MARTINI MADNESS REDUX

 Dwight Garner, who is one of the good guys, has written a book about food, drink and reading.  It’s called The Upstairs Delicatessen.

He was my editor when I reviewed for the New York Times Book Review, and although we had lunch a few times, I don’t recall us ever drinking martinis, which is relevant because lithub.com has just published an extract from Dwight’s book which they title ‘Dwight Garner on the Long History of Writers and America’s Greatest Invention, the Martini.’ I can’t find a picture of him with a martini.

 

Of course I’m devastated not be included in the list of literary martini drinkers but many of of the usual suspects are there - Eliot, Mailer, Hitchens, Highsmith, Roger Angell, Field Marshall Montgomery, et al.  I can’t find a picture of Monty drinking a martini either.

 

One thing that surprised me in the article, though not absolutley totally, was the news that Kenneth Tynan, inspired by Alan Watts, ‘had his girlfriend inject the contents of a large wineglass of vodka, via an enema tube, into his rectum. “Within ten minutes the agony is indescribable,” he wrote in his diary. His anus became “tightly compressed” and blood seeped from it. It took three days for the pain to abate. “Oh, the perils of hedonism!” he wrote.’

This is interesting to me chiefly because a long time ago on the Greek island of Samos, I met a group of Americans, some of whom had been in Vietnam, and despite having what seemed to me fairly generous war pensions, they found it too expensive to drink Greek wine in bars or tavernas, and so they tried the intra-anal method, or so they said.  They said it was very effective if you wanted to be falling-down drunk (as they did) and all perils aside, it was cheap.

Dwight says in his article that he makes his own martinis every night at home, and adds ‘If you want to go broke quickly rather than slowly, drink your martinis outside the house.’  This is certainly true and I like to think I construct a pretty good home-made martini, and I certainly do a more generous pour than you get in most bars, but somehow the experience is never quite as good as when you’re in a dark American bar with a friendly (or even surly) bartender.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GO AHEAD, PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD

It was the inamorata’s birthday so naturally we went for dinner at St. John. We started with martinis of course. They looked like this:

 

This pic and the others (apart from the Hepple Gin bottle) by Caroline Gannon.

Our waitress said they were made with Hepple Gin, which she described as ‘an unusual choice’ though it was her choice rather than ours.  A little research reveals that among other ingredients, Hepple Gin contains savoury lovage and bog myrtle, and I can safely say that I’d never tasted bog myrtle before.

 

And then it was business as usual, though not exactly as usual. I mean when the first starter on the menu is ‘Pig's Head, Radishes and Sorrel’ you know at least one of the things you’ll be ordering.  It looked like this:

 

But old habits die hard, and so for a second starter we had ‘Roast Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad’ which I think I’ve had every single time I’ve ever been to St John.

 

But this time, in a moment of mid-martini inspiration, I saw the architectural and sculptural possibilities of the dish, or anyway the remains of the dish.  I made a Bone Henge.

COOKING WITH KNIVES

 A few years back I bought a cookery book titled One Knife, One Pot, One Dish. It was by Stephane Reynaud who I’d never heard of at the time – though he looks a cheerful enough fellow

And I certainly didn’t know he ran a restaurant in Shoreditch named Tratra, though I gather it’s now closed.

 

Nevertheless, the concept of one knife, one pot, pot dish sounded and continues to sound like a great idea.  The problem with the recipes in the book was that many of them involved ingredients that I’m unlikely to obtain in my current place of residence, despite there being a reasonable local butcher and a decent fish man who comes on Saturdays. I’m talking about things such as beef cheeks, pork cheeks, oxtail, veal shoulder, veal knuckle, speck, shadefish (no idea what that is), bintje potatoes (likewise). 

 

But the idea of the one pot dish never quite went away and so at the weekend having a bought a chicken and wanting to do something easy and mildly interesting with it, I chopped it up, marinated it, and in due course put it in an oven tray along with with potatoes (not bintjes) and some sprouts and then roasted the heck out of it.  Does an oven tray count as a one dish? I’m not sure but it worked pretty well.  And it looked like this:

 

To be fair, the end result isn’t a million miles away from Reynaud’s ‘Footy Chicken,' though that involves ketchup and a jar of chilies, but I only found that out afterwards.

 

Anyway, once my chicken was eaten, the carcass made a chicken stock.  Some left over potatoes and sprouts were added and liquidized, and there you have a very acceptable soup.

 I suppose this is in fact two dishes, and making the stock and the soup required a saucepan too, so in the end it may be two dishes, two pots, but still just the one knife.  Not such a catchy title, I know.

 

BRITAIN DRINKS AND STAYS OUT

It was in New York that I learned to sit at the bar and drink. It’s not a thing you want to do in most English pubs because you get jostled by customers trying to attract the barman’s attention, and then they spill their beer over you as they carry it away once they’ve been served. But finding ourselves in Sloane Square, and seeing a watering hole called The Botanist (a small chain priding itself on its ‘elegant atmosphere’) that had a couple of empty stools at the bar, we thought what the heck.

 

It looked pretty much like the image above and those empty stools are the very ones we sat on, though the picture is from a website called designmynight.com.

 

The cocktail menu looked good and so we ordered two Sipsmith Gin Martinis.  That didn’t seem too much to ask but it was.  There was none behind the bar, and some lad was despatched to the cellar but came back empty handed, so we had to settle for a Sipsmith Vodka Martini.  Who says I’m afraid to try new things?

The ritual of the martini-making was everything you could have asked for, and our barman certainly had a sense of the occasion – no cocktail shaker for him, more a sort of glass vase. 

 

And the resulting martinis were absolutely fine, if expensive and a bit small.  But heck, we were in Sloane Square.

 

You will have noticed that the drinks were served on black napkins, ‘Black Napkins’ being a composition by Frank Zappa which I always use to say I wanted played at my funeral.  Or if not that, then perhaps Zappa’s ‘America Drinks and Goes Home.’  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUwwj4rvakI

CRACKLING

 

Having had the joy of the Pork Belly Bites at the Cricketers in Richmond, the obvious next step was to try making some in the privacy privacy of our own kitchen and in our own frying pan, with the help of my trusty assistant Caroline, who took most of these photographs. 

 

The local butcher supplied the belly:

It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, if in fact it sounds easy at all.  Cooking the pork was no problem in itself because you could lay it on its side, but the crackling didn’t get as crisp as we wanted because it was so hard to keep it upright in the pan.

Also we had it as a main course with asparagus and home-made apple sauce rather than as a starter so it was more a nodding homage than a recreation of the Cricketers ‘small plate.’

 

The apples in the apple sauce were from my pal Colin who has an allotment down Colchester way, and fans of pareidolia will note that one of the apples appeared to have a map of India on it (sort of):

Anyway the end result was good, but we concluded that perhaps those Richmond bites were pre-cooked then deep-fat-fried at the last moment to make the crackling really crisp.  And although I used to have a deep fat fryer, and often think about buying another one, I never quite get round to it.

 

A week later we tried simply to make roast pork, and of course tried to get the crackling right.  This is something that’s been haunting me my whole life, with mixed results, but I have to say this was one of my better efforts. A small triumph but one to be cherished.

 

My mum, who was not a very good cook and didn’t want to be, did have a way with crackling, and the more I think about it, the more I think it had something to do with the cooking fat she used which i was lard. We were ‘reduced’ to using duck fat.

 

 

BARTENDER, THERE'S SOMETHING IN MY DRINK

Just when you think you can't learn anything more annoying about Marina Abramović annoying I read in Waldemar Januszczak’s column in The Sunday Times that at her sixtieth birthday she served ‘cocktails made from her own tears.’  This, says Januszczak, resulted in him not taking her quite as seriously as he otherwise might have. I think he’s putting it mildly.

 

Since Abramović was born in 1946 this party and the cocktail malarkey must have been in 2006 or so, and is therefore definitely old news to the world at large but it’s brand new to me, and reminds, inevitably, of Thomas Harris’s novel Hannibal which features martinis made with children’s tears, which sounds far more evil but no less ludicrous.