DRIPPING WITH DIGNITY

 Some of the most contested lines in the popular canon can be found in the theme song of the cartoon series Top Cat – do an online search if you don’t believe me.  And this was obvious even to me as kid watching the show back in the day.

 

Hoyt Curtin was the show’s musical director so I assume he wrote the music and perhaps the words too, though I haven’t found absolute confirmation that he was the lyricist.

 

Thanks to online scholarship we now know that the opening verse runs

Top Cat! 
The most effectual!
Top Cat! 
Who's intellectual!
Close friends get to call him "T.C.," 
Providing it's with dignity! 

 

That last line caused all the trouble.  I mean how exactly do you call somebody TC with (or without) dignity?  I suppose ‘respect’ would be the modern translation. Not that it mattered at the time since I had no idea those were the lines.

 

My best guess (and remember I was young) was that the last two lines ran

 

Close friends get to call him "T.C." 
Stroll right in, get whipped into tea.

 

Although even at the time it didn’t seem that Top Cat was much of a tea drinker. And there was another version I sometimes sang to myself sand that ran

 

Stroll right in, there’s dripping for tea.

 

I knew that couldn’t possibly be right, but we were in the north, and dripping was ubiquitous, though I don’t think we ever actually had it for tea.  It was more of a supper thing.

 

And having been in the North in recent days, we went into the Sheffield Moor Market and bought some pork dripping attributed to Waterall Brothers of Percy Street, Sheffield. 

 

It contains pork fat AND lard, as well as salt glucose and Colour E150 - that'll be in the jelly).  It’s pretty good, although as is always the way, it isn’t quite the dripping of Proustian memory.

 

The picture above is from Top Cat The Movie (which apparently everybody hates).  I can't really see what they're eating or about to eat, but it probably isn't dripping.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

GOOD MORNING

If you find yourself in Broomhill, in Sheffield, you may well catch sight of the Nam Song Ca Phe, a Vietnamese joint that serves meals all day.  So obviously you might go in there for breakfast.  And as you sit down at the table and  look at the menu you’ll probably be tempted by this offering:

 

BÁNH MÌ OP LA FRYUP £11.95 

SWEET CHILLI SAUSAGE, BACON, BEEF, TWICE FRIED TOFU, SRIRACHA FRIED EGGS, SAUTEED SPRING ONIONS, DAIRYLEA CHEESE TRIANGLE, TOAST & PATE 

 

And you might think, as did I at first, that this item was a product of well-meaning immigrants who hadn’t quite got the grasp of the full English breakfast. Well you, and I, would be wrong.

 

Photo: Caroline Gannon

As soon as we entered it was conspicuous that there was nobody working there who looked at all Vietnamese, neither front of house nor in the kitchen, which you could see into from the dining room.

 

The explanation, perhaps even a mission statement, can be found on the website.

 

ON OUR GAP YEAR WE WERE LUCKY ENOUGH TO 

EXPERIENCE THE INCREDIBLE COUNTRY OF VIETNAM. 

THE PLACES, THE PEOPLE, THE ATMOSPHERE,

THE FOOD AND THE COFFEE. SIMPLY UNREAL.

 

ALL WE WANTED TO DO WAS TO BE ABLE TO RELIVE THIS EVERY DAY SO WHEN WE GOT BACK TO THE UK WE CREATED NǍM SÔNG!

​

NǍM SÔNG (MEANING FIVE RIVERS IN VIETNAMESE, AN ODE TO OUR FOUNDING CITY OF SHEFFIELD WHICH IS BUILT ON SEVEN HILLS & FIVE RIVERS) IS AND ALL-DAY-ALL-NIGHT COFFEE SHOP, RESTAURANT AND BAR SERVING UP OUR FAVOURITE VIETNAMESE FOOD, DRINKS AND OF COURSE THE LEGENDARY PHIN FILTER COFFEE.

 

There’s more but that’s enough for anyone.  The ‘legendary phin filter coffee’ can be seen at the top of this post.

 

The breakfast duly arrived looking like this:

And no, I wasn't quite as troubled as I look in the photograph below.

Photo: Caroline Gannon

Everything tasted pretty good but you did have to wonder if it all belonged on the same plate.  I could certainly have done without the pate, and probably without the Dairylea triangle but I’m not complaining. The eggs were decent and the beef was terrific.

 

There was too much food, of course, but that was probably the whole point.  We honestly didn’t need to eat again for another 7 hours. And didn’t.

 

Now, I have never been to Vietnam, though I have been to a reasonable number of Vietnamese restaurants both in the UK and in the States.  Would you find anything like this in a restaurantion Vietnam?  Well I suppose so, otherwise why would the Brromhill folk have tried to replicate it?  But I can’t find evidence for this.

 

On the other hand a little light research (I mean I didn’t get much further than Wikipedia) tells us that ‘In the Nguyễn dynasty, (which lasted from 1802 to 1945) the 50 best chefs from all over the kingdom were selected for the Thượng Thiện board to serve the king. There were three meals per day—12 dishes at breakfast and 66 dishes for lunch and dinner (including 50 main dishes and 16 sweets)’

 

So who’s to say that somewhere among the 78 dishes there wasn’t an English fry up. It’s what they call fusion.

FREE IMPROV SANDWICH

 St John Restaurant put up this image on Instagram:

 

The caption was, ‘”Creating a sandwich is like jazz,” says Fergus (Henderson). “You must find your unique sounds.”  Fergus always orders the Egg Mayonnaise sandwich from the chalkboard bar menu, and requests the addition of brown shrimp or anchovy.  The perks of being the boss.’

 

I’m not sure that creating a sandwich is really very much like jazz but I would never argue with Fergus Henderson.

 

 

And then Fuchsia Dunlop put up this image on Instagram: 

 

with the caption, ‘Scotch woodcock (a scrambled egg and anchovy dish, no bird involved) and crab on toast …” A Scotch woodcock is a version of the Welsh rarebit – the anchovies can be on top of the egg (as in the pic) or below the egg as in Gentleman’s Relish.  

Both would be OK by me.

 

I decided the kitchen gods wanted me to make an egg mayonnaise sandwich with anchovies.

 

The truth is I never willingly make an egg mayonnaise sandwich without anchovies so I boiled my eggs readied my mayo and anchovies and in due course began assemblage.  

But the fact also is that I never willingly make an egg mayonnaise sandwich without smoked paprika - and I suddenly realized I’d run out.  I’m not prepared to drive to the supermarket just for a jar of smoked paprika, so I improvised.

 Here is my egg mayonnaise sandwich with anchovies and ... turmeric. 

 

It tasted pretty good. To be honest I think that was because of the egg and the mayonnaise and the anchovies rather than the turmeric.  Does turmeric really have much taste at all? I don’t think so, but I stand to be corrected.  But it looked reasonably jazzy.

Do you want to see a picture of a young Rachel Riley (of Countdown fame) dressed as an egg salad sandwich?  Well, of course you do.

 

 

MENISCUS TEARS

(Photo not by Araki)

We’ve spoken previously about the importance of the meniscus on the martini, but the subject never gets old. If nothing else, it makes you think you’re getting your money’s worth

Below is an Instagram photograph of Grace Dent sipping a meniscus-positive martini at the Egerton House Hotel in Knightsbridge.  And kudos to all involved.

 

The Egerton menu describes it like this:

‘The Classic

‘We start with a frozen glass, chilled to 22 degrees below. A dash of vermouth first, then gin as cold as the glass. It’s poured all the way to the rim, so there’s only one way to drink it: our trademark Egerton Slurp. Trust us – it’s the only way to avoid spilling a single drop.

‘We normally finish things off with a single squeeze of lemon rind, nothing more, nothing less. Times have changed since the first martinis 130 years ago though, so if you prefer vodka to gin, we’re happy to make the switch.

‘We strongly advise one thing; whatever the spirit, treat it gently. As far as we’re concerned, our martinis are never shaken, never stirred, always perfect.’

 

When they say ’22 degrees below’ do they mean Fahrenheit or Centigrade?  I’m guessing the former but I’m not sure.  -22°F is -30°C and domestic freezers don’t go down that far but maybe industrial freezers at the Egerton do.

 

Also note the frosting on the glass in front of Grace Dent.  That’s the measure of any half-decent martini.  And you know, the movies rarely get that right. And even rarer is the meniscus.

 

Here, to pluck an example out of nowhere, is Nicolas Cage in the movie Next.

And here in Leaving Las Vegas

 

And here in Lord of War:

 

No meniscus and no frosting as far as I can see.  And of course you could say there’s no meniscus because he’s already drunk half of it. And no frosting because he’s been savouring it over a good long time.

 

But we know that’s not really the case.  It’s half empty because an overfull martini glass is hard to handle and no movie star wants to be seen  splashing gin down his or her front.    And as for the frosting, well you try to keep a glass looking frosted on the 27^th take.

Here's Bette Davis avoiding the problem by having a completely empty glass:

And below is poor dear Meryl Streep on Youtube, supposedly at home in her bathrobe singing in honour of Stephen Sondheim.  

 

She’s made the cocktail herself and she’s still only going to get half an inch of warm booze. 

And, of course, we know it's not really booze, but that applies to all the above except for Grace Dent.

You know, sometimes it seems as though Hollywood doesn’t have all the answers.

ACID

I was having lunch with an old friend in my local pub, the Crown.  I was having the Tuna melt (above) which is pretty reliable, and my companion was having a sausage sandwich and chips because his wife doesn’t let him eat that stuff at home.

 

And as we ate we overheard the two blokes on the next table discussing Landrovers while they waited for their fish and chips to arrive.  Ah, Essex!

 

Now, when we’d first sat down I’d noticed there were two bottles on the table.  The first contained malt vinegar, and the other contained a light coloured liquid, which I supposed was white wine vinegar.  And I thought, ‘Two kinds of vinegar – the Crown is getting sophisticated.’  But I am a malt vinegar man so it didn't matter much to me.

 

The fish and chips arrived at the neighbouring table and one of the blokes, evidently a sophisticate, put lashings of what he thought was white wine vinegar on his food.  Then he realized (as in fact I had some time earlier) that it wasn’t white wine vinegar at all.  It was hand sanitizer.

 

he described his plight to the waitress who said, ‘Well that was a silly thing to do,’ but she did give him a new plate of fish and chips, which I thought was pretty good of her.

 

Above are Robert Palmer and Elkie Brooks when they were in Vinegar Joe.  I cannot tell you what kind of vinegar was preferred by Joe.