THE CRICKETING LIFE

 “Have nothing in your mouth that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” ― I’m misquoting William Morris because I had a sandwich t’other day in Lloyd Park, currently home to the William Morris Gallery and once home to the man himself.

 

There’s a caff there too, run by Deeney’s which appears to bea two-establishment chain, with a Scottish vibe, famous for their haggis toasties such as the Macbeth - haggis, cheddar cheese, rocket, caramelized onion and mustard;  the Hamish Macbeth which has all the above for plus bacon; and the Lady Macbeth with veggie haggis and vegan mayonnaise, you know for the ladies, though I never imagined Lady Macbeth to be a picky eater.

 

I had the Macbeth (above), and I’m pretty sure I’d never had a haggis sandwich before, and it was very fine.  Whether it was better as a sandwich than it would have been with neeps and tatties is debatable, but I had no complaints.

 

How very different from breakfast next day at L’Hirondelle, also in Walthamstow. The sandwich menu looked like this:

and I concluded, perhaps hastily, that if they can’t spell sandwich they probably can’t make a good one, and is a wrap really a sandwich, anyway?.  So I went for the Eggs Benedict with smoked salmon which I know some people call a Royale.  It looked ok:

and it tasted like arse because the eggs were barely half-cooked, with globs of raw albumen.  Made me wish I’d had a sandwhich.

 

But then, OMG, a day later in Richmond, I encountred a kind of perfection, at the Cricketers pub: swings and roundabouts innit? There was whitebait. I can’t remember when I last had better:

 

and then there were Pork Belly Bites – deep fried I assume – melting fat and great crispy skin, with apple sauce.  Made me feel all Arts and Crafts.

 

BLOWIN THROUGH MY MIND ....

If we fret about baby octopi, then how we feel about whitebait? You’d think it must be really bad and wrong to eat all those tiny critters before they’ve had a chance to have fun, to enjoy a meaningful life, and (no doubt most important of all) breed.

Of course, anybody who cares about these things knows that whitebait isn’t a single kind of fish, and in New Zealand (which was the home of most of the websites I found about whitebait sustainability), it’s a term for multiple kinds galaxids, most of them declining or heading for extinction.  This is what galaxids look like:

In the UK whitebait tends to be the young of sprats and herrings – which are more ‘sustainable,’ and arguably this gives us a small environmental superiority, though nothing to get smug about.

I do very much like whitebait, but I don’t know that I like them well enough to kill off one or more species for my selfish needs – which of course applies to anything I might eat.

But perhaps this is too much protest, and whitebait is only on my mind because I went to Turtle Bay, a Caribbean restaurant in Walthamstow, part of a small chain - there was no velvet rope on the night I was there

and without thinking about it very much ordered the seafood platter, containing several starters ‘inspired by beach shack and street vendors across the Caribbean islands. Nothing from Guyana then.  And here you see the whitebait.  There’s other stuff there too, squid, miscellaneous curried fish, a fishy flatbread, and so on, and the whitebait came with a decent jerk mayonnaise.  

Actually the best thing we had was the goat curry, but it wasn’t very photogenic, as you see. 

And I couldn’t even begin to guess about goat sustainability

ENGLISH SCRATCHINGS

You want to know what else I ate while I was in England?  I mean why not, what have you got to lose?

Here’s a bowl of whitebait at Elistano’s, an Italian restaurant in Elystan Street, in Chelsea.  I used to love whitebait when I lived in England, and it seems to be unknown in the States, although the notion of deep fried small fish is hardly very exotic.  So now I always have it whenever I get the chance in England and I’m always somehow vaguely disappointed, but that doesn’t, and won’t, stop me ordering it the next time I get a chance.

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Here are pork scratching’s from Brigade, a “social enterprise” restaurant in Tooley Street on the South Bank.  They say, “We help homeless individuals develop skills and motivation to find employment.”  Which may be so, through the waiters looked more like male models than the homeless but perhaps these two things aren’t mutually exclusive.   The scratchings were very good indeed.

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And here’s the seafood platter for three from the West Mersea Oyster Bar, in Essex.    It was the cockles that really made it for me – and again, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen cockles on a menu in the States, and again I don’t really know why.

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 And here’s the stuffed cabbage from the Daquise in South Kensington, which has been there since 1947 when it was a hub for Polish émigrés.  Later Christine Keeler and Roman Polanski went there.  I hadn’t been for at least twenty years, and although the interior’s been spruced up – in a sort of deliberately distressed way - the menu looked very much the same. I ordered the stuffed cabbage which I know I ordered twenty years ago.  I suspect the food’s become a bit more sophisticated too, without getting at all distressed.  Best thing about the meal: the staff bring the food to the table in saucepans and then dole it out onto your plate – wonderful, simultaneously very sophisticated and very homely.

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And finally here’s the Club Sandwich from Café Opera in the Salts Mill, in Saltaire, on the outskirts of Bradford, where the David Hockney gallery is.  The sandwich contains smoked chicken, bacon, lettuce and tomato, and the potato crisps were really good, though I don’t think they were made on premises.  Best part:  the waitress had one arm tattooed like leopard skin, and I did want to take a picture of that, but I was either too cool or too inhibited, I’m still not sure which.

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