low cement wall in back of a Hollywood parking lot and made the sandwiches. As I labored at this absurd task, great Kleig lights of a Hollywood premiere stabbed in the sky, that humming West Coast sky. All around me were the noises of the crazy gold-coast city. And this was my Hollywood career-this was my last night in Hollywood, and I was spreading mustard on my lap in back of a parking-lot John.”

         I’m not sure I ever saw a public toilet in a parking lot in Los Angeles, but if I had I don’t think I’d have wanted to make sandwiches there.

 

There are various other mentions of sandwiches in On the Road, including hot roast beef sandwiches eaten in a diner in Denver, and also of course mentions of other food too, most of it all-American – hamburgers, cherry pie with ice cream, blue fish, popcorn - but it’s the sandwiches that stay with me now.


I’ve tried to find a picture of Kerouac with a sandwich, and I’ve failed, but there’s no shortage of pictures of him drinking. 


 

 

 

Thursday, March 7, 2024

NOSE TO TAIL, AND BACK AGAIN

 And speaking of artificial food, there’s currently an exhibition on at London’s Japan House titled “Ainu Stories: Contemporary Lives by the Saru River.”  It’s about life and culture in Hokkaido, the island at the far northeastern end of Japan; and life and culture of course includes food.

 

So there are some representations of the local cuisine, including sito – that’s millet dumplings; irup - dried lily bulb cakes; and sipuskepmesi - millet and rice.



But far and away the most appealing, and something I might actually try doing myself, is ciporemo – that’s potato with salmon roe – how could you go wrong?

 



I’ve never been to Hokkaido but I have been to Tokyo where I ate some oysters from Hokkaido, the biggest and best I’ve ever tasted –  they looked like this .

 



Since the visit to the Japan Centre coincided with my birthday, we also had some actual food.  The inamorata (aka Caroline) took me to St John Bread and Wine in Spitalfields.  

Naturally there were martinis to start

 



Then we ate Rollright cheese.

 



When it arrived I wasn’t quite sure about that spring onion, which was extremely strong, but the lads and lasses of St John know their business and it was great,  as right as it was surprising.

 

There were also sardines:




And top of the bill, nestled under the salad, was pressed pig’s head terrine (at least I think that’s what it was – the menu just said pig’s head).



 

And because Caroline had clued in the restaurant to the fact that it was my birthday they delivered a doughnut with a candle on the side, which was only marginally embarrassing.




Thursday, February 29, 2024

THE CHEESE AND I

 It takes a brave man to admit that he’s been inspired by the food at a Wetherspoons, but I am such a man.

 

After I had my cheesy chips at the Peter Cushing in Whitstable last week, which were perfectly good, I still thought more could be done.  Essentially I thought the chips could be cheesier and the cheese could be pokier – it tasted like fairly mild cheddar.

 


So I decided to do something very similar but using Godminster Red Chili Devil's Dance Organic Vintage Cheddar – a cheese sharp enough and hot enough to strip your carburetor and adjust your float level.  




And though I say so myself it was very good, and it looked like this (in an inappropriate bowl):




But this is interesting – and maybe everybody knows this already, the hotness of the chili cheese was much reduced. Now obviously any cheese is going to seem milder which eaten alongside a mound of fried potatoes rather than eaten on its own, but I did wonder whether the actual chemistry had been changed by a few minutes under a hot grill.  Further research may be required.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

VERY SIMILAR FOOD

 


There was a great article by Fuchsia Dunlop in the Financial Times at the weekend, headlined ‘Stone Feasts: Verisimilar meat, fish and poultry carved from rocks are part of a long Chinese cultural tradition.’
  I don’t believe I’ve ever seen ‘verisimilar’ used in a sentence before.


 

Now, Fuchsia Dunlop appears to know pretty much all there is to know about Chinese food and culture, but even she seemed to be taken aback by the practice of collecting and displaying, in some cases after carving and cutting, rocks that look like food. 

 



She describes a ‘stone banquet’ she visited at the Ningxia Museum in Yinchuan, assembled by ‘self-declared stone lover’ Xie Nin, and says it looked as though Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti had collaborated on dinner.

 



Inevitably, as you see from the pictures, some of the rocks look rather more convincingly like food than others - belly pork seems especially persuasive, but the general effect as shown in these pictures both from the newspaper and from Fuschia Dunlop’s Instagram feed is downright wonderful. Speaking as someone who loves both food and rocks, this is about as good as it gets.

 

I pick up a lot of rocks on my meanderings, but I’ve found very few that look like food, apart from the odd one that looks a bit like a potato.  But I’ve always been intrigued by restaurants or other establishments that display ‘verisimilar’ food. I found myself digging through my files looking for example of fake food I’ve photographed over the years.

 

Obviously a lot of restaurants don’t have the time or the staff to go hunting in the mountains looking for rocks that resemble their fare.  They have to rely on more mundane and easily available materials.  Some of these may be quite straightforward and literal like these replicas displayed outside a restaurant in Koreatown in LA, simply giving an impression of what the food served inside looks like.

 



But more often that not there’s some gigantism involved.  Ice cream is very good for this:

 



In Manchester you’ll find the Vimto monument. I think those are giant raspberries and grapes – I mean, those are the ingredients of Vimto - but those really are some funny looking grapes:

 




Hot dogs too are popular, and this may be more of an American thing.   This is, or anyway was, on Hollywood Boulevard:

 



This was, and I believe still is, Jimmy’s Hot Dog Company in Bisbee Arizona

 



And perhaps best of all – instead of finding a rock that looks like a hot dog (which I think is not entirely unlikely), or making one out of wood, you could build a motor vehicle that looks like one.  This is the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile:

 



There are plenty more where they came from.


Today while on my morning constitutional I picked up these three little rocky morsels – they look ‘almost’ but not quite good enough to eat.

 


And then I remembered, well I hadn’t really forgotten, that Dining on Stones  is the title of a novel by the esteemed Iain Sinclair.  

 



So … a cultural tradition with an international pedigree.

 

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

SPOONS AND CUSHING


Why do Wetherspoon pubs get such a bad rap? I mean I know that the owner Tim Martin supported Brexit but then so did many millions of others.  



And Wetherspoon pubs do have some reputation as the home of ‘bad behavior,’ but you know, I suspect there may be one or two other pubs in Britain to which that may apply.


Of course I know that Wetherspoons (and no, I don't know why it's sometimes singular and sometimes plural but as far as I can see it never has an apostrophe) doesn’t represent the pubby perfection as described by Orwell in his essay 'The Moon Under Water,' but that’s because, as Orwell says, perfection doesn’t exist in pubs.  Nor in anything else, we might add.

 

But the few times I’ve been in a Wetherspoon pub I was perfectly happy.  The beer was affordable, the vibe was OK, and I wasn’t surrounded by drooling Yahoos.

 


I was especially happy in the Wetherspoon in Whitstable last weekend.  The branch there is named The Peter Cushing  after the actor - he bought a house there in 1958.  It’s a converted cinema and the conversion is very well done I’d say it doesn’t look cheap. There was Cushing memorabilia, some bits of antique cinema machinery and some very nice stained glass.

 



The beer of course was much like the beer anywhere else, and the cheesy chips we ordered arrived quickly and were exactly as good as you’d expect cheesy chips in a pub to be to be.  

 

I couldn't see what people are complaining about.



  Although of course I accept that at chucking out time on a Friday night, things may be different.

 



I don’t know how much of a gourmet Peter Cushing was but there’s a recipe of his in Parkinson’s Pie (as in Michael) for ‘Pain-Grille Brule’ that in part runs ‘Place 1-2 slices … of brown bread under a grill set “high.” When flames appear, it is done. Reverse until the other side cries for mercy.  Do not scrape off the cinders.  Served with butter and your favourite marmalade plus a pot of Indian tea, it constitutes a meal that can be eaten any time of the day or night.’

         As yet this doesn’t appear on the Wetherspoon menu.

 

Meanwhile on the streets of Whitstable, thoughts turned more than once to mother’s ruin.





Wednesday, February 14, 2024

VALENTINE CRUNCH

 Does anything say “Happy Valentine’s Day” quite like a helping of Black Country Pork Crunch in a heart-shaped bowl?