TARTARE FOR NOW

You know me, it doesn’t take much to get me salivating over venison, and there had been a loin of venison lurking in the freezer for a couple of weeks.

 

This photo and the majority of the others by Caroline Gannon.

And then when I was in London, back at the Coal Hole in the Strand, venison croquettes were on the menu, so how could I not order them.

Actually they were described as Venison Pancetta and Red Wine Croquettes which were pretty decent in themselves.  The liquid round the edge is ‘brown sauce mayonnaise’ which sounds like it might be a mix of mayo and HP, and for good or ill, that’s pretty much what it tasted like. And that is a watercress and pickled onion salad on the side, should you be interested.

 

And then last Saturday morning I was listening to Jay Rayner’s The Kitchen Cabinet, and there was much discussion of, and enthusiasm for, eating venison, not least because there are apparently more deer in England than there have even been, perhaps because not enough people eat them.

 

So in order to even up the score, the inamorata and I thawed out the venison loin and made a tartare.  It was way better than the croquettes, if we say so ourselves.

INVITATION TO THE EXOTIC

I can’t remember when I first heard of, and started reading, Fuchsia Dunlop, the great scholar, eater and creator of Chinese food.  In some ways it seems like she’s always been there.   

Illustration by Anna Higgie

But I do know she was in the anthology The Wurst of Lucky Peach, a celebration of the sausage, in which she writes about opka hesip — sausage and stuffed lung — a favorite of the Uyghur people apparently.

Fucshia Dunlop wrote in that anthology “Cooked, the sausages are pleasantly piquant, the lung a strange hybrid of savory custard and offal that appeals, surprisingly, to those who like English puddings.” Now as then, I have to take her word for that.  Apparently opka hesip looks like this: 

Anyway I was in Hatchards bookshop last week and I bought a copy of Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to A Banquet – The Story of Chinese Food. And it’s signed!!

 

It’s a deeply serious and erudite history of Chinese eating culture, with chapters on rice, knife scraped noodle, shunde and cultural appropriation, among many other topics.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun. 

 

It may be a measure of my own shallow-mindedness that the chapter I’ve liked best so far is titled ‘The Lure of the Exotic.’

 

Now we all now that in these days of saving the planet there are all kinds of things we’re not supposed to eat, including Chinese delicacies such as bear paw and shark skin soup, and Fuchsia Dunlop is a great cheerleader for sustainability, but back in the day she was obviously an enthusiast for eating the unusual if not the downright forbidden. 

 

     Mea culpa: I did once eat bear, which was terrific, cooked (and I assume killed) by Steve Rinella.  And it is in fact legal to hunt and eat bear in much of the United States.  I’m rather more upset that once, at a Chinese wedding, I did have shark fin soup – I only knew what it was afterwards – and I don’t think it was worth killing a shark for.

 

Nevertheless, I do still get a frisson when I read Fuchsia Dunlop’s tales of the eating of leopard foetus which might on occasion be imitation leopard’s foetus, or the ovarian fat of the snow frog which can look like this:

 

And then there's the Moose face.  Fuchsia Dunlop has a friend who gave her a dish called ‘red braised qilin face’ (hongshao qilin mian).  The qilin is a mythical creature, somewhere between a unicorn and a musk deer, and is sometimes depicted like this:

 

But the one she ate was made with the face of an elk.  “And there it was, an actual elk’s face, or rather its large nose, bizarre and amazing, lying in a pool of sauce on a great round platter and there I was staring into its enormous flared nostrils.’ Reader I salivated.  She continues, “it was utterly delicious, neither meat nor fat for skin, springy and sticky, while also soft as butter.” I’m convinced!  And she adds, “I knew I would probably never taste such a thing again.”  

Anyway, I’m glad she said probably and didn’t rule it out altogether.

 

 

 

THE REASON FOR THE SEASONING

Photo: Caroline Gannon

I really love Christmas food, and every year I‘m, deeply  moved by the thought of Mary and Joseph and the Three Wise Men sitting down to a plate of turkey with roasties and giblet gravy.  The baby Jesus obviously had his own special arrangements.

But you know, what I personally like best, rather than the big roast bird, are the extras and the afters, the stuffing, the bread sauce, the mince pies, and I suppose pigs in blankets fit into that category too.

 

And I do wonder when pigs in blankets became a “thing.”  My mum never served them, and I suspect she’d never even heard of them.  But now they seem to be ubiquitous – pigs in blanket flavoured crisps for instance.  And I understand there is even pigs-in-blankets flavoured vaping liquid, though that might be an urban myth.

 

And at the Goose pub in Walthamstow, a name that in itself evokes the spirit of Christmas, they are, at the time of writing, serving “Giant Pigs-in-Blankets, Yorkie and Mash; Cumberland sausages wrapped in bacon served in a giant Yorkshire pudding, served with mash, peas and onion gravy.  1042 calories.”

Photo - Caroline Gannon

 

So obviously the inamorata and I had to order a plateful – it was the mention of the giant Yorkshire pudding that really clinched it, though that proved to be a bit of a letdown, being more like an-oblong shaped pancake, but it tasted ok.  The peas were surprisingly good too.

 

Of course in reality you’re just eating sausage and bacon, and if you buy a Marks and Spencer Pigs-in-Blankets Sandwich, sausage and bacon is pretty much what you get, though with the addition of some amazingly weird, sticky onion and port chutney. 

 

Of course we must suppose that Jesus never knew the joy of pigs in blankets since he presumably grew up eating kosher, but thanks to later developments in Christianity we are now free to eat pigs in all their many forms, from ears to trotters to crackling and beyond.  Don’t let anybody tell you that religion is all bad.

 

BLOOD AND GUTS

   So the Guardian had its  ‘Cocktail of the Week’ - Lyon’s martini x2, devised by Anthony Lyon of Lyon’s Seafood and Wine Bar, London N8,  and described as ‘An almost savoury, nori-infused gin martini to enjoy as an aperitif, perhaps with an oyster or two on the side.’ ‘Almost savoury’ as in almost pregnant and almost dead?  i.e. not savoury?  Though it sounded entirely savoury to me.  And in any case the drink looked like this:

Creating the nori-infused gin is the hard part, Mr. Lyons favours Beefeater, and the drink also involved seaweed bitters which I’ve never encountered.

To make nori-infused gin, he says, “Toast the nori over a gas flame (or barbecue or with a blowtorch) until it turns brown and smells slightly nutty: be careful, though, because it can catch quickly. Crumble the toasted nori into a clean jar, add the gin, then seal and leave to infuse for 12 hours. Strain the gin through a coffee filter, then decant into a clean jar and seal; it will be good for three to six months. Then serve with a strip of nori on the rim.’ 

 

Well that sounded like a lot of fuss, and although nori is a perfectly good thing it’s always struck me as not at all fancy, just the kind of thing you can have with a beer.  I felt I would make my own version of the seaweed martini.

 

My local, very reliable, fish man down in Manningtree market sells two different kinds of seaweed, neither of them nori, and both of them come wet and salty as the North Sea.  The thing I usually do, thanks to the ingenuity of the inamorata, is soak them to get rid of the salt and then blend them into a pile of mashed potatoes.

 

But imagine you had a couple of small fronds of the stuff and you soaked them and dried them (using a blow torch if you insist) and then dropped them into a martini – that would be good wouldn’t it? Not a substitute for olives but part of the same food group surely.  So I did it and it looked like this.  

It tasted fierce, much fiercer than nori would have.   It was a nice experiment and a change but I can’t see it making its way into the regular rotation.

 

And then I started thinking about the things people have in or with drinks, and my mind drifted back to a bar in LAX airport where I had a Bloody Mary which came with a slice of Beecher’s cheese, made in Seattle.  Like this:

It seemed great at the time, although when a man’s waiting for his plane’s departure gate number to be announced, his connoisseurship may not be at its finest.  But even in the cold light of day it still seemed like a pretty good idea.

 

And it so happens that the Manningtree market has an Italian cheese man, Solo Cheese, from whom I only ever really buy one thing and that’s pecorino with olives in it. 

 

And I bought some at the weekend but when I tasted it I realized it wasn’t just olives in there, there was some kind of red hot pepper as well.  And that worked really well with a Bloody Mary. You don’t need Tabasco in the drink when you’ve got a slice of hot cheese perched there on top.  Another small but significant triumph.

 

 

REAL FAKE FOOD

And so to Japan House in Kensington to see ‘Looks Delicious’ an exhibition of replica food, the kind of thing you see in the windows of certain Japanese, and indeed Korean, restaurants, clueing you in about what the food you get inside is going to look like. The Japanese terms is shokuhin sanpuru, I understand.

Of course these replicas don’t convey what it’s going to taste like but then as is often said, we all to a greater or lesser extent eat with our eyes.

 

To be fair, most of us would be rather alarmed if real world examples of some of this food was brought to our table but that’s all part of the fun.  The more extreme examples on display are, as I understand it, winners of various competitions held by The Iwasaki Group.

 

This not quite earthquake-proof tower of burger:

 

         A horsehair crab with two glasses of beer.

 

But others looked completely convincing.  These sandowichis:

These oysters look good enough to eat:

 

This octopus looks pretty much like the real thing.

 

Though in fact the last octopus I ate was at the Zuzu Bistro Bar in Stratford looked like this:  which is rather different, and arguably not looking quite as good.

photo by Caroline Gannon

Now, it just so happens that as I was wandering the paths of my neighborhood I happened to come across a small rock that looked, to me anyway, very much indeed like a lamb’s kidney.  Here it is with the real thing for comparison

 

The cooked kidney looked like this:

 

The rock has remained raw. The world is full of simulacra, but you wouldn’t want to eat all of ‘em.

 

 

 

KING SOLOMON'S COCO POPS

 Like all sane people I try to avoid being in hospital, but you know, stuff happens.  The secret of being in hospital, I’ve learned, is to have a good book with you.  That’s likely to be your only source of comfort.  The food certainly won’t be.

 

I was eleven years old when I was first in hospital, with an exploded appendix, and although I have no memory of the food I do remember the book.  It was H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, though not the edition seen above. 

 

I vividly remember a scene in the book when the explorers are running out of food, and Umbopa, their native guide who is not what he seems, “was marching along beside me, wrapped in his blanket, and with a leather belt strapped so tightly round his stomach, to ‘make his hunger small,’ as he said, that his waist looked like a girl’s.’  Literal belt-tightening though I’m not absolutely sure that’s a great cure for hunger.

 

Anyway, last week I was in the local hospital for a spell while they did various old-geezer tests on me. The amazing thing was that the hospital kitchen (if they actually have a kitchen) was able to make all the food taste exactly the same, whether it was beef stew, or shepherd’s pie or sausage and mash.  This, I think, though I wouldn’t swear, is the shepherd’s pie:

Actually I shouldn’t be too hard on my local hospital – I’m sure they’re doing their best in adverse circumstances.  When I first arrived they did offer me, and I accepted, this reasonably edible sausage roll.

 

And this time the book I had was Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens, and this turned out to be a very very good thing.  It’s a long way from being a foodie book but it does contain some great writing about food.

 

A minor character named Raven Sable invents a food called CHOW™ “a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things.  Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman.  It didn’t matter how much you ate you lost weight.”

 

Sable sets up a chain called Burger Lord, international but with local variations. ‘German Burger Lords, for example, sold lager instead of root beer, while English Burger Lords managed to take any American fast food virtues (the speed with which your food arrived for example) and carefully remove them; your food arrived after half an hour, at room temperature, and it was only because of the strip of warm lettuce between them that you could distinguish the burger from the bun.  The Burger Lord pathfinder salesmen had been shot twenty-five minutes after setting foot in France.”

 

There is also a fabulous footnote, and maybe I should I have known this already, about Casanova’s traveling arrangements.  He carried with him at all times a valise containing “a loaf of bread, a pot of choice Seville marmalade, a knife, a fork, and small spoon for stirring, 2 fresh eggs packed with care in unspun wool, a tomato or love-apple, a small frying pain, a small saucepan, a spirit burner, a chafing dish, a tin box of salted butter of the Italian type, 2 bone china plates. Also a portion of honeycomb … Let my readers understand me when I say to them all: A true gentleman should always be ready to break his fast in the manner of a gentleman, wheresoever he may find himself.”

 

The morning after I got home from the hospital I had Coco Pops for breakfast.  I am less of a gentleman than Giacomo Casanova, but you probably knew that already.

 

LET'S ALL GO DOWN THE STRAND

 As I understand it, imperfectly no doubt, there’s only one real-world pub still in existence that appears in the works of PG Wodehouse, and that’s the Coal Hole, 91-92 the Strand, originally an extension of the Savoy Hotel though now it’s a Nicholson’s pub (no relation).

The place is visited by Ukridge in the short story “The Debut of Battling Billson,” first published in 1923.  The narrator is Bruce "Corky" Corcoran, who seeks out Ukridge when he discovers that he’s deposited a red haired man in his rooms.  He finds Ukridge emerging from the Gaiety Theatre in the Strand.

“The audience was just beginning to leave when I reached the Gaiety. I waited in the Strand, and presently was rewarded by the sight of a yellow mackintosh working its way through the crowd.

“Hallo, laddie!” said Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, genially. “When did you get back? I say, I want you to remember this tune, so that you can remind me of it to-morrow, when I’ll be sure to have forgotten it. This is how it goes.” He poised himself flat-footedly in the surging tide of pedestrians and, shutting his eyes and raising his chin, began to yodel in a loud and dismal tenor. “Tumty-tumty-tumty-tum, tum tum tum,” he concluded. “And now, old horse, you may lead me across the street to the Coal Hole for a short snifter. What sort of a time have you had?”

“Never mind what sort of a time I’ve had. Who’s the fellow you’ve dumped down in my rooms?”

 

The fellow is Battling Billson a boxer: Ukridge intends to make his fortune as a boxing manager but inevitable complications ensue.

My pal Jonathan and I had lunch in the Coal Hole a few days ago.  We ordered the three bar stacks for the price of two and half.  Now I don’t doubt that Wodehouse was a more sophisticated and experimental eater than most of his characters, even so I doubt whether he’d have ordered the Lightly Dusted Calamari, the Crispy Cauliflower Florets, and the Hand-cut Nachos.

  It was all perfectly good and the Coal Hole does offer a sense of eating and drinking in history.  One room is dedicated to Edmund Kean, though as far as I could see there was no mention of Wodehouse.

         The Coal Hole also had a cocktail menu though we thought that was a bit fancy for a weekday lunchtime.  I don’t know whether Wodehouse would have been so reluctant.  Here he is mixing his own cocktails (almost certainly martinis) with his wife Ethel, at their home in New York.  I think it’s my favourite ever author photograph.

 

 

 

 

SETTLE DOWN DEER

 I was prepared to be a little disappointed by St John, Marylebone, not because I thought it would be bad but because the inamorata and I love the other two branches – Smithfield, and Bread and Wine - so much.  

This and the vast majority of the other pics by Caroline Gannon

Also the menu didn’t include bone marrow, which is the single thing I like best about the other St Johns.  But we had an American friend over from California and he said he wanted to go to St John, any St John, and since you apparently have to book months in advance for the other two, off we went to Marylebone.

 

Well, I was a fool even to have contemplated disappointment.  Admittedly the appearance of the martini (above) didn’t reassure completely.  How on earth do you make a martini look as cloudy as that? Though it tasted absolutely fine.

 

But then the food arrived and it was as good as anybody could wish.  The so-called Rarebit was a revelation.  I expected it to look this this:

but in fact it was a Deep Fried Rarebit, so it looked like this:

which if I hadn’t known better I might have thought was a rissole or even a croquette.

 

There were Crispy Sweetbreads with Aioli which were top notch:

But star of the show was the Roe Deer with Celeriac.  I’m not sure exactly what they did with the venison, slow-cooked it in a fine broth I expect, but the result was fantastic.

     Now, I’m not sure I could tell a plate of roe deer from any other kind of deer but some apparently can.  I remember a terrific piece by AA Gill in which a waiter tells him the special is venison. 

“What kind of venison?”  

“It’s the fillet sir.”

“No, where does it come from?”

“From our specialist supplier.”

And so on for some time, until in the end, having eaten the meal, Gill concludes, “Anyway, the deer was roe and it was a buck … I could tell.  It had that odd tang buck gets when it’s rutting.  It’s some sort of secretion.”   No competing with that.

 

And to round it off there was an Eccles Cake with Lancashire Cheese, for the inamorata and I:

and our American friend had a Bread And Butter Pudding, seen here in a mise en abyme: