EATING WITH ALIENS IN NEW YORK

I have been in New York for a week or so, eating up a storm, some of it quite high, some less so.  On the first morning in Manhattan, I staggered out of the hotel looking for somewhere to have breakfast, and found the Malibu Diner. I don’t know how they arrived at that name, and there wasn’t much of a California vibe to the place, in fact it was very, very New York, for which I was grateful.

The diner is one of the great American inventions and institutions, and doesn’t need any boosting from me.  It also seems an utterly simple, uncomplicated form that nobody could have any trouble with, but at the Malibu this didn’t seem to be so.  There was a couple of English tourists in the booth next to mine, an older northern pair, and the husband, who was doing the ordering for both of them, was having a certain amount of local difficulty.

The waiter was Latino and didn’t speak very good English and the northern man certainly did not speak American.  He was asking for “a portion of potatoes,” and although the word portion is obviously known in America (as in the importance of “portion control” when you’re trying to lose weight), it’s not a word used much in diners.  I guess “a side” would be the preferred expression. But in any case, simply asking for a “side of potatoes” doesn’t really communicate much either, you have to specify the kind of potatoes you want, and it was a while before the waiter announced that what the customer wanted was “a side of home fries.”  Whether that’s what the man actually wanted I couldn’t say, but he didn’t argue.

There was then the problem of the eggs.  The Malibu Diner menu offers “two large eggs any style” a form of words you’ll find in most diners, but this may also be confusing to the alien visitor.   “Any style” is a broad concept and I’d suggest you don’t go into an American diner and say you want your eggs coddled or en gelée, though I think it would be a hoot to say you wanted them sous vide, "I'll be back this time tomorrow."

Anyway, the waiter asked our friend from the north how he wanted his eggs, and he replied “medium.” The waiter had obviously given up trying to understand this bizarre foreigner so he nodded and wrote something down on his pad.  I wonder what the customer got.  Fried eggs over medium, I suppose, which may even have been what he wanted, but I suspect not.

Now, only a fool goes to New York in search of English food, and I certainly did not, but it so happens that one of my friends is great pals with Peter Myers, an Englishman who runs Myers of Keswick, a shop in the West Village that imports various food items (and non-food items too) from Britain.  We paid him a visit.

 Myers also bake pies on site, which are very fine indeed, and I used to eat their pork pies when I lived in New York and suddenly needed a taste of home. 

I chatted with Pete, who is a good man, and he was telling me the tribulations that go along with importing foodstuffs from the old country.  Needless to say you can’t import meat unless it’s in a can – haggis for instance.  And even Atora dried, packeted beef suet is a no-no.   But who’d have thought that wine gums were such trouble?  The problem isn’t the wine, obviously there’s no alcohol in wine gums, but rather the additives.  The list of additives allowed in America is quite different from those allowed in Britain.  After much food testing and chemical analysis, for which Pete of course had to pay, it was decreed that he’s not allowed to sell wine gums. 

 I noticed a board behind the counter saying that the shop had black puddings for sale.  I asked Pete what were they like.  He gave me a searching look.  “You seem like a man who knows his black pudding,” he said.  I reckon I do, but I wasn’t sure it was something that showed in my face, anyway, Pete then added, “And frankly these aren’t that great.” 

They weren’t of course imported from England, and they weren’t made on site either.  They were made by Donnelly’s.  The packaging is silent on where they’re based, and they’re officially called “blood pudding.”  Still, good chap that he is, Pete threw in a free one, which I have just eaten back home in LA.  Ingredients, according to the pack, include pork, beef blood and “spice extractive” and although they were pretty good they were nothing like any black pudding I’ve ever had in Britain, much spicier for one thing – I suppose that would be the spice extractive.  Still, thanks Pete, keeping making the pies.

MUTTON UNDRESSED

My attention has been drawn, as I’m sure yours has too, to the latest Chinese food scandal.  The Chinese police broke a crime ring that passed off a million dollars worth of “rat and small mammal meat” as mutton.  These small mammals included fox and mink.

Now, this is clearly very bad and wrong: if I’m going to eat rat (and I probably would in the interests of research) then I’d like to know about it, though I suspect an awful lot of people have eaten rat over the centuries, it being a delicacy in certain parts of China, and a great deal of it got eaten during the Battle of Stalingrad.  And I suppose, if nothing else, most of it has been free range. 

Mink, I suppose, would probably be farmed: if you’re breeding them for their fur, why not sell their meat too?  And fox?  The received wisdom on fox, is surely, per Oscar Wilde, that it’s “the inedible,” though I did read a report a few years back that a butcher in England was selling fox specially imported from Scandinavia.  I seem to recall that people found it tough.

However, the big question I’m left asking is, by what incredible process did the Chinese get their small rodents to taste like lamb?  We know that unusual meat is always supposed to “taste like chicken.”  The answer, according to news reports, is that “additives” were used.  Now, those must be some powerful, desirable and I’d say potentially magical additives.  Never mind selling rat, mink and fox, why not just sell the additives?  Of course you wouldn’t call them additives, obviously, you’d call it “Lamb in a Pack” or “Lamby Flavor Enhancer.”  I’d buy it buy it in bulk.

EGGLESTON REDUX

And sometimes you miss something really obvious.  As I said in my previous post, I was at Paris Photo LA, eating potato croquettes (above), while waiting to gawk at William Eggleston; and how could I not think of another of his great food photographs, this one:

There on the left hand side of the freezer is the product that that sometimes provides the title of the picture.  Eggleston titles are problematic, I think: a whole lot of them are simply “Untitled” but titles get attached  just so that everybody knows which ones they’re talking about.  Anyway, the title of this one, is “Frosty Acres Tasty Taters.”  Sounds like poetry, doesn’t it?

And I can’t resist just one more great Eggleston food picture: a photograph of a man looking at a steak with more love than some men have ever looked at anything:

EGGING ON EGGLESTON

At the weekend I had a Slammin’ Slider – that was the name on the side of the food truck anyway.  My sliders contained pulled pork and were scattered with crispy fried onions – and they were just fine if you like sliders, though I'm never sure I really do.  The Loved One would have had the Philly Cheese Steak but the truck had run out of mayonnaise, which seems a slam of a different sort: she had the potato croquettes instead with a dip that may or may not have been mayo-based.  These were fine too.  I'm pretty sure I like potato croquettes better than sliders.  So why did I order sliders?  Just one more imponderable.

We were at Paris Photo L.A.; a photography fair on the Paramount Studio lot, a place I’d never set foot before, though I’d driven and walked past often enough. I was there, among other things, to gawk at William Eggleston, who was doing a signing at the Gagosian stand.  Mr. E is a famous southern dandy and drinker.  I can’t say that he looked exactly stewed at the signing but he did look pleasantly marinated.

It would be pretty darn idle and reductive to think of Eggleston as a “food photographer,” but even so, he’s taken two of the greatest pictures of food and drink I’ve ever seen  This is the first:

I’m reminded of it every time I get on a plane.  I always get a window seat if I can, and I always try to arrange my glass so that the sun might shine through it in precisely this way.  But it never quite does.  And the image seems so still, so calm, so isolated, so untroubled and unhassled, so optimistic; not the way I ever feel when I’m on a plane, but the way I always want to feel. 

The second great photograph is this one, rather more complicated in some ways, I think: 

I've seen it captioned "Sumner, Mississippi," and we know that's where Eggleston was raised on a “plantation," and I’d guess this photograph was taken there.   My first superficial impression was that here was a grand spread of southern food laid out for a feast, maybe Thanksgiving; but of course when you look even slightly more closely you see it’s a meal for one.  My friends from the South also tell me this is pretty much everyday fare down there.  I've also seen the photograph captioned "Dinner."

Even so this seems lot of trouble to go to for just one person, and it’s not just the food but the silverware and the flower arrangement.  And perhaps there’s something sad and lonely about going to all this effort when you're by yourself, something a bit Miss Haversham.   But then, maybe that’s the whole point.  Just because you’re eating along doesn’t mean you have to slouch on the couch and eat a slab of pizza. Southerners are great believers in keeping up standards.  And maybe there’s something rather noble in going to precisely this amount of trouble, in taking pleasure and delight in small things even when there’s nobody there to share them with you.  This to a large extent is what Eggleston’s work is about; and, of course, the camera is there to help in the sharing, to be an observer, and perhaps to be an honored guest at the table. 

I’m not sure that Eggleston is a big eater, and according to an interview he did with the New Yorker in 2008, he had a troubled relationship with at least one eating establishment: the Lamplighter Lounge in Memphis, from which he was banned for at least a decade.  There he is above at the Lamplighter, in a photo by Stanley Booth.  

The celebrated Miss Shirley was a bartender at the Lamplighter Lounge for the best part of four decades: she died in 2010.  The cause of Eggleston’s ban, according to that New Yorker interview: “I got really drunk one time, and I threw a hamburger at Shirley, who had just made it.”  The ban sounds fair enough to me.