THE HAGGIS RACE

  

Pic by Caroline Gannon, as are most of the others.

Race is a difficult matter when it comes to food, but I think we’re reasonably safe with haggis.  It may be, as Rabbi Burns, puts it ‘great chieftain of the pudding race; but it isn’t repressing any other race, and you know, maybe it’s a metaphor anyway. 

 

Ours was a Ramsay award winning 'Ball Haggis' - it said so on the label.

The great thing about haggis is that it keeps on giving.  Get yourself a big haggis and you can have it the usual way with neeps and tatties (we mashed ours together into together to make life easier), and that is Caroline's whisky sauce in the gravy boat.

Then a couple of days later you have enough left over to make a haggis shepherd's pie, and yes, we slightly over did it with the smoked paprika.

 

And then there’s still enough to make an actual pie with shortcrust pastry.

 

Yes, that is a flamingo on top.  I’m not sure that anybody has ever made flamingo haggis but if anybody did it would surely have been the ancient Romans. Apicius tells us they ate flamingo tongues and he has a recipe for something that’s a haggis in everything but name - a boiled stomach, stuffed with brains, pine nuts, rue, and much more besides.   Surely somebody must have had the idea of slipping some flamingo meat in there.  Surely.

 

Of course one thing about eating 3 haggis meals in close succession is that by the end you start thinking you’ve had enough haggis to last a lifetime.  Although as dear Stephen Sondheim says, ‘Well maybe next year.’

 

THE SAMPHIRE OF LOVE

Apparently this is a thing: the samphire martini.  And all I can say is, ‘What took us so long?'

Samphire is bloody brilliant stuff.  It is, famously, a salt-tolerant plant which means it grows by the sea on rocks or by salt marshes and therefore tastes salty, and I’m more than happy to eat it raw.  So how could it not go nicely in a martini?

 

And it does go nicely, but it isn’t quite salty enough.  To get the full benefit you’d really need a handful of the stuff.  And certainly you could have it on a bowl on the side and eat it while you’re drinking your martini, but there’s something special about actually having it in the glass

 

So we squared the circle and had a martini with samphire and an olive. Works for me.    And yeah, it looks much better in black and white.

 

BUT THERE WILL BE FOOD AND DRINK, RIGHT?

 

CRACKING CRACKLING

 In recent months I’ve eaten a fair bit of Ramona’s Heavenly Humus, which tastes fine and os less than half the price of the other humus in my local supermarket.  I always go for the plain stuff, but I add lemon juice and turmeric because, you know, I’m a gourmet.

 

But it never occurred to me that there was as actual Ramona.  But there is and she looks like this:

 

And not only that, Ramona does Ramona exist, she has values, perhaps a mission statement, possibly even a philosophy.  She believes in authenticity, confidence and inclusivity. Why not? If you can’t have inclusivity in your humus where can you have it?

My mind drifted back to a night in a motel in Yucca Valley when we bought some Habanero Flavored Gigante Cracklins – or  ‘chicharones con frasa’ which as which as you might be able to see translates as ‘fried out pork fat with attached skin.’  They had me at pork fat.

 

Now I love a good bit of pork cracking and I can take a reasonable amount of hotness but these little morsels were a challenge – hotter than a pepper sprout – as Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood might say. (For the kids I should point out that this is a reference to the song Jackson (written by Billy Edd Wheeler and Jerry Stoller.)  

 

In fact the term ‘pepper sprout’ may indicate a kind of inclusivity or even diversity.  According to the urban dictionary it means somebody who’s half white and half Mexican.  Of course you have to wonder if it might also be a racial epithet, but I don’t think Nancy Sinatra would be involved with anything like that.

 

But I digress.  Because of their hotness, there was a real limit to how many Habanero Flavored Gigante Cracklins a lad could eat, which you might say was no bad thing, but I addressed the problem by smearing the pork skin with some very mild soft cheese like this.

 

As you can see by the Psychogourmet’s face, they still had to be treated with caution.  

 

This photo and the other pork pics, by Caroline Gannon.

Did it have authenticity, I don’t think so, but it had inclusivity to burn.

 

 

MUCHO MUSSO

I once saw Sally Kellerman in Musso and Frank on Hollywood Boulevard.  And then I saw her in an episode of 90210, in a scene filmed in Musso and Frank.  Art imitating life imitating art.  Like this:

 

Another time I was there I saw Tim Curry sitting at a table right by the front window so that anybody passing in the street could see him.  I suppose he must have wanted it that way.  He didn’t look like this:

 

Musso and Frank is one of my favourite restaurants in the world - it's been there since 1920, the year before Prohibition started - and not only because of the presence of celebrities.  But it does no harm. 

 

Of course it’s a long way from where I live to Musso’s but I do my best to recreate certain elements of the experience, not least the martinis.. When I was there last year the bartender gave me some cocktail stirrers to take away as a souvenir, which helps a little, though I don’t use them in martinis. And of course I never had the little flask containing a second helping, and which is apparently called a sidecar.

The food is another matter.  One of the starters that always hits the spot is celery sticks filled with blue cheese, which look like this:

Photo by Caroline Gannon.

 

So the inamorata and I tried to recreate them – she did most of the hard work. I found a convincing recipe online though it required various things we didn’t have to hand.  

The cheese should have been Roquefort but all I had was Stilton left over from Christmas. You’re supposed to thin the cheese to make it more pliable by the addition of sour cream, but we had Greek yoghurt.  And then supposedly you use a piping bag to put the mixture into the celery. I believe I’ve never so much as touched a piping bag. And frankly our celery was too thin to hold much cheese, and as you can see, I went a bit mad with the smoked paprika. But apart from all that it really wasn’t bad at all. 

 

 

 

COSMIC CONSUMPTION

 I’ve been reading Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith by John Szwed.

 

I’ve always been fascinated by Harry Smith, whose I first encountered as an avant-garde filmmaker.  Only later did I realize that he was an anthropologist, maker of field recordings, artist, collector, the man behind The Anthology of American Folk Music, and a man regularly referred to as a polymath.

 

He started out looking like this:

and ended up the way he looks on the book jacket.

 

I don’t know that Smith was actually insane but he certainly displayed some difficult, dangerous and self-destructive tendencies, and he destroyed a lot of his own work, often in a fit of pique. He was often, in some literal sense, homeless, though he always seems to have found somebody to give him shelter, and he was staggering good at extracting money from individuals and institutions.  Allen Ginsberg was an especially resilient and long-suffering supporter.

 

But what about his eating habits? Well they were as eccentric as everything else about the man, as the biography reveals.  There was also a tremendous intake of alcohol and drugs, but I reckon that’s outside the scope of this blog.

 

The first reference to food comes early in the biography when Harry was living in Berkeley, 1945-7.  The book tells us, ‘Harry had begun what would be a lifelong practice of radically narrowed food preference, at that time eating only sugar and butter, which left him weak and bedridden.’  This was when he was in his early twenties.

 

In 1949 Harry went every night to a place called Jimbo’s Bop City in San Francisco, an after hours jazz club, where he sat making notes and ‘sketching the music.’  The owner was John ‘Jimbo’ Edwards who became Smith’s patron. Szwed writes, ‘He (Harry) was kept in food by him (Jimbo), though sometimes it was the only thing he was eating at the time, like casaba melons, and the restaurant was always stocked with them.’ 

 

Much later, in the 70s, Smith took on Charles Compo as an assistant who is quoted thus, ‘When we were particularly flush, we would go to Cedars of Lebanon or A Taste of India to eat.  He usually ordered a Black Russian (vodka and coffee) and soup.’

 

That’s not my idea of what’s in a Black Russian but so be it, but I do wonder what kind of soup Harry ordered.  What goes with a Black Russian?  This is a menu from Cedars of Lebanon which refers only to ‘soup of the day.’

 

In the winter of 1986-7 Smith lived in Brooklyn in a borrowed apartment, ‘living on little more than milk and aspirin.’

 

Then he was in the Andrews House ‘a Franciscan flophouse’ on the Bowery,   where Ginsberg found him and reported ‘all he could eat was certain kinds of pea soup and mashed bananas.  And eating at the table with him he gurgled up all the saliva.  It was horrifying.’

 

By the early 90s Dr. Joe Gross ‘a practicing  psychiatrist and researcher of drugs’ let him stay in his uptown apartment where ‘he appeared to be living on Skittles; later on Jell-O, capers and pickled herring, still later on yogurt.’

 

At the very end he was living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, and Szwed reports ‘he’d been surviving on NyQuil, Alka-Seltzer, flu medicine, Zand Insure Herbal Immune Support, instant mashed potates, ginger ale and coffee.’ He died in fairly horrible circumstances on November 27^th 1991. 

 

Despite an amazingly rickety life he survived to the age of 68.  My own father who lived and ate very carefully for all his life, only lived to be 64.  Go pick the moral out of that one.

SQUID-U-LIKE

 

Just before Christmas a friend sent me an article from Esquire magazine titled “The Best Martinis in America, 2023.”  Some of these sound great, some sound a bit odd, and I’d say a fair proportion aren’t martinis at all, but I’m old school in these matters.

 

The oddest, to my mind, was the Dirty Pasta Water Martini (above), served at Fiorella in Philadelphia, which looks the article describes it like this: ‘Dirty pasta water is often referred to as liquid gold, that secret ingredient that gives pasta dishes a velvety texture. So it makes sense that it could be used for the same purpose in a martini. The heavily salted pasta water takes the place of vermouth in this martini. The only other ingredients are gin and olive brine, making for an incredibly food friendly martini. Try it with Fiorella’s five pomodoro spaghetti. —K.S.’  Well, I think I probably shan’t, but you go right ahead KS.

 

Which brings us to the Tentacle Martini which can be found in Feasting a book by Bompas and Parr, and a book that I still thumb through once in a while.  The Tentacle Martini looks like this:

 

It’s made with gin, green chartreuse and an octopus tentacle  ‘It came about when we only had gin, green chartreuse and a few octopus in the refrigerator.’  What a life these boys lead.

 

Well, I’m not a fan of chartreuse, and although I’m bigfan of octopus, what was in my fridge was squid. The Bompas and Parr recipe says ‘there’s so much alcohol in there it effectively cooks the tentacle’ but I was taking no chances and I blanched and chilled the tentacles before putting them in the drinks.  They looked like this (and I'm sure a better photographer could have made them look better):

 

So the Nicholson Tentacle Cocktail was born: gin, vermouth and squid.  I’d still say it wasn’t really a martini but you know, it tasted exactly like a martini with a squid tentacle in it.

THE ACCEPTABLE VEGAN SANDWICH

I was in the café at the Photographers’ Gallery in Soho, on my own, and it was more or less brunch time and without giving it too much thought I picked a sandwich from the display case.  The sandwich contained – I made a note -  humus, tomato, pickled onion, raddish and mixed leaves.  Conceivably there might have been something else in there too, but if so I didn’t spot it.

 

And as I was eating it I realized this was a vegan sandwich and I wondered if this was the first entirely vegan sandwich I’d ever eaten.  I really haven’t eaten many sandwiches that didn’t contain butter or mayonnaise, and this one didn’t have either.

 

The sandwich was fine, a bit too much bread for the amount of filling and I could have used about ten times more humus, but hey, I had no objection to it being vegan.

 

SOME THINGS I PUT IN MY MOUTH - 2023 EDITION

AWAY FROM HOME:

 

A Negroni at Iberica, Victoria.

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A sausage roll at Delice, Lloyd Park – beef sausage for some (in fact I suppose fairly obvious) reason. 

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A pasty on an appealing plate, at the caff at the East Ruston Old Vicarage Garden.

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Toasted sandwiches served on slate at the Copr Bar, Swansea, though I actually forget what was in them:

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Zestily presented sausage bap and chips at the Sun, Dedham:

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It’s a wrap at the Welcome Institute.

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Anchovies, at the Orford Saloon in Walthamstow.

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Crispy squid, chips and salad, at the Rising Sun, Twickenham, eaten in the unexpected company of pre-game rugby fans who were consuming vast quantities of pizza.

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Seared Ahi tuna with ‘resort grown avocado pickled shallots, shaved Fresno pepper, gochujang bbq drizzle,’ at Edna’s Eaterie, Tucson Botanic Gardens. No, I’d never heard of gochujang either but it’s a kind of chili paste apparently.

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Spoiled for choice at the caff at the Horniman Museum.

Photo by Caroline Gannon, as are quite a lot of the others.

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AND AT HOME

In fact it’s a venison fillet but I know it looks like a sausage:

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Cheese straws, made by following (not very closely) a recipe for ‘Dishoon’s cheese and masala sticks’ 

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Devilled kidneys – my butcher is a good butcher but you have to ask him to order in kidneys specially:

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Another steak tartare in a universe of steak tartares:

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Taco night – not so much deconstructed as self-destructed:

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White Lake Cheese Somerset Dairy Tor, from Teddington Cheese in Richmond.

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Comparatively sophisticated - smoked mackerel. asparagus, Hollandaise sauce:

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Cheese on toast and beans (less sophisticated)

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A haggis pie with what looks like a fox’s face, though it was supposed to be a heart:

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Shepherd’s pie, post-Xmas – made with leftover duck (I read that Giles Coren was having the same.)

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