MUCKING UP THE BOOKS

There was a great article in the LA Times by Laurie Ochoa (that’s her above, about a million years ago, with Mark Z Danielewski), headlined, ‘If the world has gone digital, why do so many of us still want cookbooks?’ I don’t have an answer to that but I know it’s true in my own case.

 

Laurie quotes Kate Gibbs of the Guardian, ‘Cookbook sales in the U.S. grew 8% year-on-year between 2010 and 2020, with sales numbers boosted even further by the pandemic.’ Which is slightly, though entirely, surprising.

 

Laurie also writes, ‘A well-loved cookbook is a well-worn cookbook. We shouldn’t be afraid to get our cookbooks dirty.’  And that may be true but even so I try to keep my cookbooks cleanish, though of course there are exceptions.

 

But here’s a thing, I obtain a lot of my food (and drink) books secondhand, and honestly I don’t want the pages stuck together by somebody else’s failed attempt at onion gravy.  My own failed gravy I can live with.

 

However, with most of the books I buy this isn’t much of a problem. I would guess that a high percentage of the volumes you find in used bookshops, and especially in charity shops, have been given to people as presents.  Not only have these books not been read and cooked from, in many cases they haven’t even been opened.

 

Here are some of my more or less recent acquisitions: the priceless Ginspiration, bought at a local church sale, yep, I'll go anywhere for a used book:

 

Jonathan Meades’ The Plagiarist In the Kitchen – reader, it cost 25 pence.  Sorry Jonathan.

 

And here are some from the past, both bought at the same, now closed, local charity shop. Cocktails With Bompas and Parr

Yep, I made the tentacle martini (op cit) and managed not to spill gin on the pages.

 

And the Book of St John – if you need a recipe for grilled ox heart with beetroot and pickled walnuts, where else are you going to look?

And of course there is Apicius, mine is a 1958 edition and new translation.  

I’ve never made anything from it, and judging by its condition neither has anybody else.  But that’s not surprising: you have to go a long way before you find somebody who needs a recipe for stuffed dormouse.

 

SCONES WE HAVE KNOWN

 

According to Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food, the word scone was originally a Scottish word, possibly derived from ‘schoonbrot’ or ‘sconbrot’ which means fine white bread.  I think this information comes from the QED.  The Oxford Companion also says ‘The pronunciation of the word shows a distinct regional divide, being “skon” in Scotland and northern England, and “skoan” in the south.’

Well … as a lad from Sheffield I can tell you there’s at least one place in the north where we always said ‘skoan’ and it was only when I moved away from Sheffield that I had any idea anybody pronounced it any other way.

 

Pic by Caroline Gannon, of course.

My mother who was a plain cook, and proud of it, made scones from a packet mix, and they were very plain indeed, and we ate them plainly with butter but never with jam or cream.  I can’t tell you what brand of mix she used, but we can be absolutely certain it wasn’t ‘Snowflake.’

 

The first job I had after university was working behind the counter in a local caff, and they sold CHEESE SCONES!!  – it was a revelation.  And a welcome one.

 

Today, I can’t say I’m the biggest scone fan in the world but looking through my picture archive I see I’ve scoffed quite a few in recent times, most often when out and about of an afternoon and not fancying a sandwich.

    Here’s one for example eaten in the Millenium Galleries in Sheffield in recent times, long, long after I stopped thinking of myself as a Sheffielder: 

 

And the fact is, most scones that you buy and eat are pretty much OK.  It’s rare to get a really bad one, just as rare to get a transcendentally good one.  I suppose that means it’s a ‘safe choice.’

 

Here’s one from Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire:

Here’s one from Nature in Art in Gloucestershire, where I had a conversation with the gal behind the counter about pronunciation:

 

 Here’s one from the basement café in Waterstone’s bookshop in Piccadilly:

 

Here’s a somewhat fancy one from the caff at Two Temple Place in London, containing olives and onion and served with slices of cheese and a garnish of salad.  I don’t believe I’ve ever eaten another scone with salad.

 

And then my eye was caught in the caff at the local garden centre by a cheese and hazelnut scone.  Yeah, it came with onion relish! It sounded great.

And it and tasted ok – very big, slightly dry, and in need of more cheese and more nuts, if you asked me; but this is evidently not a universal opinion.  The caff was displaying this notice:

You can’t argue with that can you? Well I mean, you can, but why would you want to?

SEEM TO BE GETTING THE HANG OF THEM SCALLOPS

Helped by the somewhat elegant plate bought from the local charity shop part of an 'Eastern Dining Set' (whatever).

Photo by Gannon Studios (who else?)

SOMETHING ABOUT A MARTINI

 

A friend of mine, admittedly an American friend who perhaps had unreasonably high expectations, went into the bar at Euston station recently and asked the barman for a Martini.  He didn’t know what that was or how to make it, so my friend settled for a negroni, which was within the barman’s wheelhouse.

 

I think she was lucky that he didn’t just pour her a glass of ‘Martini.’  For many, many years very few people in England knew what a martini was, but they’d heard of Martini Bianco which was, and is, the trade name of a brand of vermouth made by Martini and Rossi.  I’ve always wondered whether they were deliberately trying to cause confusion.

 

And then last week in the Times, in the Comment section, Rose Wild (possibly her real name) quoted from an essay published in the Times in the summer of 1914, titled ‘Thoughts on Drink.’ The relevant passage runs ‘A wise man of the world has laid down as a law of universal application that “Whenever you want a drink and don’t know what drink it is that you want, what you want is vermouth."’

 

I suppose there must have been one or two occasions when I didn’t know what drink I wanted, but it’s a rare thing; and just as rarely have I ever wanted a glass of vermouth.

 

We come back, as so often, to the first verse of Ogden Nash’s poem, ‘A Drink With Something in It.’

 

There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth—
I think that perhaps it's the gin.

 

How right he is.  It’s not, it’s never, the vermouth.

THE CHEEK OF IT

 

I asked my local butcher (with whom I like to think I’ve ‘made friends’) if he could order pig cheeks for me.  He could but, he said, he didn’t have to: he had a couple in the freezer.  They looked like this when defrosted:

 

All photos - Gannon-Nicholson Studios

Now, I had never cooked pig cheeks before, though I had cooked ox cheeks – low and slow is obviously the way to go with both/either.

 

I hunted around for pig cheek recipes, even though I’m constitutionally incapable of following the whole of a recipe, and they all said much the same – sear the outside, then cook low and slow in some kind of liquid. I chose red wine and stock, though I thought about using cider.

 

Come the bewitching hour I heated up oil in a frying pan, did the searing, 

 

Then I placed the cheeks in a casserole with the liquid, chopped onion and carrot.  

 

And it was only then it occurred to me that a good half the mass of the pig cheeks was fat and skin.  Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with pig fat or pig skin in their place but I thought eating a large casseroled chunk of it might be going a bit far.  None of the recipes I’d consulted had said anything about this, because maybe they expected me to know, so out they came, the skin was sliced off and the meaty part returned for more lowness and slowness.  It was a good decision.  

 

Just a few hours later they were ready to serve, and if I say so myself, they were pretty darn good.

 

As I set the plates on the table, I was thinking how very nose to tail, very Fergus Henderson, very St. John, all this was, but I realized I’d used a garnish of parsley.  I had in fact been following at least that of a recipe, and I suddenly recalled the St John mantra: no garnishes, no art on the walls, no music.  But I do have art on my walls and I at the time I was playing some music – Cometary Orbital Drive by Acid Mother’s Temple, in honour of their forthcoming UK tour.

It’s true.  I can’t live up to Fergus Henderson’s standards, but then few can.

This is how the meal looked after the Acid Mothers Temple kicked in: