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.

 

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?

 

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.

IN FRONT OF THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM

 Word is that Ferran Adrià, he of the restaurant El Bulli, the epicenter of molecular gastronomy fame, which closed in 2011, is about to the premises as a museum.  I like restaurants and I like museums but a food museum strikes me as tricky thing.

As far as I can tell, Adrià’s museum will consist of a lot of photographs of food, making it seem like a living Instagram, along with paintings by Adria, which from what I’ve seen are likely to make it look somewhat like a charity shop. Here’s some art he did earlier:  

 

But perhaps there’ll be art by other people too:

 

It appears there’ll be no museum café, and I don’t know whether or not there’ll be a gift shop.

 

Needless to say I never ate at El Bulli but my old late pal did Jonathan Gold  did, right before it closed, and reviewed it for the Wall Street Journal.  He compared it toYoko Ono’s art and an edible infomercial, which doesn’t sound as though he loved the place, but he talked about it on KCRW radio and I think his main point was it pays not to overthink what you were eating at El Bulli, which obviously is not going to apply in the museum.

 

Closer to home Bompas and Parr did very briefly, for about 3 months, set up The British Museum of Food, in Borough Market.  The museum's aspirations, they said at the time, were ‘to change peoples’ lives by helping them consider what they eat, spread knowledge around nutrition and health and to recognize its role in culture.’  Which sounds fair enough.  In 2016 the museum was looking for a permanent home, and as far as I know it still is.  I believe they have a very good menu collection.

 

In Japan there’s The Museum of Fruit, which I only know about because David Toop made a CD of music for the place. 

 

Originally I thought this must be some ironic conceptual art piece, but no, it’s an actual museum of fruit (kind of). The website says ‘Itsuko Hasegawa 長谷川逸子designed the Fruit Museum in the Yamanashi Prefecture near Mount Fuji in Japan, completed in 1997. The three shell-shaped buildings symbolize the “fruits” of spiritual sensuality, intelligence and lust. 

In a general sense, the buildings are trees producing fruits of creativity in the visitors who themselves will spread a sensitivity to our frail environment, and hopefully produce green buildings themselves.’

So no, not your average museum of food or anything else, but it does exist in the real world.

As most certainly do the two noodle museums dedicated to Momofuku Ando, the founder of Nissin Food Products and inventor of instant ramen.

 

There’s one branch of the museum in Ikeda and another in Yokohama. The latter ‘offers the virtual experience of being a noodle in a huge factory, and going through the entire manufacturing process from making the noodles to shipping them.’

I think I might give that a miss and head for the tasting room. Yes this is a food museum where they actually give you food.  

 

And finally, I was thinking of the Brighton Pavilion, some way from being a museum of food but it’s the kitchen that I always remember best.  It looks pretty good as it is now, 

but it was probably more fun before it became an exhibit. 

HE GIVES YOUR HOLLANDER A VOMIT

 As I wander the city streets around London, or most other places else for that matter, I often look at the ground to see what’s been discarded, and sometimes I even photograph it.

 

Of course vomit is the one of the things I sometimes see, and although it’s occurred to me to photograph pools of sick, I’ve always thought better of it.

 

Obviously I am a terrible square.

 

Those funsters Bompas and Parr have opened a pop up ‘Vomit Vault’ at the Crypt Gallery just off Euston Road, and inside you can gaze at multiple pictures of vomit on the streets of London. The images are compelling and disgusting in equal measures.  There’s a book too, titled Salute to Puke.

 

In many ways this seems a natural progression of the Bompas and Parr enterprise. If you’re fascinated by the food and drink that goes into the human body it’s only natural to be fascinated by what comes out.

 

The serious, or at least somewhat serious, point seems to be that the reappearance of vomit on the streets of London marks a return to post-pandemic normality, a ‘sign of economic and social recovery.’

 

At the opening night party there were some ‘do it yourself’ cocktails that could be imbibed and then used to replicate some of the images on the walls.

But I managed to restrain myself.

 

Photo: Caroline Gannon

The lighting conditions in the vault made it hard to take photographs of the exhibits, which some may think just as well.

 

Those bleached out spaces are the colour prints on light boxes. The actual images look like this:

 

Art lovers can buy them in various forms and editions and have fun deciding where in their   homes to display them.   Prices are from 21quid to 630 smackers. 

The real joy of the exercise is that Sam Bompas is a man of such charisma that he can drag you to a crypt, make you look at pictures of vomit, and come out thinking you've had an uplifting experience. 

Here’s a link to Bompas and Parr:

http://bompasandparr.com/projects

GREAT MINDS

It’s just possible that you may have read a novel titled The Food Chain.  Give it a whirl, you might like it.  In there you’ll find a Scene in which a characters drinks a cocktail made up of 26 ingredients from A to Z.  Like this:

*

Now, it’s equally possible that you may be a follower of Bompas and Parr, in which case you may have come across one of their latest creations.

A  Angostura Bitters (Angostura)
B  Botran Solera (Guatamala)
C  Cointreau (France)
D  Diplomatico (Venaulan)
E  El Dorado 12 (Guyana)
F  Frapin Cognac (France)
G  Grand Marnier (France
H  Havana Añejo Especial (Cuba)
I  Ilegal mezcal (Guatemala)
J  J.H Rhum (Martinque)
K  Kamm & Sons (UK)
L  Louis Royer VSOP (150 years)
M  Martell VS Cognac (France
N  Nine Leaves (Japanese Rum)
O  O. V. D (Old Vatted Demerara)
P  Pimento dram (Germany)*
Q  Quagli Berto Rosso (Italy)
R  Regan’s Orange Bitters (USA)*
S  Sipsmith Sloe Gin (UK)
T  Tipples British fruit liqueurs (UK)
U  Underberg Herbal Tonic (Germany)*
V  Velvet falernum
W  Wray & Nephew (Jamica)
X  Xante pear (France)
Y  Yagurara Cachaça (Brazil)
Z  Zoco Patcheran (Spain)

World's first indeed!  Young Bompas owes me a drink.

GEOFF DREAMS OF SODOM

One of the things I was doing in London was presenting (possibly even curating) a couple of movies as part of the Bompas and Parr Food Film Festival, 2018.  One of the movies was La Grande Bouffe, directed by Marco Ferreri; the other Jiro Dreams of Sushi, directed by David Gelb.

Films were shown in the Curzon Cinema in the basement of the Mondrian Hotel, and the bartender of the hotel’s Dandelyan bar - Ryan Chetiyawardana aka Mr. Lyan - had invented a couple of special cocktails to accompany the screenings: Double Pop and Oranges & Death.

There was also a small exhibition in the bar, with that title Oranges & Death.  It seems that terrible things happen to people in movies after they’ve bought or peeled or eaten an orange, although bad things don't necessarily happen to people who've drunk a cocktail of the same name.  Here is the Double Pop with a death or, more likely life, mask in the background:

Photo by Caroline Gannon

I first saw La Grande Bouffe in the 1970s, a few years after its 1973 release.   It had stayed with me but I hadn’t seen it for forty years or so, and then I watched it twice in a week, once as research, and once at the festival along with an audience.

La Grande Bouffe was, and possibly still is, a controversial movie, known by far more people than have ever seen it.  The exact plot only reveals itself gradually but it’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that it’s the story of four middle aged men who gather in a villa with the intention of eating themselves to death.  It’s a kind of pastiche of de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (written in the Bastille) – but de Sade’s men had 4 months to get the job done – eating yourself to death in a weekend takes some doing.

As a method of suicide it’s not the most efficient, but it comes with some compelling metaphors.  Food is the thing you need in order to live, but here it’s the things that kills you.  And, of course, there may be an argument that in the West most of us are eating ourselves to death quite literally.

The four men are all upper bourgeoisie, though not exact equals in the class structure: a chef, a judge, an airline pilot, a TV producer.  They’re played by Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi, and the characters share first names with the actors.

When I first saw it all those years ago, I remember they seemed a bunch of charmless old farts, but I guess I’ve mellowed.  As we get older we find charm in some unexpected places.  And as time goes by, men in their 40s and early 50s really don’t seem so old after all. 

The characters are monstrous in some ways, infantile in others - Philippe the judge still lives with his wet-nurse. There’s also an overarching and subversive critique of masculinity.  There’s something not very sexy about men eating together, and I think there may be the suggestion that it’s rather effete to care too much about food.

In this universe women are an after thought.  Three prostitutes belatedly join the feast, but they’re a disappointment.  They’ll do certain things for money but not everything, and their enthusiasm is at best patchy.

And then Andrea appears – played by Andrea Ferreol – a schoolteacher who gets involved because of her own needs and obsessions, who does what she does for free. 


Forty years ago I really didn’t get the appeal of Andrea, a fleshy, warm, wild but unglamorous woman, whereas today she seems an absolute wonder.  She’s her own woman, and in many ways the story is hers.  She doesn’t appear to consciously exploit the men, and yet in the end she gets pretty much everything she wants.

La Grande Bouffe has a reputation as a gross out movie – but it’s not just a prolonged wallow in disgust.  Parts of it are genuinely tender and sensual, and there’s comedy as well as horror.  And I think that if the movie weren’t a comedy it would be much harder to take the movie seriously, an idea that never occurred to de Sade.

I’ve read reviews saying that after you’ve seen La Grande Bouffe you won’t ever want to eat again, but I suspect that readers of Psychogourmet, and fans of Bompas and Parr, have stronger stomachs than that.

        Further cocktail adventures were had when my pal, and top photographer, Jason Oddy took me along to a place named Hakkasan, a place that seems to be designed so that high-ranking Triad members will feel at home there.  The drink on the left is a Hakkatini, the one on the right a Rhubarb Margarita. The Hakkatini did contain orange vodka, but only the slightest hint of death.

 

Photo by Jason Oddy