GOTTA LOVE YOUR MOTHER

I’ve been continuing to read and enjoy Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet (I admit that my fingers keep wanting to type Invitation to a Beheading).

 

And I’ve been especially taken with something she describes called “Loving Mother’s Dish.”

The story goes that there was once a woman whose son travelled to Beijing to sit the imperial civil service exams.  While waiting for his return she prepared his favourite dish, a slow cooked stew of pork and eggs.  

But travelling in imperial China was no better than traveling on British railways and the son didn’t get back on the day he was expected.  She took the stew off the stove, went to bed, and got up next day and simmered it some more on the second day. 

Again the son didn’t arrive so she stewed it some more, but he did arrive on this, the third day. Dunlop writes, “the stew had been heated up three times, and the meat was inconceivably tender and unctuous, the sauce dark and profound.’? All of which I can believe.  But what about the eggs?   

         I have never eaten an egg that’s been stewed for three days but I think the end result would not be profound in any ordinary sense of the word.

       I haven’t been able to find a recipe for “Loving Mother’s Dish” but I did manage to find this on a website called fooddelicacy.com 

It’s braised pork belly and eggs in soya sauce: the cooking time is an hour and 15 minutes.

EATING WITH ALIENS IN NEW YORK

I have been in New York for a week or so, eating up a storm, some of it quite high, some less so.  On the first morning in Manhattan, I staggered out of the hotel looking for somewhere to have breakfast, and found the Malibu Diner. I don’t know how they arrived at that name, and there wasn’t much of a California vibe to the place, in fact it was very, very New York, for which I was grateful.

The diner is one of the great American inventions and institutions, and doesn’t need any boosting from me.  It also seems an utterly simple, uncomplicated form that nobody could have any trouble with, but at the Malibu this didn’t seem to be so.  There was a couple of English tourists in the booth next to mine, an older northern pair, and the husband, who was doing the ordering for both of them, was having a certain amount of local difficulty.

The waiter was Latino and didn’t speak very good English and the northern man certainly did not speak American.  He was asking for “a portion of potatoes,” and although the word portion is obviously known in America (as in the importance of “portion control” when you’re trying to lose weight), it’s not a word used much in diners.  I guess “a side” would be the preferred expression. But in any case, simply asking for a “side of potatoes” doesn’t really communicate much either, you have to specify the kind of potatoes you want, and it was a while before the waiter announced that what the customer wanted was “a side of home fries.”  Whether that’s what the man actually wanted I couldn’t say, but he didn’t argue.

There was then the problem of the eggs.  The Malibu Diner menu offers “two large eggs any style” a form of words you’ll find in most diners, but this may also be confusing to the alien visitor.   “Any style” is a broad concept and I’d suggest you don’t go into an American diner and say you want your eggs coddled or en gelée, though I think it would be a hoot to say you wanted them sous vide, "I'll be back this time tomorrow."

Anyway, the waiter asked our friend from the north how he wanted his eggs, and he replied “medium.” The waiter had obviously given up trying to understand this bizarre foreigner so he nodded and wrote something down on his pad.  I wonder what the customer got.  Fried eggs over medium, I suppose, which may even have been what he wanted, but I suspect not.

Now, only a fool goes to New York in search of English food, and I certainly did not, but it so happens that one of my friends is great pals with Peter Myers, an Englishman who runs Myers of Keswick, a shop in the West Village that imports various food items (and non-food items too) from Britain.  We paid him a visit.

 Myers also bake pies on site, which are very fine indeed, and I used to eat their pork pies when I lived in New York and suddenly needed a taste of home. 

I chatted with Pete, who is a good man, and he was telling me the tribulations that go along with importing foodstuffs from the old country.  Needless to say you can’t import meat unless it’s in a can – haggis for instance.  And even Atora dried, packeted beef suet is a no-no.   But who’d have thought that wine gums were such trouble?  The problem isn’t the wine, obviously there’s no alcohol in wine gums, but rather the additives.  The list of additives allowed in America is quite different from those allowed in Britain.  After much food testing and chemical analysis, for which Pete of course had to pay, it was decreed that he’s not allowed to sell wine gums. 

 I noticed a board behind the counter saying that the shop had black puddings for sale.  I asked Pete what were they like.  He gave me a searching look.  “You seem like a man who knows his black pudding,” he said.  I reckon I do, but I wasn’t sure it was something that showed in my face, anyway, Pete then added, “And frankly these aren’t that great.” 

They weren’t of course imported from England, and they weren’t made on site either.  They were made by Donnelly’s.  The packaging is silent on where they’re based, and they’re officially called “blood pudding.”  Still, good chap that he is, Pete threw in a free one, which I have just eaten back home in LA.  Ingredients, according to the pack, include pork, beef blood and “spice extractive” and although they were pretty good they were nothing like any black pudding I’ve ever had in Britain, much spicier for one thing – I suppose that would be the spice extractive.  Still, thanks Pete, keeping making the pies.

THE EGG AND EYE

I’ve been continuing to think about eggs, not least because in Sunday’s New York Post there was an anecdote about Liz Taylor when she was filming Butterfield 8.   The director Daniel Mann gave her two eggs in their shells and told her he wanted her to cook them in the next scene.  She held one in each hand and said, “But what do I do with them?”  In her late twenties at the time, her life experience hadn’t included cooking an egg. Butterfield 8 is also the movie in which Liz, or rather her character, brushes her teeth with whisky. 

But in fact I don’t think cooking eggs is the easiest thing in the world.  I remember seeing Albert Roux on TV (that's him below) and he said that when he interviewed potential new chefs he didn’t ask them to cook anything at all fancy, he asked them to make him a good fried egg.  Very few could.

Are eggs inherently sexy?  I think so.  When they’re in the shell they look hard and smooth and streamlined, when they’re cracked open, the albumen is simultaneously slimy and sensuous.  When they’re cooked well, the slime goes and the sensuousness stays.  Some people think they’re downright pornographic.

If evidence of the trickiness of egg cooking were required, consider this scene from Venus In Furs.


          Just then the door opened and an attractive stoutish blonde girls entered.  She had wise kindly eyes, was dressed in black silk, and brought us cold meat and eggs with our tea.  Severin took one look at the latter, and decapitated it with his knife.
          “Didn’t I tell you that I wanted them soft-boiled?” he cried with a violence that made the young woman tremble.

            “But my dear Sevtchu ..” she said timidly.
       “Sevtchu, nothing.” He yelled, “you are to obey, obey do you understand?” and he tore the kantchuk from its hook.

Well, any excuse. A footnote in my edition tells me a kantchuk is a long whip with a short handle, but you’d have guessed that anyway.  And you’d probably have to say it wasn’t just the eggs that were getting him upset. 

Of course “decapitating” eggs is pretty tame stuff compared with what Simone and the unnamed narrator get up to in Bataille’s The Story of the Eye.  First she develops a mania for “breaking eggs with her behind” and it pretty much goes downhill from there.  Lots of toilet antics are involved and at one point they have a fantasy about putting their mentally challenged pal Marcelle into a bath “half-filled with fresh eggs, and she would pee while crushing them.”

When I was growing up, the schoolyard wisdom was that you should never play with eggshells because they gave you warts.  Lord knows what writhing around in half a bath tub of them would have done.

Bataille never strikes me as absurd in quite the way de Sade does.  He and his characters are clearly very, very odd, but not exactly ridiculous.  Certainly Bataille seems to have much more fun with all this egg stuff than the reader does, but perhaps that's the way it always is with all truly pathological writing.

By contrast with Bataille the egg action in Ai No Corrida (released in the US as In the Realm of the Senses) seems positively normal and healthy.  It’s a simple insertion.  Soft boiled egg goes in, soft boiled egg pops out, the hero eats the egg in a cheerful fashion.  Good fun all round.

So, with Easter approaching, I bought myself some Cadbury’s Creme Eggs - the deal was buy 2 get 2 free.  They were one of the great chocolate treats of my childhood, and as with so many things from childhood they now seem much tamer and less exciting than I remember.  Didn’t the “yolk” used to be much more yellow?  Wasn’t the flavor more intense?  And didn't they used to be spelled "cream" rather than "creme"?

And above all, didn’t they used to be much, much bigger?  My memory is that they were pretty much the same size as a real egg, but if so then times have certainly changed.  These were absolutely minute; scarcely a mouthful.  It obviously doesn’t take much imagination to think of erotic uses for a Cadbury's egg, but if I’m honest I have to say I didn’t find them the slightest bit pornographic.  Perhaps I'm getting jaded.