MORAL PUB GRUB

'Cheese is a mity elf,

Digesting all things but itself.'

Folk rhyme, apparently.

 

 

I remember, when I started, or started trying, to read Joyce’s Ulysses, when I was about 16 years old.  Much of it went over my head, as I suppose much of it still does, but I was all fired up by the scene in the ‘Lestrygonians’ chapter when Leopold Bloom goes to Davy Byrne’s (the apostrophe seems to come and go) pub for lunch. This is a heavily edited version of the part that did the firing.

—Have you a cheese sandwich?

—Yes, sir.

A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?

—Yes, sir.

Mr Bloom cut his sandwich into slender strips. 

—Mustard, sir?

—Thank you.

He studded under each lifted strip yellow blobs. 

 

I was a cheese lover from a very early age, and my parents were moderately indulgent in buying me moderately exotic cheeses. I’d never eaten gorgonzola at the time I read that bit of Joyce, though I knew what it was, and I’d definitely tasted Danish blue. My grandma told me it had worms in it, which I doubted even at the time.

But reading that passage in Ulysses, I was confused by the reference to mustard.  Who puts mustard on a cheese sandwich?  A great many people, no doubt, but it was news to me, and still doesn’t strike me as a good idea.

 

         Anyway, being in Dublin last week, off we went (Anthony, Caroline and me), to Davy Byrnes, now definitely without an asterisk and styling itself a gastropub. The “Classic Gorgonzola €13.00 Classic Gorgonzola and brown bread served all day (pair with a glass of Pinot Noir for €20)”is still on the menu, and apparently it looks like this, 

 

Very appetizing though not as I ever imagined.  It’s an open-face sandwich I suppose, but it would be hard to cut it into strips.

 

We didn’t order that. Instead we had Connemara oysters, 

Davy Byrnes photos by Caroline Gannon

Cod Croquettes - yep I'm still on my croquette kick

and Sneem Black Pudding with ‘Charred tomatoes, apple chutney, Lyonnaise onions and Guinness brown bread.’  I might have wished for apple rather than the tomato which actually appeared totally uncharred, but let’s not quibble. 

       It was all very good indeed – and the place was full of Joyce memorabilia, and the staff were great, not least the owner - Bill Dempsey, I believe - who was very chatty and charming, and it was karaoke night, though fortunately that was happening way down the other end of the room.

 

       And other things about Dublin …  Now, I am not the world’s greatest drinker of Guinness – I drink about a pint of it per year. So during my time in Dublin I probably had a decade’s worth.  There is, apparently, much discussion about where the best pint of Guinness is to be, and The Gravediggers, adjacent to the Glasnevin Cemetery, is high in the list of contenders.  

As a non-connoisseur I might be inclined to think that all Guinness tastes pretty much the same, but no, the one I drank at The Gravediggers was very superior indeed. VERY superior.

 

THE NIGHT PORTER

Well first there’s this, from an era lost beyond recall, when somebody at an advertising agency thought that Guinness drinkers might want to sharpen up their knowledge of game. No doubt some of them did, but not so very many, I imagine.

Then there’s this ad from Malaysia. No, the woman doesn’t get to imbibe the Guinness but she seems intoxicated at the very sight of her man drinking it.

How times have changed. Here’s a picture from the celebration of 50 years of Guinness in Malaysia - now the women get to hold the drink.

And then there’s this – Cahill’s ‘smooth Irish Cheddar with rich Irish porter’ - so it doesn’t contain Guinness but the website says it ‘pairs well with a cold pint of Irish Stout.’ I ate it, actually with a glass of Pinot Grigio, and it tasted good, if a bit grainy.

But digging deeper in the Cahill’s website I found a recent notice that said, ‘As a precautionary measure, we at Cahill’s Farm Cheese are recalling a number of batches of our specialty cheddar cheese due to possible presence of Listeria monocytogenes.’ That includes all of their cheddar made with porter. However, since I bought mine at a stall in a farmer’s market and had eaten most of it before I went to the website I shall have to take my chances.

GOOD FOR SOMETHING.

 Guinness!

 

So feminist.

 

So multicultural.

 

So Volks (my understanding is this ad was never actually used, though I stand to be corrected)

 

And so handy for making a couple of Black Velvets on a hot afternoon.

THE BLACK VELVET WAGEN

There was a short time of my life when I used to hang out with actors (I had my reasons).  And some of them used to drink Black Velvet – i.e. Guinness and cider - because it was supposed to be good for the voice – it “opened the throat” apparently.  I used to drink it too, though my throat didn’t need any opening.

Of course we weren’t drinking real Black Velvet: that involves Guinness and champagne and was created by a bartender of Brooks's Club in London in 1861, to mourn the death of Prince Albert.  I didn't actually know that until about ten minutes ago.

Brooks's club - on a quiet night

Over the years I stopped drinking Black Velvet, and I can’t say I really missed it, but lately, when given the chance, I’ve been drinking it again.  Here’s a very decent one I had at Dargan’s, an Irish bar in Ventura.  The cider was Strongbow, the first alcohol that a whole generation of teenage English drinkers ever tasted.  Or perhaps that's just me.

The best thing is that you drink the cider through the Guinness – it all has to do with specific gravity, no doubt.  If you’re interested, that’s a Snakebite in the back – half cider, half Harp lager.

Back in the Psychogourmet Utility Kitchen I’ve been trying to do something similar but different– and a bit classier – Freixenet cava and Big Bear Black Stout.

It tasted good enough but as you can see, there wasn’t the separation I was looking for.  And Big Bear Black Stout is a big chewy, fudgy, liquorice-ish mouthful so it was a bit like drinking dessert.  Still, there’s plenty of time for further experimentation.

Now, as you may know, I am a man who is, or at least used to be, deeply fascinated by Volkswagen Beetles, and blow me down, a stash of Guinness advertising posters has been found.   I must say my first reaction that it was a lark painted by Bruce McCall, but as far as I can tell, they're, so to speak, kosher.

Those fine neutral men at Guinness evidently decided they could shift some units in the Third Reich.  The People’s car, the People’s beer.  Well, only up to a point.

O'BRIEN'S POTATOES

It’s probably no great disadvantage for a writer to be named after a kind of food.  Take the example of Flann O’Brien, born Brian O’Nolan, and sometimes known as Myles na gCopaleen, and occasionally as Brother Barnabas or George Knowall, among other pen names.  At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman are the two great books, and a good, searching look along my bookshelves proves that my copies have been "borrowed." 

Back in the day, when I was involved with what we used to call “London fringe theatre” I had a semi-girlfriend who acted in a stage version of The Third Policeman.  She dressed up as a strangely convincing and very lovely heifer. And she recited the poem The Workman’s Friend, which in fact comes from At Swim-Two-Birds, but was obviously thought too good not to include in the production.

         My favourite verse runs as follows (and is none the worse for being recited by an 

attractive raven-haired woman dressed up as a cow):

“When food is scarce and your larder bare

And no rashers grease your pan,

When hunger grows as your meals are rare –

A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”

I don’t know much about O’Brien’s eating habits, but we do know he was a serious alcoholic, also a depressive, cripplingly disappointed by his lack of literary fame and success (that old chestnut).  In the latest edition of the London Review of Books Jonathan Coe writes about two newly published collections of O'Brien’s work, one a volume of plays and teleplays, the other of his short fiction.  Coe quotes from a piece titled Slattery’s Sago Saga, which he doesn't really rate, but it had me chuckling fit to bust.

“The forenoon passed quickly and it was about two o’clock in the early autumn day when Tim sat down to his heaped dinner of cabbage, bacon, pulverized sausage, and sound boiled potatoes of the breed of Earthquake Wonder.”

I’ve never worked out precisely how many breeds of potato there are, and perhaps nobody even really knows, nor am I sure exactly what constitutes a breed, but I see the figure “over 4,000” regularly quoted.  They do have some fancy and improbable names, and of course the Irish potato famine was exacerbated by an over reliance on the Irish Lumper, a name that sounds absolutely weighted down with doom.  

Other breeds include the Glacier Chip, the Stampede Russet, the Dakota Chief, the Inca Dawn, (and my current favorite) Ruby Pulsiver’s Blue Noser; all of which sound as though they might have been invented by Flann O’Brien, though none, admittedly, is quite as good as the Earthquake Wonder.  Ruby Pulsiver’s Blue Noser looks like this (a disappointment in some ways):

        Potatoes do seem to have been on O’Brien’s mind quite often one way or another, and sometimes in connection with his lack of literary “success.”  He once complained (though I haven’t been able to find out exactly where) “Gone with The Wind keeps me up awake at night sometimes – I mean, the quantity of potatoes earned by the talented lady novelist.”

DINING WITH DAGWOOD

I’ll bet you were as thrilled as I was to read the news last month that Andras Borgula, artistic director of the Judafest celebrations in Budapest, was planning to break the record for the world’s tallest kosher sandwich.  Apparently he’d approached the nice folk at Guinness World Records who told him there was no such thing as a record for the world’s tallest kosher sandwich, but if he wanted any chance of getting in the book he’d better make it at least two meters high; about seven feet.

Now I’m sure that the nice folk at Guinness meant well but really a seven foot sandwich is a mere nothing in the annals of sandwich construction.  The non-kosher record was apparently created at the Uday Samudra Leisure Resort, in Kerala, India in October, 2007, and it got to 50 feet.  It used 350 slices of bread, 100 pounds of cucumber and tomatoes, 88 pounds each of boneless chicken, sausage, ham, apple, and mayonnaise, 55 pounds of fish, 165 pounds of lettuce, 77 pounds of onions, and 330 pounds of butter.  Much of which sounds fairly kosher to me, apart from the ham obviously, but I’m no expert in these things. It's here apparently, though it's scarcely visible underneath the scaffolding.

         Anyway, in Budapest, Borgula and a group of volunteers prepared 400 kosher sandwiches, the idea being to stack them one on top of another to make what they described as a towering club sandwich: which suggests they don’t really know what a club sandwich is.  The individual sandwiches contained kosher turkey, hummus and pickles.  Well, Mr. Borgula is no doubt a provocateur and funster but surely somebody should have told him that, at best, he’d be making the world’s tallest stack of kosher sandwiches, not the world’s tallest kosher sandwich.  Anyway, that’s all now irrelevant.

The whole thing was a fiasco. Borgula ran out of bread just as the pile reached 1.9 meters.  But, “even if we had more,” Borgula said, “the tower was start[ing] to fall apart.”  I’ve only found one picture and it’s this:

And clearly he isn’t even making a stack of sandwiches, he appears to be making just a low hummock.  Where’s the sport in that?  And in fact I think that if you were a purist you might even object to that Indian record breaker.  A sandwich that needs a scaffolding really isn’t a true sandwich if you ask me.

If you want a big sandwich, this is a big sandwich:

It was made in Zocalo Square, Mexico City in 2006, a single construction weighing 6,991lbs (3,178kgs), containing lettuce cheese and ham, and recognized by Guinness as the world’s biggest sandwich, if quite clearly not the tallest.

I admit I have no idea how culinary matters go in Iran, but even so I was surprised to hear that in 2008 there was an attempt to set a new world record, this time for the world’s longest sandwich.  It was, I read, though don’t altogether believe, a stunt aimed at get Iranians to eat more healthily, and the sandwich was to be partly filled with ostrich meat, which contains half the fat of chicken.  That is no doubt true, but I’ll bet you need to slather on a fair amount  mayo to make it palatable.

The sandwich was intended to be 1,500 meters long, containing 700 kgs of ostrich meat and 700 kgs of chicken, and it was put on display in a public park in Tehran, where the good folk from Guinness were standing by to measure it.  Unfortunately the crowd was so determined to do some healthy eating that they started tucking in to the sandwich before it could be measured.  Where are the religious police when you need them?  Chaos ensued.  The sandwich was demolished and gone in a matter of minutes, leaving the Guinness representatives with a problem, though I’d have thought they might have considered the event for some other category.  Has 700 kgs of ostrich ever been so swiftly eaten?

The current record for the longest sandwich is held by three combined teams from the Lebanon. They made their sandwich in Hazmieh village, Beirut, in May 2011, and they really did put some work into it.  They had 4 specially constructed movable ovens so they could bake one long continuous piece of bread. The dough was divided into sections and rolled out, but then recombined by further rolling.  Then the movable ovens rolled over the top of the bread cooking it as they went. 

I’m seriously impressed, though doesn't the diameter look just a bit thin?   It was in fact a chicken sandwich though zested up with pickles, mayonnaise, red vinegar, salt, mustard, white pepper, lemon juice, kammoun spices and coriander.  But then anything tastes pretty good with all that on it. However the sandwich measured a “mere” 735 meters, less than half the intended length of the Iranian attempt.    

Sandwiches have been on my mind lately because hotels.com have just published their International Club Sandwich Index 2013, (that's it above, though you'll have to go to their website to read it properly) comparing the prices of sandwiches around the world.  I can’t say that I eat many sandwiches in international hotels, but I’m sure some do.  Hotels.com use “the classic hotel staple of a chicken, bacon, egg, lettuce and mayonnaise sandwich as a barometer of affordabiliy.”  Geneva comes top with $30.45.  New Dehli comes 28^th at $ 9.11.  The index doesn’t say anything about the quality or quantity of these international hotel sandwiches, but my guess is that none of them is quite as big, tall or long as they ought to be for the money.