THE CHEESE AND I

 It takes a brave man to admit that he’s been inspired by the food at a Wetherspoons, but I am such a man.

 

After I had my cheesy chips at the Peter Cushing in Whitstable last week, which were perfectly good, I still thought more could be done.  Essentially I thought the chips could be cheesier and the cheese could be pokier – it tasted like fairly mild cheddar.

 

So I decided to do something very similar but using Godminster Red Chili Devil's Dance Organic Vintage Cheddar – a cheese sharp enough and hot enough to strip your carburetor and adjust your float level.  

And though I say so myself it was very good, and it looked like this (in an inappropriate bowl):

But this is interesting – and maybe everybody knows this already, the hotness of the chili cheese was much reduced. Now obviously any cheese is going to seem milder which eaten alongside a mound of fried potatoes rather than eaten on its own, but I did wonder whether the actual chemistry had been changed by a few minutes under a hot grill.  Further research may be required.

VERY SIMILAR FOOD

 

There was a great article by Fuchsia Dunlop in the Financial Times at the weekend, headlined ‘Stone Feasts: Verisimilar meat, fish and poultry carved from rocks are part of a long Chinese cultural tradition.’  I don’t believe I’ve ever seen ‘verisimilar’ used in a sentence before.

 

Now, Fuchsia Dunlop appears to know pretty much all there is to know about Chinese food and culture, but even she seemed to be taken aback by the practice of collecting and displaying, in some cases after carving and cutting, rocks that look like food. 

 

She describes a ‘stone banquet’ she visited at the Ningxia Museum in Yinchuan, assembled by ‘self-declared stone lover’ Xie Nin, and says it looked as though Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti had collaborated on dinner.

 

Inevitably, as you see from the pictures, some of the rocks look rather more convincingly like food than others - belly pork seems especially persuasive, but the general effect as shown in these pictures both from the newspaper and from Fuschia Dunlop’s Instagram feed is downright wonderful. Speaking as someone who loves both food and rocks, this is about as good as it gets.

 

I pick up a lot of rocks on my meanderings, but I’ve found very few that look like food, apart from the odd one that looks a bit like a potato.  But I’ve always been intrigued by restaurants or other establishments that display ‘verisimilar’ food. I found myself digging through my files looking for example of fake food I’ve photographed over the years.

 

Obviously a lot of restaurants don’t have the time or the staff to go hunting in the mountains looking for rocks that resemble their fare.  They have to rely on more mundane and easily available materials.  Some of these may be quite straightforward and literal like these replicas displayed outside a restaurant in Koreatown in LA, simply giving an impression of what the food served inside looks like.

 

But more often that not there’s some gigantism involved.  Ice cream is very good for this:

 

In Manchester you’ll find the Vimto monument. I think those are giant raspberries and grapes – I mean, those are the ingredients of Vimto - but those really are some funny looking grapes:

 

Hot dogs too are popular, and this may be more of an American thing.   This is, or anyway was, on Hollywood Boulevard:

 

This was, and I believe still is, Jimmy’s Hot Dog Company in Bisbee Arizona

 

And perhaps best of all – instead of finding a rock that looks like a hot dog (which I think is not entirely unlikely), or making one out of wood, you could build a motor vehicle that looks like one.  This is the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile:

 

There are plenty more where they came from.

Today while on my morning constitutional I picked up these three little rocky morsels – they look ‘almost’ but not quite good enough to eat.

 

And then I remembered, well I hadn’t really forgotten, that Dining on Stones  is the title of a novel by the esteemed Iain Sinclair.  

 

So … a cultural tradition with an international pedigree.

 

SPOONS AND CUSHING

Why do Wetherspoon pubs get such a bad rap? I mean I know that the owner Tim Martin supported Brexit but then so did many millions of others.  

And Wetherspoon pubs do have some reputation as the home of ‘bad behavior,’ but you know, I suspect there may be one or two other pubs in Britain to which that may apply.

Of course I know that Wetherspoons (and no, I don't know why it's sometimes singular and sometimes plural but as far as I can see it never has an apostrophe) doesn’t represent the pubby perfection as described by Orwell in his essay 'The Moon Under Water,' but that’s because, as Orwell says, perfection doesn’t exist in pubs.  Nor in anything else, we might add.

 

But the few times I’ve been in a Wetherspoon pub I was perfectly happy.  The beer was affordable, the vibe was OK, and I wasn’t surrounded by drooling Yahoos.

 

I was especially happy in the Wetherspoon in Whitstable last weekend.  The branch there is named The Peter Cushing  after the actor - he bought a house there in 1958.  It’s a converted cinema and the conversion is very well done I’d say it doesn’t look cheap. There was Cushing memorabilia, some bits of antique cinema machinery and some very nice stained glass.

 

The beer of course was much like the beer anywhere else, and the cheesy chips we ordered arrived quickly and were exactly as good as you’d expect cheesy chips in a pub to be to be.  

 

I couldn't see what people are complaining about.

  Although of course I accept that at chucking out time on a Friday night, things may be different.

 

I don’t know how much of a gourmet Peter Cushing was but there’s a recipe of his in Parkinson’s Pie (as in Michael) for ‘Pain-Grille Brule’ that in part runs ‘Place 1-2 slices … of brown bread under a grill set “high.” When flames appear, it is done. Reverse until the other side cries for mercy.  Do not scrape off the cinders.  Served with butter and your favourite marmalade plus a pot of Indian tea, it constitutes a meal that can be eaten any time of the day or night.’

         As yet this doesn’t appear on the Wetherspoon menu.

 

Meanwhile on the streets of Whitstable, thoughts turned more than once to mother’s ruin.

VALENTINE CRUNCH

 Does anything say “Happy Valentine’s Day” quite like a helping of Black Country Pork Crunch in a heart-shaped bowl?

RIDE LIKE THE WYND

  

I know my readers are a cool lot, so I expect many of you are familiar with Viktor Wynd, he of the Last Tuesday Society, his museum of curiosities – skeletons, taxidermy, (separate) jars containing Amy Winehouse’s and Kylie Minogue’s poo; and much else besides.  And then there's his Absinthe Parlour.

 

pic by Caroline Gannon

You may also be familiar with food and drink funsters Bompas and Parr, who are equally cool in a somewhat different way.  That’s Sam Bompas below on the right:

 

And lately there’s been a collaboration, possibly a convergence, between Wynd, Bompas and Parr.  The Absinthe Parlour currently has a display celebrating the book Cabarets of Death by Mel Gordon, edited by Joanna Ebenstein.  

 

And as part of the celebration Bompas and Parr have curated a Cabinets of Death cocktail menu.  Which looks like this:

The list only contains 4 cocktails and one of them - Divine Nectar - is a mocktail so inevitably we gave that a miss, but there are a couple of real winners.

 

Below is the Captain of Death – the name refers to tuberculosis.  The drink contains Devil’s Botany Chocolate Absinthe Liqueur, Bourbon, Gold Rum, Barberry and Wild Thyme Syrup, and Clove Bitters.

pic by Caroline Gannon

I didn’t even know that chocolate absinthe was a thing – and it was very good.  But even better was the Eternal Nothingness - Devil’s Botany London Absinthe, Tequila Blanco. Sour Apple Cordial, Lime Juice, Green Apple Maggots (Green apple ‘maggots’ are in fact ‘popping boba pearls’  It looked like this:

 

pic by Caroline Gannon

Now we all know it’s easy to overcomplicate a cocktail and this sounded very complicated indeed, but it worked. You could taste all the ingredients but the drink was much more than the sum of its parts, even if I could probably have done without the maggots.

 

Also on the menu was Flames of Hellfire, which we gave a miss, largely because we wanted to be able to walk rather than crawl out of the bar.

 

Absinthe of course is made from wormwood – which I grow erratically and only semi-successfully in my own garden, by which I mean it either grows out of control all over the path or it looks like it’s about to die. 

 

And in the ‘live and learn’ department I only recently discovered that although wormwood is an ancient plant, it didn’t grow in the Garden of Eden until after all that business with the Tree of Knowledge, the Fall of Mankind and so on.  Wormwood only appeared after God had cursed the serpent (or whatever the creature was at that stage while it still had legs) and made him crawl upon his belly out into the world beyond.  Wormwood grew along the track where the serpent had slithered.  Who wouldn’t want to make a drink from an ingredient  like that?