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: