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:

THE SECRET SOUND OF THE SANDWICH

I think you know about my sandwich obsession, and there in the Book of St. John (not the biblical one) on page 259 are these words ‘creating a sandwich is like jazz, you must find your unique sound.’

 

Well this raises a lot of interesting and no doubt ironic questions.

 

I tried to imagine some of my favourite jazzers eating sandwiches: Miles Davis, John and Alice Coltrane, Derek Bailey, John Zorn.  I don’t doubt that these people ate sandwiches at some point in their lives, but they were far too cool ever to be photographed doing ir.  Eric Dolphy of course recorded ‘Out to Lunch’ but history doesn’t tell us what he ate while he was out.

Charlie Parker is definitely eating something below.  I don’t know what it is, but it’s pretty definitely not a sandwich

 

The Book of St John reveals that ‘Fergus will always order the Egg Mayonnaise sandwich from the chalkboard bar menu and request the addition of brown shrimp or anchovy; or langouistines which he asks for on the side to shell and apply himself.’

 

Well, my access to brown shrimp and langoustines is limited but I do usually add an anchovy or two to my egg mayonnaise sandwich, as seen in the photograph at the top of this post.

Here's a picture of Fergus Henderson with a sandwich, but I believe it's got bacon in it.

 

FAT IS FLAVA

 I know it’s only January but I think I’ve just bought the food book bargain of the year.  It’s The Book of St. John by Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver.  Mine for a mere £2.50 in the local charity shop.  It looks unread, possibly unopened.

 

It’s full of excellent photography by Jason Lowe who doesn’t get his name on the cover, and he is responsible for what I think is one of the sexiest food photographs I’ve ever seen.  

 

(These things are subjective, obviously)

THE LAST MAN WITHOUT A YOUTUBE CHANNEL

 And yes, since you ask, I have been doing some cooking. 

(The vast majority of these pics are by Caroline Gannon)

 First, a proper recipe, from Times Easy Dinners, Chicken Traybake with Balsamic Roast Potatoes.  Not much to go wrong but I'll use more balsamic when/if I do it again.

Before: 

After:

After that I busked it recipe-wise, Bream:

Then Rabbit - very local, shot just up the hill (though not by me):

 

And then risotto with the leftovers:

And when all else fails Steak Tartare:

It was all perfectly decent if not totally fantastic. But you know, we can’t all be Fergus Henderson, much as we’d like to be.

FREE IMPROV SANDWICH

 St John Restaurant put up this image on Instagram:

 

The caption was, ‘”Creating a sandwich is like jazz,” says Fergus (Henderson). “You must find your unique sounds.”  Fergus always orders the Egg Mayonnaise sandwich from the chalkboard bar menu, and requests the addition of brown shrimp or anchovy.  The perks of being the boss.’

 

I’m not sure that creating a sandwich is really very much like jazz but I would never argue with Fergus Henderson.

 

 

And then Fuchsia Dunlop put up this image on Instagram: 

 

with the caption, ‘Scotch woodcock (a scrambled egg and anchovy dish, no bird involved) and crab on toast …” A Scotch woodcock is a version of the Welsh rarebit – the anchovies can be on top of the egg (as in the pic) or below the egg as in Gentleman’s Relish.  

Both would be OK by me.

 

I decided the kitchen gods wanted me to make an egg mayonnaise sandwich with anchovies.

 

The truth is I never willingly make an egg mayonnaise sandwich without anchovies so I boiled my eggs readied my mayo and anchovies and in due course began assemblage.  

But the fact also is that I never willingly make an egg mayonnaise sandwich without smoked paprika - and I suddenly realized I’d run out.  I’m not prepared to drive to the supermarket just for a jar of smoked paprika, so I improvised.

 Here is my egg mayonnaise sandwich with anchovies and ... turmeric. 

 

It tasted pretty good. To be honest I think that was because of the egg and the mayonnaise and the anchovies rather than the turmeric.  Does turmeric really have much taste at all? I don’t think so, but I stand to be corrected.  But it looked reasonably jazzy.

Do you want to see a picture of a young Rachel Riley (of Countdown fame) dressed as an egg salad sandwich?  Well, of course you do.

 

 

ART MEAT

  

Do you eat less meat than you used to? 

I do, or at least I think I do.  

In fact I thought everybody was eating less meat, but apparently not.

 

According to a Times review by Christina Patterson’s of Rob Percival’s The Meat Paradox, the ‘average’ person in the UK ate 78.6 kgs of meat in 2013, but by 2017 it was 84.9 kg.  And apparently we’ve all been eating more meat during Covid.

Given that increasing numbers of people are supposedly vegan or vegetarian I wonder if this means that the people who do eat meat are eating more to compensate.  Or are people simply exaggerating the extent of their veganism and vegetarianism?

 

Incidentally Rob Percival is head of food policy at the Soil Association which not everybody thinks is the most wonderful institution; see Jonathan Meades passim - “It is difficult for instance to imagine that such titans of contemporary thought as Prince Charles and Mr Sting will be dissuaded of their support for the Soil Association because its founder, Jorion Jenks, was a member of the English Mistery and British Union of Fascists …”

 

Meat was on my mind as I went to the Damien Hirst exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Britannia Street, London.  There on view were various meaty (and occasionally fishy) exhibits of cows, sheep, a pig, sausages, and of course a shark, some of which I’d seen before. 

But I hadn’t previously seen a sort of replica butcher’s shop with the phrase ‘Shut Up & Eat Your Fucking Dinner’ painted in cursive script its front wall.  This is from 1997.

 

And in this faux butcher’s shop window were what looked like faux pieces of meat that might have been made out of plaster or even wax, though since the press release insists these are ‘formaldehyde sculptures’ I guess it’s actual preserved meat.

 

I’m never sure to what extent Hirst is trying to freak out the straights and the squeamish with his dead critters.  My own feeling is that if you’re prepared to eat meat you should be prepared to look at it in the butcher’s window or even the abattoir.  Of course if you’re not prepared to eat meat you might think using dead animals in art is bad and wrong.

 

The visit to the Gagosian was in anticipation of dinner at Fergus Henderson’s St John restaurant the home of nose to tail eating, which certainly used to a be place where you might spot the occasional Young British Artist.

 

I always say that St John is my favorite restaurant in the whole world and sometimes, when I haven’t been there for a while, I fear that I’m over-rating the place.  And then I go there and all is well and I realize I was right all along.  It’s good to feel right.

 

Pic from the St John website

The room isn’t the loveliest in the world and yet the ambience is terrific – and not a bad place for people watching. I’ve always found the service excellent though some Tripadvisor reviewers would beg to differ.

 

But of course it’s the food that counts – it was impossible to resist the old classic of marrow bones with parsley and caper salad, 

Photo: Caroline Gannon

And this was the special.  When you see deep fried tripe on a menu you have to order it.  It was fabulous and meaty and chewy.  Damien would have loved it, I imagine.

Photo: Caroline Gannon

There were other delights too – sliced lamb with lentils, and roast Middle White.  And sure it’s a menu to scare off the vegan: pigeon, potted pork, devilled kidneys - but fish eaters are well looked after.

 

I also – and why oh why hadn’t I done this before – I ordered one of their martinis.  It was exactly as a martini should be, only more so.

Photo: Caroline Gannon

 

DECONSTRUCTING FERGUS

I always say that my favourite London restaurant is Fergus Henderson’s St John, and while this is completely true, it’s depressing how rarely I go there.  Of course nobody goes anywhere at the moment so I’ve been consoling myself by following St John’s Instagram page and was especially taken with this image of what I take to be ‘deconstructed’ egg mayonnaise.

It’s an image that confirms many of my prejudices; the main one being that you really do need an anchovy or two to make egg mayonnaise go with a swing.  I generally make it with a as sandwich but I suppose Fergus would thinking than serving up a sandwich at St John would seem a bit crude.

Here’s one I made earlier, some years earlier, 

and here’s one I made just today:

KNIVES OUT FOR THE TERRITORY

So here I am, trying gamely (you may say desperately and shamelessly) to drum up a little publicity for the most recent Nicholson title The London Complaint, a short book about the perceived and real horrors of London.  It’s not a food book by any means though there is a chapter titled “A Bellyful of London” about the perceived and real horrors of London food.  The extract down below deals with what we might as well call food critics. 

I’m also partlywriting this because I just read a piece on eater.com titled “The Best of 2016’s Bad Restaurant Reviews” – and honestly I thought some of these bad reviews were amazingly gentle.  Ryan Sutton criticizes a New York restaurant called Vandal for serving beef tartar over a hot pretzel, “resulting in hot mush’ he says.  But that doesn’t seem like a bad review, just a straightforward description of a terrible, terrible idea.  It looks like this apparently:

Besha Rodel calls Otium in LA a ”souped-up version of every trendy restaurant in town” – which I think is positively benign.  When that place opened I assumed most of the world would refer to it as “Odium.”  Nice enough looking room, although those chairs look about as comfortable as tractor seats.

Actually the most startling line in the whole piece eater.com piece reveals that a bottle of Evian mineral water at Cut by Wolfgang Puck, in New York, costs $33 dollars.  No wonder Wolfgang looks happy, if frankly a little nervous.

Even the blessedly demonic Jay Rayner seems to easing off a little, certainly in his description of a dish he ate a London restaurant called Tapas 27 “It was, I suppose, a deconstruction of a boeuf bourguignon. It was also the systematic dismantling of all my culinary hopes and dreams.” That sounds more in sorrow than in anger, to me.

Anyway, here’s some of what I wrote in The London Complaint:

 **

“There was surely never a time when people didn’t share information about what was and wasn’t a good place to buy or eat food in London, celebrating the good and especially complaining about the bad. Restaurant criticism is generally said to have begun in France with L’Almanach des gourmands, an annual publication that appeared from 1803 to 1812, written by Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, but England, and especially London, duly joined in.

Various guides to eating out in London appeared in the mid nineteenth century, an example being London at Dinner: Where to Dine, published in 1858, written anonymously. It’s still a good read, full of general and specific advice about eating out in the capital, and generally positive and upbeat in tone, though naturally there are some complaints – about illumination, for instance. ‘It is of the utmost importance that the dining-room should be well-lighted; this is a point often neglected at the tables of people who ought to know better, but are too indolent to give directions.’

The author is also concerned with the nature of menus:

In ordering a dinner at a London tavern, at a suburban one, or a country inn, the bill of fare is the most misleading guide in the world. It usually contains seven or eight soups; fish plain and dressed in twenty ways; with every dish that the ingenuity of a man or woman can make out of beef, mutton, veal, and lamb – and in twenty-nine cases out of thirty it happens that what you particularly fancy out of the list is not to be had.

That sounds like a perfectly reasonable gripe. 
Our man is also worried that London cuisine is being infiltrated and subverted by foreign influences: ‘Leicester Square is the haunt of foreigners, and as they continue to frequent its restaurants, we must presume they are content with the fare provided for them. To English tastes they might not seem so satisfactory.’ And later he writes:

Strangers in London, with money at command to dine when, where, and how it may suit their fancy, can, with perseverance and tact, always gratify their propensities in reason, but we cannot undertake to direct the voluptuary where to pamper his palate and sow the seeds of wretchedness for himself. It is not in him to be satisfied anywhere. We address ourselves to the saner portion of society.

By the end of the nineteenth century Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Newnham-Davis had emerged as a great democratiser and demystifier of the London gastronomic scene. He wrote about food for the Pall Mall Gazette, and in 1899 published a restaurant guide titled Dinners and Diners: Where and How to Dine in London, which he updated two years later. In 1914 he published the Gourmet’s Guide to London. He claimed his audience was ‘the Respectable Classes’, and, as a former military man, he referred to himself as a ‘soldier of the fork’.

Newnham-Davis isn’t happy about the growing number of French restaurants in London, but he says that in general complaining isn’t style. ‘I prefer to consign to oblivion the stories I could tell of bad eggs and rank butter and cold potatoes, stringy meat and skeleton fowls. It is so much better for one’s digestion to think of pleasant things than to brood over horrors.’ This is a little frustrating, it leaves you wishing he’d complain a bit more, and let us savour the details of the failings of those terrible London restaurants he’s been to, but perhaps I’m looking at this through contemporary eyes. Complaining about bad food has today become a rich source of entertainment.

And these days all the amateurs are in on the act too, thanks to Yelp and Tripadvisor. Here you will find essentially anonymous reviews from people you don’t know, whose tastes you don’t share and whose opinions you don’t respect, but just occasionally the complaints soar into the realms of absurdist poetry.

‘The grouse is just horrible and smells like poo.’ That’s a review by somebody called ‘Pier 1’. This next one is from will D., Manhattan, NY:

The food disgusted me. I got Bullets in my meat. I founds them on my mouse . . . It unacceptable. I told the restaurant manager but he won’t say any sorry. He said, ‘YOU CAN EAT THEM, NO PROBLEM.’ He is a crazy . . . Really really discussing. NEVER AGAIN. Beside that, all the dishes I ordered, I could not eat it. It’s kind of food for camping . . . very wild . . . way of cooking, looks like and taste . . . Also the restaurant has full of toilet smell, I am wondering why people not recognised this . . . Why this restaurant is so good? I don’t get it. Anyway Never again. It’s my nightmare.

Both these reviews are of Fergus Henderson’s restaurant St John, which happens, in many opinions, including mine, to be one of the great restaurants in London; and it has somehow managed to survive these complaints.

*