WHO ATE ALL THE PIES (VERY QUICKLY)

Look, here in the Psychogourmet Test Kitchen we are not body fascists and we’re certainly not body-shamers.  We like our pies, and we could all afford to lose a good few pounds.

So when we see (above) a picture of the winner of the World Pie Eating championship, held in Wigan earlier in December – that’s Martin Appleton-Clare who ate a chicken pie in 19.58 seconds - we’re far too accepting to question whether his vocation might be having an unacceptable effect on his body.  We know that every true champion puts his or her body through unimaginable stresses. 

To be fair, the runner up Ian Gerrard – the one above on the left - looks as though he may have suffered even more than Martin Appleton-Clare:

Compare and contrast with Sonya Thomas, of Alexandria, Virginia, AKA The Black Widow. 

She’s the winner of multiple eating contests, holder of multiple records, including eating Nathan's hot dogs,  eating five and three quarters pounds of deep fried asparagus in 10 minutes, eating 43 soft tacos in 11 minutes, and eating 65 hard boiled eggs in 6 and a half minutes.  All of these sound like very hard work and the hard boiled eggs just sound like absolute torture. 
         Even so, Sonya Thomas weighs 100 pounds and is 5 foot 5 inches tall.  Just sayin’.

A TOKEN DRINK

"Surrender at the bar."  The story of all our lives. Well not all of them, obviously, but you know what I mean.

BUTCHERY

About a million years ago I worked in Harrods.  I didn’t work in the food hall, though I’d have liked to, but I spent a fair amount of time there, skiving off from the furniture department where I supposedly didwork.   I hung around looking at food.  The fish fountain was pretty amazing, a lot of fish arranged into a kind of sculpture. I always wondered what happened to the fish at the end of the day.  I always suspected it just got thrown away, which seemed very wasteful, but maybe the staff got to take it home with them.  

That, in an inverse sort of way, was what happened in the cheese department. If you went there first thing in the morning, before the store was open, the guys were preparing the displays, trimming pieces off the big slabs of cheese, making them neater, so they looked more presentable and desirable.  Then they’d put the offcuts in a bag and sell them to staff for next to nothing.  If they liked you, they’d even cut off big chunks of perfectly good cheese and put them in the bag too, and sell them to you for the same low price.

I don’t know if any of this still goes on. I went into Harrods at the weekend, and I didn’t see the fish fountain but the place was so packed I was lucky to see anything at all.  The cheese department had changed out of all recognition but it looked pretty good. 

However there was one new development that we’d have laughed at back in the day, and I’m still prepared to laugh at it today – the Vegetable Butchery.

I know I'm not the first to observe the absurdity of this, but you do have to wonder what thought processes were employed to arrive at that name.  And what names did they reject? Vegetable Monger? Vegetable Brokerage? Ludicrously Overpriced and Fussily Arranged Greengrocery Department? 

          The girl behind the counter had the decency to keep her eyes downcast.

YET MORE SANDWICH LORE

I was thinking about Enid Blyton, the way you do.  When I was a kid I really used to enjoy her books even though they depicted a world that was very strange to me.  That may have had a lot to do with the English class system.  And now I wonder if it was the strangeness that I actually enjoyed.

I do remember the characters were always having picnics – our family never had picnics. This illustration by Eileen Soper seems to say it all:

Today, of course, I do wonder what was actually in those sandwiches.

And then this picture popped up on Facebook, posted by Howard Rodman.  It’s by Berenice Abbott, and shows McSorley's Ale House, on East 7th Street, in Manhattan. 

The thing that really caught my eye was that sign on the wall offering sandwiches for ten cents and fifteen cents, with no mention of what was in them.

         McSorley’s is still there and I did go there once in the 1990s, I remember that across the street there was an empty lot with rats running all over it, and there was a white DeTamaso Pantera parked in front of it. The latter was far more suprising than the former.

And I managed to find this more or less contemporary photograph of McSorley’s. The sandwiches have gone up in price but at least they tell you what’s in them.

VESPERS ARE FOREVER

My pal Joanna and I were in the Pembury bar, in Roux at Parliament Square, a ritzy watering hole if ever there was one, and not my usual stomping ground, but since we're being Christmas, every London pub was exploding with people, most of whom it seems only ever go to a pub once a year, so the Pembury was the quiet option, though it wasn't quite as quiet as it looks in this pic from their website:

The cocktail menu featured a James Bond Vesper Martini – that old cookie - in this case “Sipsmith Gin, Belvedere Vodka, Lillet Blanc,” though as any fool knows, the modern version of Lillet Blanc is made to a different recipe from the one Bond would have known.

The Vesper cost 15 quid which seemed pretty steep but that’s how it is with ritzy watering holes, and given that the non-alcoholic "One For The Fox" which either contains or consists of “Citrus Agave” cost £12, our Vespers could conceivably be thought of as bargains.

The drinks came and they were perfectly decent, good enough that we drank them and then tried to order two more.  However, the waiter told us they’d run out of Lillet – by which I suppose he meant that we’d just drunk the last of it - but that we could have a version made with vermouth instead of Lillet so we had that.  And they were perfectly decent too, though in smaller glasses, even if the pour may have been the same size.

Next day I was walking down Kings Road and came across a shop selling classic James Bond posters, like this one for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

I don’t remember if George Lazenby drank cocktails as 007, but even if the film ruined him, he did at least get a gig selling Kronenberg.

QUAILING

Did I ever tell you my George Bush quail story?  If I didn’t, it goes as follows.

I was at a media lunch given by/for Steve Rinella, when he seemed to be on the verge of becoming a celebrity chef, and he served up a big tray of quails.  They’d been given to him by some guys who ran a fancy shoot in the American South, and the story was that George Bush junior had been down there and these were the quails he’d shot.  Obviously he didn’t want to take them away with him on the presidential so he left them behind to be given as a souvenir to the some lucky person – “as shot by the president.” 

Rinella was that person but he pointed out, and it was obviously true as I ate them, that these quail had not been shot at all – they didn’t have a mark on them. and had presumably been farm-raised but then presented to Bush as “evidence” of what a great shot he was.

The quails above are not those ones. They come from R & E Family Butchers of Leys Avenue Letchworth Garden City.  I can’t tell you where they come from but they too had not a mark on them, and they were bigger, juicier and tastier than any quail I ever had in America.

At R & E Family Butcher I also picked up a leaflet for their Christmas Hampers, which had this remarkable illustration on the front.  

 I have no idea where that illustration comes from either (drawn by the butcher’s daughter perhaps), I thought there was something a bit Eric Stanton-ish about the dad, but a reverse image search didn’t produce anything very telling, though it did bring up this stock image titled "Buy my Dish of great Eels."

Near enough.

BUTTER WOULDN'T WASH ...

I’m living in Chelsea, round the corner from a Waitrose supermarket.  The food and drink they sell are perfectly decent but they publish a free tabloid titled “Weekend” which makes me want to kill.

The current issue has Elton John on the front, and inside there’s an advertorial from Sipsmith for “Hot Gin.”  Hot water seems to be the main ingredient.  I mean, really?

Elsewhere in the paper there’s a Heston Blumenthal-inspired recipe for a gimlet but this ain't no ordinary gimlet.  It's one of these, the one on the far right I imagine:

And this is how you'd make it if you were of unsound mind:

Of course this isn't really a gimlet, and I balked at the nonsense about butter and cider, but I can think of one gimlet-fetishist who’d have reached for his roscoe at the very idea.  I mean Raymond Chandler of course.

And it so happens that Chandler lived, briefly, in Chelsea in 1958, not half a mile away from where I am, in Swan Walk.  Hold that thought.

         The best thing about my local branch of Waitrose is that they sell oysters – 79 pence each, which isn’t bad, but if you get there at the end of the day and there are just a few left, fewer than 6 I assume, then they knock down the price.  Last night I got three at 32 pence each.  They looked like this:

         Oysters appear here and there in Chandler, usually as similes or occasionally as an adjective – somebody wears an oyster-white raincoat, someone has oyster-white luggage.

I do like this from “Red Wind” which is about the implement rather than the bivalve - “She jumped as if she had been stuck with an oyster fork. Then she tried to smile. It wasn't very successful.”

       And there’s this from “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” Chandler’s first published detective story (1933):

“Mardonne came out from behind the desk. He moved jerkily, like a marionette. His eyes were as dead as stale oysters. Saliva drooled down his chin.”

Almost enough to put you off your oysters, but somehow not quite.

SALT AND BITTER AND GOOD (AGAIN)

I think it was Anthony Bourdain who said you can tell a lot about an eaterie by looking at its toilets, and I’m sure he wasn’t the only one.

It so happened last week that I had lunch at the Chelsea Arts Club, and I ate an acceptable salt beef sandwich (a bit light on the salt beef), which looked like this:

And afterwards I went to the loo, and there in the gents, blow me down, was a nude photograph of one of my former editors, Rowan Pelling, who I knew back in her Erotic Review days. It/she looked like this:

Yes I’m sure you can tell a lot about an eaterie by looking at its toilets – but in this case I’m not sure what.

FLASHING

Once again I’ve been thinking about food photography, which also of course includes drink.  It seems, in many ways, that it could be a very difficult and frustrating profession, but the only food photographer I know, of any sort, Anne Fishbein who and as far as I can tell is a perfectly happy woman, and takes photographs like this, which are great:

As discussed passim on this blog, most photographers of any sort, have at one time or another taken photographs of food and drink, not least William Eggleston, although his photographs always seem to be about something other than food and drink, which is obviously a very good thing.

And I was indulging my Eggleston obsession the other day and came across an article and interview in Vanity Fair by John Heilpern from November 2015, titled “Does William Eggleston Love Women? You’re Damn Right!”  I really don’t know how many ironies there are in that headline. Anyway, at the end of the interview Heilpern asks if he can take a picture of Eggleston on his cellphone.The article runs:     

“‘Go ahead,’ he obliged. I took three of him. Then he sportingly offered to take a cellphone shot of me, although he confessed he didn’t know how. After a little explanation, he figured out my cellphone’s push button and took one picture, scarcely glancing through the lens.   

“The difference was laughable. Mine were just the usual snapshots, while his was a single, masterly composition of someone seated amid the day-for-night kitsch of El Quijote. He’s a magic man, that’s for sure.”

Well yes, Eggleston is a magic man, but I still don’t quite know why so many of his interviews seem to involve El Quijote – a slightly grim Spanish restaurant next to the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.

         

Hold these thoughts. Last Friday I went out with Jason Oddy, a man who seems as far from being a food photographer as is possible.  But he told me that Eggleston was one of his great heroes, and it was seeing photographs by Eggleston, more than any others, that made him want to take photographs. Oddy generally takes photographs like this:

         

We were having an art and food night. We started out at Mosaic House in Earls Court at an exhibition by the Persian artist Behjat Sadr (1924-2007), titled Dusted Waters.  There was a DJ set by her grandson.  Her work looks like this:

There was wine to be had at the Mosaic Rooms, and afterwards we rolled out into the night and thought it would be only appropriate to go to a Persian restaurant and we ended up in Apadana, in Kensington High Street, which has been there since pre-revolutionay days. It was founded in 1967.  So obviously there was wine there too.

It was a decent enough place - we had the hot mezza sampler, spicy Koobideh, and seabass.

And I’m no fool, I don’t brandish my camera when “real” photographers are around, but I asked Jason to take some photographs, and he did, and everything looked great – better than I’d have taken (obviously) and better than it actually appeared in “reality.” There was also this fellow in the restaurant:

The next day I looked up another article about Eggleston, this one by Augusten Burroughs, from The New York Times Style Magazine, dated October, 2016. The title of the article was “William Eggleston, the Pioneer of Color Photography” – I can imagine more banal titles, but not easily.

And the end of the article runs, “We leave the offices of the Eggleston Trust and go to his apartment. The first thing one sees upon entering is a bright red plastic sign with a yellow border, printed with capitalized white sans-serif text. It warns, “THE OCCUPANT OF THIS APARTMENT WAS RECENTLY HOSPITALIZED FOR COMPLICATIONS DUE TO ALCOHOL. HE IS ON A MEDICALLY PRESCRIBED DAILY PORTION OF ALCOHOL. IF YOU BRING ADDITIONAL ALCOHOL INTO THIS APARTMENT YOU ARE PLACING HIM IN MORTAL DANGER. YOUR ENTRY AND EXIT INTO THIS APARTMENT IS BEING RECORDED. WE WILL PROSECUTE SHOULD THIS NOTICE BE IGNORED. THE EGGLESTON FAMILY.”

Both Augusten Burroughs and I find ourselves wondering where exactly you find a doctor who prescribes a “daily portion of alcohol,” and what exactly is the dosage.  It wouldn’t happen in Tehran, I’m sure.

THE BREEZE AND I

I used to be pathologically indecisive when it came to picking a restaurant, especially if I was in a place I didn’t know well, or at all.  I’d walk the streets, annoying my companions, saying, Oh this one’s too full, this one’s too empty, this one’s two bright, the menu at this one is way too long to be any good, and so on. 

I have got better, and it’s in part because of reading Jonathan Gold’s food writings.  If ever there was a man prepared to venture into an unpromising mini-mall to eat in an unpromising hole-in-the-wall restaurant it was Jonathan.  The economist called him "poet of the strip mall eatery" which somehow doesn't quite get it, though I'm sure they meant well.

I’m sure Jonathan sometimes ate some less than stellar food, but he was a man who always knew that another meal was just around the corner.  And when an unpromising restaurant turned out to be really pretty good you experience a satisfaction that doesn’t come from a restaurant for which you had justifiably high expectations.

 And so a couple of nights ago, for perfectly good if slightly complicated reasons, my companion and I were walking down Green Lanes, in Stoke Newington looking for somewhere to eat, increasingly prepared to settle prepared for anywhere that was open, wasn’t lit by bare fluorescent tubes, and had at least two customers.

We ended up in Mediterranean Breeze – a Turkish fish restaurant, which looked OK from the outside, was decently lit, and had just one occupied table, a party of three women.  It was in fact way too big to be considered a hole-in-the wall.

We sat down, and the three women immediately left, but we were already in so we stayed.  For the rest of the time we were there it was just us, a waitress (who I think went home after a while), presumably a chef though I never saw him, and Tony the wonderfully welcoming maitre d’.

The food was good, but on the night it seemed absolutely wonderful – the bream was fresh, the fried potatoes were perfect, the wine was cold and decent and cheap, Tony was a gem; and it seemed like we’d made the restaurant discovery of a lifetime.

And you know, it really didn’t look like the kind of place that would give you an amuse bouche, and they probably wouldn’t have called it that, but before the main courses we were presented with two gorgeous, plump, rich, briny oysters. 

For a while, admittedly quite a short while, it felt like I was sitting in the best restaurant on earth.

GIN CRAZY

You know, a part of me will be really glad when this whole ”gin craze” is over and gin is once again left to the hardened professionals, like me.

I like gin a lot and obviously I prefer a good gin to a bad gin but I really don’t need it to be artisanal and hand-crafted. I certainly don’t need it to be made with “shoreline botanicals including ground ivy, bladderwrack and scurvygrass." Yep, that’s a real thing –  those things are apparently in Edinburgh Seaside Gin:

I first witnessed the effects of gin, when I was a kid at my cousin Margaret’s wedding – she's the bride seen below.  

Her mother, my auntie Daisy, was in floods of tears at the reception, and I already knew that people do get emotional at weddings, but Daisy was utterly inconsolable because she hadn’t been introduced to some relative of the groom, and she took this as the worst possible, infinitely wounding, insult.  Even though I was just a kid, this struck me as out of proportion, but my dad explained to me that Daisy had been DRINKING GIN!  This, he said, was what happened to people when they drank gin – they ended up swept away by floods of uncontrollable emotion. My dad didn’t like that sort of thing one bit.

Recently I encountered (I mean obviously I didn’t drink it) this stuff: Pinkster – “premium gin made with real raspberries.”

Now look, if by some bizarre chance, I wanted strawberries in my gin, I’m quite capable of putting them there myself. I don’t need some ginmeister, or former accountant, to do the job for me, OK?

And then last week in an otherwise very sensible restaurant named Pulpo they were offering a special cocktail, the Reverse Martini.  

 I asked the waitress for details. She said, “You know how a martini is lots of gin with a tiny splash of vermouth, well this is the reverse, a lot of vermouth with a tiny splash of gin.” I turned it down obviously and I’d like to believe that nobody ordered it, but I expect somebody did.

And just when you think it can’t get any worse, this stuff hits the news: Morus LXIV.  We’re told it’s distilled from the leaves of a single “ancient” Mulberry tree.  We’re also told that with each leaf is “hand-harvested” and “individually dried.”  Do the leaves know they’re been hand-harvested? Do they care?

Harvey Nicks in London is selling this stuff in a “set” – a 70cl jar and a 3cl one – yeah, yeah, it comes in jars, and the set costs £4,000. That's not a typo.  There are only 25 large bottles available.  I do hope that’ll be enough.  If the good folk who make the stuff would like to invite me to a tasting, I'd definitely be there.

And speaking of typos: