IRONIC MEAT

We've all heard about how intrigued President Obama was on the Letterman show when somebody produced a heart-shaped potato.

As a lot of people have said, heart-shaped potatoes aren't really very rare. But how about this ...

We decided to marinate and roast a lump of tri-tip. Yes, damn the arteries. So we went to the store, bought a slab of meat, and when we got it home it looked like this:


Heart-shaped. Oh the ironies. Though of course it didn't much resemble an actual beef heart, much less a human one.

Then being a smart arse I couldn't help thinking of the theory of signatures, expounded in Medieval and Renaissance herbals, that a benevolent God helped us identify the medical usefulness of plants by making them resemble the body part they were good for; so that lungwort was good for the lungs, walnuts were good for the brain, etc.

However once our meat was cooked it didn't look like a heart at all. It just looked like a piece of beef. Which is OK by me.


There's also been a lot of talk lately about the Buddah pear.


Now I think this is a cheat. The pear doesn't just happen to look that way. It looks that way because it's encased in a plastic mold as it's growing. If you're going start doing things like that, just about any food can be made to look like anything, or anyone.

Meawhile, in southern Croatia a farmer, name of Neda Glibota, had a chicken that laid an egg that looked like this:


"I couldn't believe it had come out of one of my hens," said Neda. "I thought it was some sort of odd-shaped potato."

THE DEGLAZED DETECTIVE

I’ve been reading a dodgy book by Gene D. Phillips, called Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir. Not unreasonably, the author decides to define the term “hard-boiled detective,” at which point the dead hand, and deader prose, of academia asserts itself (this is on page 3).


He writes, “Hard-boiled fiction was so named because the tough detective-hero developed a shell like a hard-boiled egg in order to protect his feelings from being bruised by the calloused and cruel criminal types he often encountered.”


But wait a minute, the shell of a hard-boiled egg isn’t any tougher than the shell of a raw egg, and certainly not any more impervious. It’s the inside, the white and the yolk that get harder with boiling, until eventually they’re as solid as each other all the way through, though still, obviously, not as hard as the shell.


But in any case this metaphor doesn’t remotely describe Philip Marlowe. His shell may be hard, which of course is in the nature of shells, but his center is really soft, gooey and sentimental. In other words he’s a soft-boiled detective.


So I started wondering what other egg cookery metaphors might be available to the creators of fictional detectives, the coddled, the devilled, the Detective en Cocotte. The Art of French Cookery by Escoffier et al lists well over 100 names for egg dishes, though admittedly not all of them work as qualifiers for a sleuth: the Frou-Frou Detective, for example, doesn’t sound like a winner. (As I’m sure you know, Eggs Frou-Frou involves doing immensely complicated things with eggs, Chaud-Froid sauce, and black truffles.) THUS:


But why should detectives be restricted to egg metaphors? A detective who was soft on the outside but hard in the middle would be the Parboiled Detective (like a potato). There’d be the Deep Fried Detective, the Battered Detective, the Flambéed Detective, and (a healthy but angry choice) the Steamed Detective.

Another angry PI would be the Simmering Detective. One who was constantly being interrogated by bad cops would be the Grilled Detective. And of course there’d have to be (a comedy romp, you knew it was coming) the Half-Baked Detective.

Since a great many detectives tend to be boozers, you might also have detectives who were soused, pickled, juiced, potted or stewed.

But in today’s fancified literary and culinary environment we might want a detective who was a little more upscale, who was more of an amuse bouche. How about the Sun-Dried Detective, the Spice-Rubbed Detective, the Detective en Croute? But maybe even these are all a bit old school.

The one that I hope to be pitching to a publisher any day now, is the Molecular Detective (as in molecular gastronomy). He’d be expensive, he wouldn’t address any real problems, and wouldn’t have much taste, but he’d blow an awful lot of nitrous oxide in your face.

FOOD ISSUES

The New York Times ran its Food Issue yesterday. One of the articles was by Michael Pollan (author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma) and titled “Rules to Eat By.”


Apparently Pollan put out the word via a NYT health blog asking readers for “their personal dietary dos and don’ts.” The collected results are coming out in January in a book called “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.”

Now you and I might think is a great way of getting other people to write your book for you, but Pollan says he’s doing it because “in matters of nutrition, culture still has a lot to teach us about How to choose, prepare and eat food.” Well, I wouldn’t stake my life on it, Mike.


What struck me about many of the examples he prints in the article and even more so about the ones online, is they’re incredibly joyless, humorless, pleasure-denying, sometimes downright punishing. Thus:

“No second helpings, no matter how scrumptious”

“Breakfast, you should eat alone. Lunch, you should share with a friend. Dinner, give to your enemy.” That’s from somebody Romanian grandma; oh those happy go lucky Romanians!

“Only eat food that Paleolithic hominids ate.”


“One of my top rules for eating comes from economics. The law of diminishing marginal utility reminds me that each additional bite is generally less satisfying that the previous bite.”

“Eat until you are seven tenths full and save the other three for hunger.”

“If I can’t make it, I won’t eat it.”

Jeez!! Lighten up, people.

I grew up in a working class home in the north of England. My mother was a terrible cook, and didn’t care or pretend to be anything else. Her, unwritten and unspoken rules, were as follows:


“If there aren’t potatoes on the plate then it isn’t a real meal.”

“Anything that comes in a can is better than anything that doesn’t.”


“If the instructions say it needs cooking for twenty minutes, then it’ll be even better if it’s cooked for an hour.”

It was these rules that turned me into a foodie, and an adventurous (rather than accomplished) amateur cook. After my mother’s cooking, anything seemed good.

GOURMET RIP

So, Gourmet magazine is dead. This seems in every way to be a very bad thing. If Gourmet can’t make it, here’s not much hope for anybody else. The fact that it closed despite having a circulation of a million seems truly amazing, but they say it was the lack of advertising that killed it.

I joined in the general mourning, then realized that despite being a foodie and magazine junkie, and despite the obvious truth that Gourmet contained plenty of good writing – by the likes of Jane and Michael Stern, Jonathan Gold, Anthony Bourdain, Jonathan Hayes and (once, spectacularly in “Consider the Lobster”) David Foster Wallace - I realized I didn’t actually buy the magazine all that often.


I asked myself why and dug out, more or less at random, one of the issues I did buy, May 2007, the “Special Travel Issue,” to see if I could find any clues to my lack of purchasing. The cover has various shout lines including “+59 recipes we brought back” “The world’s 36 best food destinations” “43 places to stay” the promise of recipes for cocnt mousse and Brazilian shrimp: frankly I can’t imagine why I bought it in the first places.

But good lord, this 228 page issue is awash with advertising, so much so that it’s actually hard to find the content of the magazine. There are full page color ads for Mercedes, Cartier, Ambien, Botox, the Waldorf Astoria, plus various banks and cruise lines. There’s Andy Garcia shilling for Cadillac, and a tousled Kim Basinger who seems to have been ravished by her Baume & Mercier wristwatch.


Yes, yes I know it’s a special issue, but even so all this rather suggested that I wasn’t precisely the demographic these advertisers were looking for. Admittedly there were one or two food ads, but they seemed very low powered by comparison, Wines from Spain, Cacao Reserve, Kashi. I didn’t feel very at home.

And sure, if you could find them, there were some interesting recipes, for veal rolls and lion’s head casserole. But others were way less interesting; grilled pita with Greek salad, radish-cabbage coleslaw (oh boy!!).

And somewhere there were some genuine food articles, one about a search for truffles in Saudi Arabia: who knew? But elsewhere a certain level of humorless absurdity crept in. An article about Tangier had the sub heading “Paul Bowles was onto something when he decided to stay in Morocco for good. Is there another country or cuisine that’s as fragrant colorful and textured .. ?”


You could argue about the cuisine, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of argument to determine what Bowles was “onto” in Morocco. Safe to say that boys and dope were much higher on his menu than the couscous. Were the readers of Gourmet not supposed to know about that stuff, or was it just too indelicate to mention?

Some of the online reaction suggests that the death of Gourmet is at least partly because of the explosion of food blogging, though it seems to me that blogging is the symptom rather than the disease. Either way, I suppose Cartier, Botox, Ambien et al must now be looking for new places to advertise. The Psycho-Gourmet is here, he’s waiting, he’s ready to prostitute himself.

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.

PRETENTIOUS, EUX?

And just to prove that pretension comes in many forms, I happened to be in Oceanside, near San Diego and saw in the near distance a sign for a place called “Auto Bistro.”

Well, we know things can get eclectic in Southern California. “Bistro” suggested something French-inspired, where you might expect to get a plate of rillettes, some boudin noir and a glass of Chablis.


“Auto” partly suggested a kind of drive through or maybe something like Jack Rabbit Slim’s in Pulp Fiction where they eat in car-shaped booths, but also the old fashioned Automat where you put money in a slot and got a hot pie out of a machine.


As is always the way, I was hoping for too much.


Auto Bistro turned out to be a gas station, and yes you could buy food there, but it was strictly gas station food: hot dogs, potato chips, beef jerky, etc; not a boudin noir in sight, though they did have minute bottles of olive oil for sale.

It revived thoughts of the only TV show I’ve ever thought I could present: The Gas Station Gourmet.

The pitch: I’d go around America in a VW camper, complete with sink, fridge and cooker, go to some down-home, backwoodsy sort of town, visit the local gas station, talk to the folks, buy whatever food they had on sale, and then I’d take it back to the camper where I’d perform culinary miracles. Interested parties should talk to my agent, soonest.

PUBLIC DICKS

I’ve been reading Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel “Inherent Vice.” As mentioned in an earlier post, Pynchon has a fine eye, nose and vocabulary, for bad food.

Doc Sportello, the novel’s private eye hero, and his lawyer Sauncho Smilax, go to a fish restaurant called the Belaying Pin. The waitress, name of Chlorinda, asks what’ll it be.

“Ordinarily I’d go for the Admiral’s Luau,” Sauncho more diffident than Doc expected, “but today I guess I’ll just have the house anchovy loaf to start and, um, the devil-ray filet, can I get that deep-fried in beer batter?’

Doc orders the jellyfish teriyaki croquettes followed by eel Trovatore.

The waitress recommends they drink Tequila Zombies. “You’ll want to be good and fucked up by the time this arrives.”


One of the many lazy things reviewers have said about the book is that it’s “Chandleresque,” which suggests to me they haven’t read either Chandler OR Inherent Vice very closely.


I went back to The Long Goodbye in search of the passage where a melancholy Philip Marlowe goes to Lawry’s because he has a craving for roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Now the fact is I go to Lawry’s once in a while and they do serve not bad Yorkshire pudding, but as I look around the restaurant I never see anybody except me eating it. In the picture below it's that odd thing on the lefthand side, and I gotta say it doesn't look all that appetising.


It doesn’t surprise me that few Angelenos go for the Yorkshire pudding: it seems the least L.A. of all foods. I know Philip Marlowe was no ordinary detective, but somehow it feels like Chandler’s anglophile tastes showing through rather than Marlowe’s.

I also found this passage in the Long Goodbye about American sandwiches:

”I went down to the drugstore and ate a chicken salad sandwich and drank some coffee … the sandwich was as full of rich flavor as a piece torn off an old shirt. Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out the side, preferably a little wilted.”

I’d say that last sentence was just a little overcooked. He might have stopped after the toothpicks: but I’m not going to argue with the great Raymond.


Incidentally, in Inherent Vice, Pynchon can't resist a bit of further food-related mirth - an English rock band called Spotted Dick. Why is it that Americans find spotted dick so hilarious, yet can take noir novels about private dicks effortlessly in their stride? That's a rhetorical question, incidentally.

SCARY MUNCHIES

There are people here in America, and I’m sure elsewhere too, who like to think that England is quaint. Admittedly most of these people have not spent very much, if any time, in England. That’s why they imagine it’s a theme park of mock-Tudor tea rooms and roast beef restaurants, pubs serving hearty fare and good honest fish and chip shops. And these are the people who think they LIKE English food.


There’s also a home-grown fantasy about the classic English caff – there are websites devoted to these. The idea is that these places may be a bit rough, the crockery will be chipped, the cook will be surly, but the fry up will be fantastic. Well, only up to a point. It seems to me, as with George Orwell’s pub The Moon Under Water, that these great cafes are mostly fictional.


For some time while now, as an antidote to the idea that English eateries have charm, I’ve been photographing ones that scare the hell out of me. Maybe the food’s good, maybe it’s not, but in every case they’re a very, very long way from any notion of what a typical English restaurant is, or should be, like. And I guess that's not a bad thing. But who would have thought of, and who wouldn't love, an eaterie combined with a minicab office?


And I realize I said, a couple of posts back, that I thought English food was becoming a mite pretentious. Well not always, obviously.


I loved these “novelty doughnuts,” proof, if proof were needed, that the English don’t always take their food too seriously, and also that the spirit of Martin Parr still exists in the old country.

EATING FOR TWAIN

Safe to say that the otherwise reliable Mark Twain had, at best, conflicted feelings about English pie. A Tramp Abroad from 1880 is admittedly a satire, but when he makes a list of the foods he’s missing this doesn’t sound very satirical. He, or his narrator, misses apple pie, peach pie, American mince pie, pumpkin pie, and squash pie. Most of these, I’d have thought the English would have done reasonably well, though probably not the pumpkin.

He also gives a recipe for “New English Pie”: “To make this excellent breakfast dish, proceed as follows: 
Take a sufficiency of water and a sufficiency of flour, and construct a bullet-proof dough. Work this into the form of a disk, with the edges turned up some three-fourths of an inch. Toughen and kiln-dry in a couple days in a mild but unvarying temperature. Construct a cover for this redoubt in the same way and of the same material. Fill with stewed dried apples; aggravate with cloves, lemon-peel, and 
slabs of citron; add two portions of New Orleans sugars, then solder on the lid and set in a safe place till it petrifies. Serve cold at breakfast and invite your enemy.”

I can’t help thinking he may have gone to the wrong restaurants.

UNAMERICAN PIE

The last time I was in England I was writing a piece for Bon Appetit: I got paid, it didn’t get published – not the worst result. So I went to Simpson’s in the Strand, Fergus Henderson’s St John, Gordon Ramsey’s Maze and Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen – all pretty great except the last – although if you want to pay $200 dollars for a so-so Italian meal, you’ll absolutely love it.


This time I was paying for myself, so I ate a lot of pies. What is it with the English and pies? Why do they do them so well, why do they (I) like them so much? Interesting fact: the first English pies were called coffins.

Well obviously comfort is involved, but why do the Brits find comfort in something the rest of the world views with suspicion?

When I first moved to LA, I became aware of the House of Pies “a slice of heaven on earth” – corner of Franklin and Vermont – frequented by Kirstie Allie among others - and I thought great, I’ll be able to get a Cornish pasty or a cottage pie of a steak and kidney pudding. Yeah, right.


House of Pies is a burger joint – the pies are the desserts – Banana cream, French Blackbottom, Bayou Goo - perfectly good pies if you like that sort of thing but a very long way from the English tradition.


So, once back in England, I tucked into the Cornish pasty seen above, Melton Mowbray pork pies, a home made cottage pie, and this (tastes better than it looks) steak and oyster pie at O’Neill’s Irish pub in Southend on Sea.


However, if you go to Southend what you really want is not pies but seafood: whelks, cockles, jellied eels.

I hadn’t been to Southend in a long while but my memory was that you couldn’t walk ten yards without running into a jellied eel stall. Now the place seems to have been oddly gentrified. The cockle stalls are to be found huddled together within a shell’s throw of each other at Leigh on Sea.


But, and it’s a big but, and I don’t know if my palate has become more sophisticated or less, whether the local cooking methods have changed or improved, but these cockles and whelks, were some of the best I’d ever tasted – subtle, delicate, briny but not salty, and the jellied eels were absolutely, no doubt about it the very best I’d ever had.


I think it would be an odd person who went to England solely for the food; but a man who went there and couldn’t respond favourably to steak, kidney, oysters. eels, whelks and so on: well he’s no person at all in my book. whether Kirstie Allie fits into this category, I'm not sure, (fact is I still think she's pretty hot) but she doesn't quite look like a savory pie girl to me.