EATING GOLDENLY

Before we finish with currywurst, possibly forever, my Berlin correspondent Susanna Forrest directed me to an article she wrote for momondo.com.  She writes:  “Currywurst und Schampus in the Saturday Kollwitzplatz market have elevated Berlin's humble signature dish … into something ludicrously sophisticated. The pommes are served with truffle mayonnaise, and my pick, the "Spezial Currywurst" with creamy mayonnaise and raw red onion, is almost too rich to snarf.”  Interesting use of “almost” there.  This is her picture of it:

She continues; “The ritziest wurst on offer is their 5€ Currywurst Gold, spiced with 22k gold leaf. Which is just silly. I don't dare eat it in case the next anti-yuppie demo in the Kiez lobs Molotov cocktails through my bedroom window.”  The internet suggests that there’s quite a bit of gold-inflected currywurst about, like these two:

And if the one in the Kollwitzplatz market is really only 5€, then it’s still cheaper than the gold-free version I had in LA.

I realized, and it wasn’t exactly a stunning revelation, that I’ve never knowingly eaten gold-leaf.  I was going to say I’d never tasted gold-leaf but then I don’t believe anybody has actually tasted it: see below.  In an interview in the Independent Sam Bompas (of Bompas and Parr) was asked about his “store-cupboard essentials.”  He said, “24-carat gold. It costs around £25 for 25 sheets. It doesn't have any flavour, but it makes for the most over-the-top desserts – it sparkles and is quite magical.”  Only a fool would argue with Sam Bompas.

I recall, a long time ago, being interviewed in my horrible, tiny London flat by a journalist from the Yorkshire Post.  A bad idea.  And it so happened that I’d cut out this image out and stuck it up on noticeboard in the kitchen:

 In fact it’s ravioli of scallops cooked by Garry Hollihead of L’Escargot, vermouth whole fresh truffles are also involved.  I still have the cutting to this day, obviously.  And I could see the journalist was fascinated by this, and was writing the piece in his head; “Humble writer lives in squalor but dreams of food covered with gold-leaf.”  This was not true – I’d cut the picture out because I found it so absurd.  But possibly the journalist had something worse in mind, “Humble writer lives in squalor because he’s spent all his money on food covered with gold-leaf.”  This was not true either.  At the time my idea of a lavish night out was a meal at a dodgy Greek restaurant in the Harrow Road.  Gold-leaf was not in evidence there, and even if it had been, I doubt whether it would have been enough to make their moussaka seem magical.

NO WURST THERE IS NONE

I’ve been reading The Photobook: a History, Volume 3, by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger.  All three volumes in the series feature certain books containing photographs of food, though most of them are a very long way from being the conventional notion of “food photograph.”  This is a relief.

The new volume, for example, contains The Catalogue of Meat Products, Conserves and Lard (1973), with photographs by Jiøí Putta, made for some Czech government department, and it’s an absolute wonder.  There’s also America’s Favorites by Kay Lee, deadpan color photographs from the 1980s of junk-ish food: Oreos, Puffed Cheese Doodles, and of course Wonder Bread.

But most intriguing is a series of 96 books edited Joachim Schmid titled Other People’s Photographs. Each book contains 32 thematically related images harvested from online photo sharing sites.  Quite a few of them feature food and one of them is titled Currywurst and it looks like this:

Now it just so happens that here in LA there’s a newish restaurant named Berlin Currywurst.  I thought the universe was sending me a message that I had to go.

I’ve eaten currywurst in Germany just once, in Munich, bought from a van in the street, and to be honest I’d expected to like it more than I did.  It was a sausage on a paper plate, sitting in tomato sauce, with some curry powder sprinkled over it.  This seems to be the classic form, and subtle it’s not, but then who wants their street food to be subtle.

Well, I think the people at Berlin Currywurst in Los Angeles do want their currywurst to be subtle, or at least a bit fancy.  It’s one of those restaurants, there seem to be more and more of them, where you can’t just go in and say “I want one of those.”  Here you go to a counter and you have to specify the kind of sausage, the kind of bread, the kind of sauce and the strength of the seasoning sprinkled on top.   There was none of this choice in Munich as I recall.

So you order and go out to the beer garden, which is very pleasant indeed, and they bring it to you and it was all perfectly decent, (I had the bockwurst, Kreuzberg sauce, and the Berlin Calling level of hotness, if you care) and we’d ordered some rosemary and garlic fries (fritten, to be linguistically correct) and I had a glass of Hacker Gold, and it all made for a very agreeable weekday lunch.  It looked like this:

My German pal Marco who was there and enjoyed it perfectly well said this was a rather high end currywurst.  In Germany it would have been more “working class” with more sauce and no choice of sausage.  And of course nobody in their right mind in Germany would pay 8 or 9 dollars for currywurst.

Meanwhile, quite independently, another friend, now in Berlin, Susanna Forrest, directed me (though I don’t suppose I’ll be going there in the foreseeable future) to the Deutsches Currywurst Museum Berlin, which allows visitors to discover the history of currywurst.  The interior looks this:

 

A triumph of style over content perhaps but it looks like fun, and I suppose (in some sense) you get to eat the exhibits, or a version of them anyway.  Here’s what they sell:

I wish the place in LA had had fowl currywurst.  I’d have snapped it.

A SLIGHTLY CONFUSING THING FROM BELGIUM

Here's a slightly confusing thing from Belgium, photographed and brought to my attention by Susanna Forrest, writer and horsewoman extraordinaire.  

As far as I can tell the joke is that there are people in Belgium who are craving a burger made from genuine horsemeat, but they’re being deceived, and fobbed off with a burger that’s 100 per cent beef.  Or maybe there's a completely different joke.  Belgian horse irony is not my strong suit.