I SIN, YOU SIN, WE ALL SIN FOR BOURSIN

It's a croissant with Boursin and a venison sausage.  Could have used more Boursin. Couldn't we all?

BUNKERING

There was a fine (and provocative) piece by Jay Rayner in the Observer about the ‘binary choices’ facing the happy eater.  Do you go for tea or coffee, white sliced or sourdough, jam or marmalade?  These I found easy to answer but some of his other examples don’t seem quite so binary.  Vodka or gin he asks, and he doesn’t like gin, but for me there’s no definitive answer.  Gin in a martini, obviously, but vodka in a gimlet or a Bloody Mary.  Anyway I’m not here to pick a fight with Mr. Rayner – I’m no fool, unlike Gordon Ramsay.

But his ideas fitted in with some thoughts I had at The Grocer, a decent bar/restaurant in Spitalfields Market.

 

First impressions were great.  Our waitress, named Anneka, (lot of tattoos, one or two facial piercings – which I guess is standard for London waitresses) met us at the door and said ‘Sit anywhere you like.’ These are the best word I can ever here when entering an eatery.  The alternative is a server who insists on putting you at a small table, in a dark corner next to the toilet.  Hurrah for Anneka.  We went for a booth.

 

We ordered fish and chips which were good but they did, for me anyway, raise a binary question; does a pickled onion go with fish and chips? I know this is not one of the great existential questions but in fact I’ve got through my life this far without wanting a pickled onion with my fish and chips, and I’ve very rarely had one. What does that say about me?

 

However, The Grocer’s fish and chips came with a very small pickled onion, perhaps a bit large to be a cocktail onion but only just, and it was impaled on a cocktail stick which was in turn impaled in the fish, like this:

 

It was, of course, no problem.  I ate it and it didn’t trouble me, and if I hadn’t wanted to eat it I wouldn’t have, but I was still a bit surprised to find it there at all.  Jay Rayner says this kind of thing has a lot to do with where you’re born and raised, saying ‘Tell me whether you are chips with curry sauce rather than chips with gravy and I’ll have a strong sense of where you’re from.’  I think this is true, though for me personally the choice between curry sauce and gravy largely depends on if I'm in Yorkshire, and how many pints of Tetley’s I’ve had.

 

Anyway, the real beauty part of fish and chips at The Grocer was the vinegar: artisanal, old fashioned, slowly oak matured, and all this done in the Old Nuclear Bunker at Coverack in Cornwall, which looks like this:­

 

And some people claim to prefer ketchup with their chips.

 

DEATH STALKS THE KITCHEN

Look, none of us doubts that there are profound and mysterious connections between 

food, passion, love, sex and death.

 

Even so, I was surprised by a recent headline in the Daily Telegraph that read,

YouTube chef ‘chopped up lover and dumped his head in the sea.’

 

I won’t intrude on the grief of the people concerned by naming names, though of course you can look it up. What actually fascinated me about the headline was that the paper thought  ‘chopped up lover and dumped his head in the sea’ needed to be in quotation marks, whereas YouTube chef didn’t.  I suppose this mean that anybody who calls themselves a YouTube chef,isa YouTube chef.

 

The Telegraph article enters the Nicholson archive alongside other headlines that include 

 

‘I’ve got a taste for killing,’ says cannibal who ate man’s tongue.

 

The Head in the Hellman’s Box

 

Hunger forced her to eat raw batter

 

Teen ‘poisoned dad’s pasta and choked mum’

 

Chef cut corners on pie that killed worshippers

 

Sausage Tycoon killed in his sauna with a crossbow

 

How very different from the home lives of our own dear Angela and Helena.

THE SPUD IS IN THE HEART

 

There has apparently been ‘outrage’ in parts of the crisp 

eating community because certain Marks and Spencer 

crisp packets marked ‘British potatoes’ are overstamped 

on the sell-by label with the words ‘contains non-British 

potatoes.’

An M&S spokesman said: ‘An unprecedented industry-wide shortage, caused by drought last year, meant we – and other businesses – were forced to source some potatoes from outside the UK for a few weeks ahead of this year’s British potato harvest.’  So it’s only temporary anyway, supposedly.  

 

However, it’s said there’ll be another shortage this year because of a wet spring, plus rising costs of machinery and fertilizer.  In other words British farmers can’t make a profit growing potatoes, and when I see how cheap it is to buy a bag of supermarket spuds, I’m amazed they can make any money at all.

 

And so we come to Agnès Varda (1928 -2019) French (Belgian born) filmmaker, screenwriter, photographer, artist and so on.

 

She’s best known, to me anyway, for Cléo from 5 to 7(1962) about a woman waiting to hear the results of a cancer test, with appearances by Jean-Luc Godard and Eddie Constantine.  I don’t believe it features any potatoes.  Unlike her film The Gleaners and I(2000) in French Les glaneurs et la glaneuse.

 

‘Glaneurs’ as I understand it, gather crops left in the field after harvesting, so it has connotations of foraging, scavenging and collecting.  Historically they’ve usually been women, as in Millet’s ‘Des Glaneuses.’ I believe it’s also currently a brand of combine harvester.

 

In the movie, Varda goes to a field where imperfect (though perfectly usable) potatoes are dumped, and identifies with the discarded and misshapen tubers.  She takes home some heart-shaped spuds and lets them grow wrinkly and sprout, sees a resemblance with her own wrinkled hands, and compares her aging body with the far more rapidly aging potatoes, and thinks that she too has been discarded. So it’s all about death and decay and patriarchy.

 

Also I hadn’t realized heart-shaped potatoes were so easy to come by.

 

Later Varda did an exhibition and dressed up as a potato. Potatoes can get you obsessed like that.

 

And then today, life being the synchronicitous thing it is, my Instagram pal Barbara Lounder put up pictures of two different kinds of basket for gathering potatoes. Her captions reads ‘One from Norfolk, one from Unama’ki. These are currently in my exhibition “Family Gathering/Gathering Family” in Sydney NS at Eltuek Art Centre. The exhibition is on until August 18.’  Brava.

More locally, here in the Nicholson archive, we have lately taken possession of a plate featuring the ‘Baked Potato Man’ by John Finnie – 1985, Wedgewood – one of series of street food trades that includes ‘The Street Seller of Hot Green Peas.’  But it’s hard to get obsessed with hot green peas, I'd say.