THE BULL IS IN THE HEART

 As often as not you can tell a book by looking at its cover; that’s kind of the whole 

point of a book cover.

 

We could debate whether this also applies to potato crisp/chip packets.

I mean, could any anything live up to a packet like this?

 

Is it a bull playing a guitar?  Or is it a human guitarist who’s been changed into a bull?  I honestly can’t say, but I do like it.  The crisps inside looked like this:

 

They were perfectly fine.  Not quite as intense and full on and reminiscent of a minotaur as they might have been, but perfectly fine. 

 

The Superbon website says, ‘Superbon crisps are produced in the Madrid region, home to the beating heart of the crisp world: the Chueca district.’

 

I didn’t even know the crisp world had a heart.

 

GET YER FRITAS OUT

Photo by Luna Goodyear Smythe

If Santa’s going to bring you a stocking filler, what could be better than a large quantity of potato crisps? And if they come in an elegant tin, then so much the better.  Of course it would be a mighty big stocking that could accommodate such a tin but that’s the magic of Christmas innit?

It’s a serious business, as you see from the photo above at the top, but open the can and things cheer up considerably.

These in fact are Spanish crisps or, to get bilingual, ‘patatas fritas’ and they’re fried in 100% olive oil (aciete de olive) – there’s sea salt in there too.  In general I think the best crisps (chips) are fried in lard and usually come from Pennsylvania (op cit elsewhere in this blog) but the Spanish result is pretty great; light and crisp (as is only right) and very satisfying, by which I mean that you don’t have to eat a ton of ‘em to feel satisfied (depending, naturally, on how easily you’re satisfied).

The company that makes them is Bonilla a la Vista.  Their website says ‘DEVOTION IS OUR MAIN INGREDIENT - Bonilla a la vista is always with you during your daily moments of enjoyment: after work with your friends, with some beers at the pub, during a youngster’s birthday celebration, when you sit in the sand and feel the sea breeze after a session of surfing… special and unique moments.’

I shall keep that in mind after my next session of surfing.  In the meantime, this is a picture of their factory, a little less artisanal than I’d imagined, but evidently none the worse for that.

Also it appears that Bonilla a la Vista has friends all over the world, or at least in South Korea.

MORE SPUD LORE

So I went back to Franklin and Company to have their waffle cut duck fries.  They were good, although you could easily have imagined something gamier and more duck-intense.  I suppose I was thinking of goose fat, which I know costs more than duck fat, though I’m not entirely sure why: roast yourself a goose and the fat just pours out - enough to   satisfy most of your fat needs for at least the next year.

Even so, it’s really it’s all about the potatoes, and my idea for a grand and quixotic book titled something like The Secret Life of the Spud hasn’t been completely abandoned.  And so, being the freewheeling researcher that I am, I Googled “potato+porn.” In a world of “food porn” and “ruin porn” I thought this might be quite innocent, and in the main it was.  

There’s even a (rather neglected) tumblr site:  
http://potatopornpotatoporn.tumblr.com
It has very few words, though there are links to recipes and pictures like this one:

But the world being as it is, my googling also brought up quite a few pictures (more of men that of women) doing ill-advised things with potatoes – pretty much the opposite of eating them.  Here is a more decorous image (which I suppose is actually selling the handbag), by James Piatt and Ted Walton, though those names took some finding.

And I did discover that there’s a (completely unpornographic) Potato Museum in Munich - Das Kartoffelmuseum.  I’ve been to Munich – how did I miss that?  In that museum they have one of these things:

       It’s a ceremonial vessel, dedicated to, possibly in the shape of,  "Axomama" – the Andean potato goddess.  There’s a lot to be said about these things, and The History and Social Influence of the Potato by Radcliffe Salaman says a fair amount: human sacrifice and mutilation of the upper lip seem to have been involved.

       It now seems that I might not get to the Idaho Potato Museum, after all, so here’s a picture of their prime exhibit, what they say is the world’s largest potato chip, measuring 25 inches across - though in fact as you can see, it’s actually a giant Pringle: 

Now I’d have thought Pringles were so “constructed” you could make them any size you wanted. Why stop at 25 inches? You could have one ten feet across.  But more than that, the Honorable Justice Warren, British High Court Judge, has declared that Pringles do not met the legal definition of a “potato crisp” at all, since they’re made from potato flour, corn flour, wheat starch and rice flour together with fat and emulsifier, salt and seasoning, with a potato content of a mere 42%.  Quite right, Judge.

EATING UNPECULIARLY

And of course while in England I ate what the English would call potato crisps, and what my American neighbors would call potato chips.  I selected these two as a couple of interestingly similar examples - both sausage and mustard flavour.

You’ll notice that Corkers don’t immediately declare themselves to be either crisps OR chips, but rather “Natural British Crunch” which sounded to me like a euphemism for some sort of chemical construct, although the promise of East Anglian spuds on the packet was vaguely reassuring, and indeed potato crisps is what they are.

Both varieties definitely seem to be peddling some dubious version of British nostalgia.  Corkers have silhouettes of phone boxes, Minis, cricket bats and whatnot.   Tyrell’s have happy girls, perhaps from the farm, perhaps from the factory, and they tell us, just in case we’ve been living in a bunker for the last 30 years, that crisps go well with a pint of ”ale.”

I can’t say I’d ever heard of Ludlow sausage – there’s no mention in Antony and Araminta Hippisley Coxe’s Book of Sausages  (which is my bible in these matters) but of course it’s declared online that they’re part of a long and noble tradition.  This may just possibly be true.

In any case I didn’t get a strong sausage taste from the Tyrell’s, more of an all-purpose savory flavor, and they were perfectly fine, and no doubt better still with ale (perhaps in a flagon for old time’s sake).  The list of ingredients runs as follows, “Potatoes, Sunflower Oil, Sausage and Wholegrain Mustard Flavour (Lactose, Sugar, Salt, Mustard Powder, Yeast Extract Powder, Onion Powder, Sage, Spice Extract, Pork Powder, Citric Acid, White Pepper, Garlic Powder, Flavouring, Colour: Paprika Extract)” which leaves me wondering whether there’s any actual meat or sausage in the mix.  Again, I had never heard of pork powder, but I now know it’s a pork-free seasoning, containing hickory smoke, dried jalapeno and a bunch of other things.

Corkers tasted far more like the real deal.  There was a big tangy burst up front, which I suppose was the mustard, though if I’d had to guess I might have said it was vinegar, and then at the end there really was a genuine, intense, lingering pork taste.  How they managed that, I’m still not sure.  The pack lists as the ingredients as “Potatoes, Sunflower Oil, Yeast Extract Powder, Potato Starch, Whey Powder (from Milk), Salt, Wheatflour, Sugar, Spices (including Mustard), Natural Flavourings, Herbs, Onion Powder, Natural Colour: Paprika.”  So again no obvious presence of meat or sausage, unless sausage can be construed as a “natural flavouring.”

And finally, for those who want to believe that British food is a series of unnatural shocks that flesh is heir to, may I present the Very Peculiar Marmite chocolate bar. 

Now, I think anyone who goes out of their way to proclaim peculiarity is already trying too hard, and so it was here.  It really wasn’t very peculiar at all.  It tasted fine, rather like one of those bars of chocolate with sea salt.  I got the savoriness, and once you know it’s Marmite then you can taste it quite clearly, but really I’m not sure I’d have got it in a blind tasting.

The problem I think is that it’s 98% chocolate and only 2% Marmite, and I reckon 2% is way too low.  As a man who tends to have both chocolate and Marmite in the house I shall be doing some experimenting – 3 per cent, 5 per cent, spreading Marmite thickly across a chocolate bar as though it were a slice of toast.  Hey – don’t judge me!

SWEET AND SOUR SPUDS

Every time I go to India Sweets and Spices, my local Indian supermarket, I end up buying some kind of subcontintental potato chip/crisp.  This seems a reasonable thing to buy, since the Indians obviously have a pretty good way with potatoes, whether it be Bombay aloo or sukhi bharji or wada pav.

That’s a wada pav above (spellings vary), essentially a potato sandwich, and to those of us who grew up in the north of England eating chip butties, it seems both natural and comparatively sophisticated.

The Indians also have perfected the aloo paratha: unleavened dough into which spicy potatoes have been incorporated, then rolled out and cooked on a griddle   with butter or ghee.  That’s the “proper” method anyway, but I once had a version in an Indian Restaurant in London, that was an ordinary unstuffed paratha that had simply been folded over and heap of mash shoved inside.  I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing.

So yes, I’m always optimistic when I buy my Indian potato snacks, but they always turn out to be strange and disappointing. 

Take those curious little suckers above - Anand Potato Chips (Masala), masala being a term that doesn’t meant much more than mixed spices, and spicy they were, in fact they were so hot that the aftertaste was as though you’d shaken chili pepper directly into your mouth.  But at least they had a crispness about them.

Another attempt was Mo’pleez Spicy potato chips (above), masala again, which delivered the experience of eating dry, tasteless crackers that had been left in a drawer for a couple of months.  Mo’pleez is a terrific name but my real feeling and that of people I shared them with was “no mo’ ever again, thank you.”

Still hope springs eternal, and when I had the chance to try three different varieties of potato “wafers,” manufactured by Balaji Wafer Pvt. Ltd, based in Gujurat, and according to their website, “In year 2003 Balaji Group took pride to introduce this biggest fully automated Potato processing machinery plant in India which can process 4500 kg. potato and make 1200 kg. of chips per hour.”  Impressive.

         The three flavors, as you see, were Simply Salted, Cream and Onion, and Magic Masala (of course).  Simply salted was a little too simple for my tastes, and perhaps lacking in salt, and the Cream and Onion was not bad at all, though common or garden all-America sour cream would have been zestier.  But the Masala: oh my, I’d never tasted anything quite like it.

I’d try one and think, what is that flavor, Mint? I’d try another.  Was that sugar? Chutney? Well, there was no mint, but sugar was third on the list of ingredients, after potatoes and vegetable oil, and I think the thing that was mostly responsible for the taste was the dry mango powder.  I found the result sort of cloying and vaguely unpleasant.  We know that mango chutney is a staple of Indian cookery, and something that by and large I like with an Indian curry, but not so much as a coating for spuds. 

Still, they are no doubt made with local Indian tastes in mind, and if there seems to be something vaguely absurd about potato snacks that have had to travel 9000 miles (the locavores would be horrified) no doubt there are many Indian immigrants in LA who think these snacks are worth every bit of the effort.

In general I’m with the local lobby, nevertheless, having been down to the (somewhat) local branch of World Market I’ve just bought a six pack of exotic beers and ciders from around the world (sold for a pretty reasonable $1.99 each.  Consequently I’ve been enjoying some Einstock Olgero, Icelandic white ale, featuring “the complex flavors of a classic Witbier, including orange peel and coriander.”   I couldn’t detect the coriander but the orange was definitely there, and I was pretty happy with that.  The mavens over a RateBeer.com don’t seem to like it a whole lot but I thought it was pretty good, though that may have had something to do with the tequila chaser, made by Sauza, a company located in the municipality of Tequila, in the state of Jalisco in Mexico.  The tequila glass, incidentally, was bought in Jalisco, in Guadalajara.  How international can you get?  

THE FALL OF CHEESE

I was following one of my other mild obessessions, Mark E. Smith of the Fall, and I came across this quotation from the great man, “Blue cheese contains natural amphetamines. Why are students not informed about this?”

I guess he thinks they should be told so they can run out and buy a couple of pounds of Gorgonzola, although frankly I’d have thought good blue cheese was more expensive than most amphetamines. Admittedly this isn’t really my area.



Obviously Mark E. Smith is a fine character and he certainly knows his way around pharmaceuticals, but I still wasn’t convinced that there’s speed in blue cheese. A bit of research was required.

Smith is not alone in his belief. In fact, according Dr Neil Barnard author of Breaking the Food Seduction, “Cheese holds … drug-like compounds … It contains an amphetamine-like chemical called phenylethylamine, or PEA, which is also found in chocolate and sausage.” (The spelling is more usually phenethylamine, apparently.)



That seems to be saying it occurs in all cheese, not just the blue varieties.

And further research does indeed leave little doubt that phenethylamine-like chemicals do indeed occur in cheese, and phenethylamine is part of the same happy family as methamphetamine and MDMA (aka Ecstasy). There are plenty of sources online that will sell you the stuff as a diet aid.

Other sources say that phenethylamine is usually inactive when it’s taken orally because the body quickly breaks it down, and significant amounts never reach the brain.

So, eating huge quantities of blue cheese, it turns out, is unlikely to speed up your metabolism and give you that lean hungry, meth-head look, but I suppose we might have guessed that.



The best food story about Mark E. Smith appears in Stuart Maconie’s book “Cider With Roadies.” Maconie is in Smith’s flat after a boozy night out and Smith asks if he wants something to eat and Maconie says sure, so Smith goes into the kitchen and bangs around for twenty minutes or so and then comes out carrying two plates of potato crisp sandwiches (that’s potato chips in American parlance).

And because Smith is a good host, he asks Maconie, “Do you want a pickled onion with that?” I know I would have.