THE MOORE THE MERRIER

 

As everybody knows, Thurston Moore (that’s him above on the left, standing next to some bloke from Sheffield) is a great guitarist and a wonderful human being, and as far as I know he has no connection whatsoever with Thurstons Fine Foods of Luton.

 

Nevertheless when I was down at the local market, at the stall selling ‘food that’s probably fallen of the back of a lorry’ and I saw they were selling Thurstons brand olives stuffed with tuna, how could I resist?  

And you know, that picture on the can showing olives and chunks of tuna was very appealing.  So I bought a can, took it home, opened it – and discovered I had been deceived.  The picture on the label bore very little relation to what was inside. These olives weren’t stuffed with chunks of tuna but with something called ‘tuna paste’ which I suppose is acceptable but that’s not what’s shown on the label.

The olives were all right, and perfectly edible but I’m not sure I’d have been able to indentify the filling as tuna.  We live and learn.

 

And then, looking for connections, I dug out an interview in GQ with Mr. Moore, containing the searching question, ‘Do you make lunch at home?’ And Thurston replied, ‘My midday lunch thing will generally be a tuna sandwich. It's the best.'

Elsewhere in the article he says, ‘You do not get a bagel in London. I have sincerely attempted to figure out where the New York bagels are, or even the Montreal bagels, for God's sake, but they do not exist.’

 

I feel his pain. However, last week I was in the café at Royal Institute of British Architects (yes, I get around), and I ate a wonderful brown bagel with mackerel and mayonnaise.  It really rocked.

 

In honor of Mr. Moore I just went to my shelves and thought I should play some of his music with a foodie theme.  I didn’t do all that well.  The best I could manage was ‘Sympathy for the Strawberry’ which sounds like this

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbd9Kth5JjI

MAKING THE OLIVE SCENE

Funny things, names.  I mean if I’m in London and in need of a beer and I see a Nicholson’s pub I somehow feel drawn to it, despite having no connection whatsoever with the eponymous William Nicholson, who opened his first pub in 1873.

And at my local farmer’s market on Saturday I saw they were selling small cans of olives stuffed with anchovy paste.  

They were only a quid for 3 so I’d probably have bought them anyway, but then I saw the brand was Thurstons.  I thought of Thurston Moore, top guitar abuser.  How could I resist?

I don’t know that I’d want an olive stuffed with anchovy paste in my martini but on their own they taste pretty good.  Also the contents of the can don’t look much like the image on the outside, in fact they look better.

I have no idea what Thurston Moore’s preferences are in olives, or martinis, but I imagine he might like them dirty.

DAYDREAM COCKTAIL NATION

I’ve been in California.  On the plane on way there I read, belatedly, Kim Gordon’s Girl In a Band.   I thought the earliest parts, about her family, were the best, especially about her father, Calvin Wayne Gordon.

She writes, "He’d grown up doing chores beside his mother and sister – cooking and gardening - pretty much anything involving his hands – and the habit had stayed with him.”

This included making cocktails. “During cocktail hour which my mom and he never missed, he made amazing martinis and Manhattans with a chilled martini shaker kept in the freezer at all times. This was the late fifties and the early sixties - people took their cocktail hours seriously.”

Kim, some of us still do. The family spent some of their weekends fishing on the Klamath River, just south of the Oregon border, and stayed in a rented trailer.  There are photographs and film of these weekends apparently, though I’ve never seen any. 

“Jackie goes around taking photos, then they go for double martinis at Steelhead a lodge nearby where they went to drink at night ... In one of the videos – it must be 1986 – I show up and Thurston trails in, though usually he liked to hole up in our camper, reading, until happy hour.”

You know, that doesn’t surprise me one bit. 

OPTIMISM, MILD OBSESSION, AND SQUID

The other night I had some of the best squid I’ve ever tasted.  It was at a Japansee restaurant in London, called Fushan, in New Oxford Street.  It looked like this:

It was deep fried and coated in a spicy batter, and it was mostly tentacles, but I can’t really tell you what made it so special – just, you know, the crunchiness and the taste (of squid).

And it appeared on the menu like this:

Karaage, I now discover means “Chinese fry” in Japanese, which confuses matters a little, though only a little.

So next day, filled with optimism and mild obsession, I went into the local Waitrose looking for more squid that I’d cook myself.  There was some to be had and it was reduced, though it was just the tubes with no tentacles. I also don’t currently have a deep fat fryer, so the squid was pan fried with garlic, lemon and parsley, and it was perfectly fine but not fantastic.  Looked like this:

And then a couple of nights later in Efe’s in Brick Lane, I had squid breaded and deep-fried Turkish-style, and at this point it started to occur to me that maybe I only really like the tentacles.  They're certainly the bits that crisp up best.

And here is another less than fantastic squid dish that I had in Tokyo; a tube again, and filled with something inscrutable and really not all that appealing.  I’m sure regular readers will explain to me what’s going on here:

And then I thought about Thurston Moore and one of his early meetings with Mike Watt.  He quotes Watt saying, “All I eat is squid.  If I’m going to go to a booze joint, they’d better have squid. So he ordered all this squid and he was shoveling all this squid into his mouth.”  This is Thurston doing his impersonation of Watt eating squid – you can find the  interview, not all of it about squid, on Youtube.

This is Mike Watt apparently eating Euros.

THE SANDWICH OBSESSION CONTINUES

Life, being what it is, I had never heard of a Chipwich until today.  My ignorance, of course, and again an all-American form.  As the name suggests, it’s another version of the sandwich, and I had some vision that it might be potato chips between two slices of bread (a sandwich which does not have, and definitely, needs a name, perhaps The Nicholson).  Anyway, I was clearly letting my imagination run away with me.  The Chipwich, as I’m sure everybody but me knows, is a slab of ice-cream between two chocolate chip cookies.

It’s a fine idea, but one I’d have thought that didn’t need much “inventing,” however, one Richard LaMotta is credited as its begetter. Wikipedia tells me that the Chipwich date back to 1981 when LaMotta invented the thing and began a guerilla marketing campaign, "in which he trained and enlisted 100 street cart vendors (mostly students) to sell the Chipwich on the streets of New York City."

Now, the only reason I’ve heard of the Chipwich even now is because I just read the article about Kim Gordon in the New Yorker, and how deeply tragic it is that she and Thurston Moore have split up, but there’s kind of an upside because she’s “been working on being more open.  On being more comfortable with who I am.” 

The article tells us that when she and Thurston got married in 1984, she was working in a copy shop and he “manned a Chipwich stand in mid-town Manhattan.” Now, we all know that the Internet is in many respects pure evil, but one thing it does allow you to do is a run a search for “Thurston Moore Chipwich” and come up with this deeply wonderful image of the boy himself. 

And here is a picture of the couple, and the rest of the band, in happier days, in cartoon form, eating together.  Ah, memories.