LUNCHEON ON THE ASTROTURF

There’s one thing that’s probably even less satisfying, and far more trouble, than breakfast in bed, and that’s the torturous ritual known as the picnic.

Eating outdoors in itself is fine - whether it’s sitting on a park bench eating a sandwich or on the terrace of an outdoor restaurant - but once you call it a picnic there’s all that organization, all that business with hampers and special plates and cutlery rugs. It sucks the fun right out of it.

I’ve been thinking about this because the current issue of Gatronomica also has a piece about the later years of Lee Miller. We all know about her days as model and muse, and then as war photographer, but who knew that she ended up living on a farm in east Sussex, married to Roland Penrose and engaging in “defiant” cookery”? Well, many people I suppose, but not me.

I found myself thinking about that famous photograph Miller took in Picasso’s garden, in 1937, titled “Picnic at Mougins.” See below.

© Lee Miller Archives, England 2010. All rights reserved. www.leemiller.co.uk

The cast, left to right, is made up of Nusch and Paul Eluard, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin. It’s always seemed a little dubious that the women are topless and the men fully clothed, something to do with the male gaze, artists and models, nature and culture. And the fact that it’s all a knowing nod towards Manet’s “Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe” doesn’t really change things much.

Knowing that the photograph is taken by a woman, changes things just a little, but of course Lee Miller was never exactly reluctant to take her top off, and I just discovered this picture (below) of the occasion, taken by Roland Penrose, proving that, yes she was nude model as well as photographer.

© Roland Penrose Estate, England 2010.The Roland Penrose Collection. All rights reserved.


“Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe” has surely been parodied and pastiched more than any painting except for the Mona Lisa; in other paintings, in photographs, cartoons and album covers and whatnot. Even Picasso had a crack at it.



I’ve been peering at reproductions of Manet’s original, trying to see what they actually had to eat at their picnic. It’s hard to tell. There’s bread and fruit, but I can’t identify all those fruits, and perhaps surprisingly, there’s no wine. And certainly there isn’t any eating going on – they obviously have other things on their minds.

At least it looks as though the Lee Miller crowd have eaten well, and had a bottle or two of wine, but since their plates are conspicuously empty we don’t know what was on the menu. In the Penrose picture some of the plates have been cleared away. They also, of course, have a table, which seems way, way too much trouble for a picnic.

I have only one picnic picture from my own life, fully clothed, here with my mother somewhere in Lincolnshire in the late 1960s, and although my mother’s having a cup of tea – in a real china cup note, - I’m very conspicuously not have anything at all. Even then I probably thought it was too much trouble.




And just to add, the Lee Miller Archives have been more than fair and generous in allowing me to use the relevant images.  They have asked me to add the information that "The home of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, Farley Farm House in East Sussex is open for guided tours being April and October each year.  Please contact Kate: 01825 872856 "  I am very happy to do so.

THE WHITE STUFF

An article of mine, about my mother’s all-white eating habits, has just appeared in the new issue of Gastronomica: a great magazine.

The article doesn’t appear in their online version, so here it is in full.
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EATING WHITE


Today I ate lunch in memory of my mother. She died about a decade ago, and every once in a while I feel the need to replicate the kind of lunch she and I ate together many times. The meal consisted of a cheese sandwich, made with white Cheshire cheese on white bread, along with a glass of cold milk. If this seems a rather pallid and unexciting meal, then that’s exactly the way my mother would have wanted it.

Since I grew up, and my mother lived all her life, in northern England, and since I now live in Los Angeles, this memorial meal of mine may have lacked some authenticity. Cheshire cheese, available at any grocery store in England, is considered quite a delicacy here in California, and I had to make a trip to a specialty cheese store. To be fair, not all the Cheshire cheese sold in England is of very high quality. At its best Cheshire cheese is simultaneously moist, crumbly, sweet and tangy. When it’s not at its best it’s just bland: again, my mother would have had no problem with that.


The bread I grew up eating in England has no exact American equivalent: Wonder Bread may be the nearest. Ours was called Mother’s Pride, and although I don’t think my mom was naive enough to think she was fulfilling her maternal duties by buying this brand, I know she appreciated its softness and its snowy whiteness. These days I’m a wholemeal man, but I admit there’s still some guilty pleasure to be had in eating a slice of processed, factory-produced white bread, especially spread with pale, salted butter, the way my mother ate it.

As for the glass of milk, full fat of course (my mother would not have seen the point of any other kind) well, that has much of the guilt and very little of the pleasure. If you grew up in England at a certain time in history, your school, on behalf of the government, provided you with a daily dose of “school milk” and we were led to believe we had a moral duty to drink it. The kids who didn’t like milk were regarded as a bit strange. If any of them were lactose intolerant they certainly kept quiet about it.


Today, of course, I worry about my cholesterol as much as the next man. My mother entertained no such worries. She loved milk, and she loved cream even more; milky coffee, milk puddings, creamy soups, creamy sauces, vanilla ice cream. Perhaps it was because she’d been through World War Two, a time when milk was one of the many things rationed in England, a time when there were bigger things to worry about than cholesterol. But I don’t think it was the historical associations, and I’m not even sure it was the taste of milk that she really liked. I think it was the colour. She just loved white food.


My mother wasn’t, and never had any ambitions to be, a good cook, but she did care about keeping my father fed and happy. These two things weren’t absolutely synonymous, but they were inextricably linked, and so she became the cook he wanted her to be, which meant that she provided heavy, overcooked, tasteless English food.


I don’t suppose my father’s eating habits were especially strange for a white, working class man of his generation. He liked meat and potatoes in large quantities. Vegetables were present but irrelevant, dessert was essential but it didn’t have to be fancy. He didn’t want “adventure” in his eating. He wanted slabs of pork and beef, sausages, pies, suet puddings.
Of course these are not primarily white foods, but there were other areas where my mother could sometimes satisfy both her own and my father’s tastes. She made excellent creamy mashed potatoes, for instance. She made cod, stewed with onions in milk: tripe was served exactly the same way, and it was a long time before I realized tripe wasn’t a kind of fish. She cooked cauliflower and served it with a white cornflour sauce. She served blancmange, custards, store-bought cream cakes.


You might have thought that chicken would have been a natural menu item, but we never ate it. My father had briefly worked on a farm when he was a boy and had developed a violent aversion to poultry. Equally, although it was permissible to eat rice in a sweet rice pudding, we couldn’t eat it in savory form: my father hinted darkly at rice-related experiences he’d had in Ceylon during the war, intense and too terrible to be spoken of. As for pasta, well I think it never really crossed my father’s mind that a man like himself would ever eat pasta.


I now know that my mother must have been incredibly eager to eat chicken, rice and pasta, because she started cooking them for herself the moment my father died. When she cooked them for me - I’d long since left home by then - I dropped broad hints that they might be improved by adding a few herbs and spices, but my mother’s pantry contained no seasonings except salt and pepper, and will it surprise you that she favored packaged, ground white pepper? Anything else would have adulterated the whiteness.


My mother was a Catholic: my father and I were not. Although she wasn’t a church-goer except at Christmas and Easter, I’ve often wondered whether she made some connection, unconscious perhaps, between food and purity: white food meant a white soul. Perhaps that’s a little too obvious. And I’m sure you could speculate about why she should want to become “purer” after my father’s death, but I shan’t. Whatever the reason, white foods were her idea of comfort food, and it seemed to me at the time, and still does now, that as a widow in her late sixties my mother was entitled to seek comfort wherever she wanted.


Today there is a “no white food” movement, an all-too-simple to follow diet that avoids white products, partly on the basis that potatoes, pasta, rice and bread are wicked carbohydrates, and partly because the whiteness of sugar and flour, for instance, is a sign that the food has been processed, bleached, made unnatural. There seems to be a lot of good sense in this line of thought, but it’s one that would have had no effect whatsoever on my mother. She wouldn’t touch brown sugar or brown flour.


I think we can probably say that my mother’s white diet didn’t, in itself, kill her. She had a pre-existing heart condition, caused by rheumatic fever in childhood, but I think we can also be fairly sure that it didn’t do her health much good. She was found in a chair in her living room by a neighbor one Sunday morning. Her heart had apparently given out some time the previous afternoon. The sliced chicken loaf that she always bought from the local deli counter for her Saturday evening meal, a sort of “high tea,” was found uneaten in the fridge.

My mother had never discussed what kind of funeral she wanted: she and I didn’t have that sort of conversation. By default, and far from sure that I was doing the right thing, I found myself organizing, then attending, a full-blown Catholic funeral. Inevitably I was rather lost when it came to the finer points of ritual, but in due course I found myself joining the line of those receiving holy communion. A thin white wafer was placed on my tongue by the priest. As it dissolved slowly in my mouth I felt that my mother might have approved of the blandness, but she would surely have wanted something smooth and creamy to help it go down.


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GOOD IN PARTS

I was thinking about breakfast in bed, and wondering why it’s never as much fun as it ought to be. I think it has something to do with being afraid of spilling juice or cereal or getting crumbs in the bed. Admittedly this is less of a problem if you’re in somebody else’s bed but even so …

Then I came across the above picture of Marilyn Monroe. She’s putting a raw egg into her glass of milk, raising the possibility of getting egg shells and uncooked albumen between the sheets which seems even worse.

From Marilyn Monroe it was a short step to thinking about J. Edgar Hoover, not least because a new biography’s just been published called, “Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties” by Kenneth D Ackerman.

Breakfast, like everything else in the Hoover household must have been a difficult business. He lived with his mother in Washington and they argued a lot. His niece Margaret reports, “His favorite breakfast was a poached egg on toast, and if that egg was broken he wouldn’t eat it. It went back to the kitchen and another egg was prepared.”


So far I have some sympathy with this. A bad egg is far worse than no egg. However, even when the egg was perfect, Margaret continues, “he’d eat one bite of it, then cut it up and put the dish on the floor for (the dog) to finish up.” This must have caused no end of bad feeling in the kitchen.

Hoover’s eccentricity made me think Sir George Sitwell, father of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell. You could spend a lot of time arguing whether George was eccentric or simply nuts, but he certainly had curious and fixed views on just about everything and was an inventor, who came up with the Sitwell Egg.


This was actually one of his more reasonable ideas, a variation on the Scotch egg, which is sausage meat wrapped around a hard boiled egg with breadcrumbs on the outside. The Sitwell Egg contained smoked meat as its “yolk,” surrounded by a “white” of compressed rice, the whole thing contained in a “shell” of artificial lime, whatever that might be. The story is that he arrived unannounced at Selfridge’s and got an appointment with the owner, Gordon Selfridge, and said, “I’m George Sitwell and I’ve brought my egg.” It never caught on.

All of which brings me back to a story my wife likes to tell about when she was a kid her grandmother asked her is she knew how to make breakfast more nutritious, when she said she no, her granny replied triumphantly, “You put an egg in your beer.”

CAUL OF THE WILD

Did you ever read one of those recipes that starts, “Take a pig’s caul” ?

Often they appear in the same kind of recipe that says, “Make friends with your butcher.” I’ve never found a butcher who wanted to be befriended, but a couple of weeks back I did find a source for caul. So we went and bought one, and then we got it home and thought. “Oh, OK, what do we do with it now?”


A riffle through the recipe books suggested it was great as a kind of sausage skin or the wrapping for a crepinette, or venison and quail pate, but alas we didn’t have any venison or quail just lying around waiting to be turned into pate.


So we dug out an old Saveur recipe - white fish, shrimp, green onions, water chestnuts, coriander - pureed in a food processor, wrapped in a piece of caul, battered, then and deep fried.


We did it. It went pretty well, tasted pretty good, but you know it wasn’t the great thing we were hoping for.


We realized we were attracted to the notion of “taking a caul” rather than to what a caul might actually be or what it might taste like.

This is a familiar phenomenon, like “First catch your hare” sometimes attributed to Hannah Glasse, sometimes to Mrs Beeton, though apparently it’s not to be found in either. It just sounds good.

Or there’s “Take Buttock of Beef” which again may or may not be from Hannah Glasse and is also the title of a book by Verity Isitt.

I thought Apicius might be good at this sort of thing and I found his recipe for “Aliter Sala Cattabia Apiciana” a name that doesn’t quite say it all. You take Picentine bread, Vestine cheese, chicken meat and goat’s sweet bread, put that in a mould, pour a wine and herb dressing over it, and then (and here’s the line), “Cool in snow and serve.”


It’s not even clear what’s being cooled, you or the dish. Either would be just fine, I’m sure

THE BIG CHILLED SOUFFLE

And speaking of the memorialization of meals, as I was a couple of posts back, I managed to dig out the above menu from my (Oh god was it really so long ago) 21st birthday dinner. It was cooked by the college chefs of Caius College, Cambridge where I was studying English literature and sexual frustration.

Understandably enough, I don’t have very clear memories of the food, but coq au vin sounds like the kind of thing the college kitchen did fairly well, and whitebait was regarded as pretty fancy fare at the time. As for Soufflé Milanese I had no memory of it whatsoever, had no idea what it was, and I found it amazing that the kitchen would take on the delicate task of serving 20 or so soufflés.



As you see, the people at the meal signed the menu, which is where this whole memorialization thing falls down. These people were my best friends, along with their boyfriends and girlfriends, but I look at those signatures now and I only have the vaguest idea who they all are.

I remember Alison but I’d forgotten her surname was Thomas, and Julian Roberts must have been a boyfriend of Sue Douglas. There’s a Pauline and a Geraldine and I think one of them went out with Neil Reeve, but I wouldn’t swear to it. And as for the person who signed herself Hemline, I have absolutely no idea who that could be.


So I decided to make a Soufflé Milanese. I didn’t really think it would result in a Proustian unlocking of memory, but I reckoned it could do no harm. Recipes are in short supply, even on the internet, but the big thing I discovered about Soufflé Milanese is that it’s a cold lemon soufflé. That makes far more sense, far more the kind of thing the Caius kitchen would take on.

I’m not keen on doling out recipes, especially since they not my own, but a soufflé Milanese is really pretty simple. You take a bain marie and beat up 2 egg yolks, a cup of sugar, the juice and zest of two lemons and stir in some gelatin. Once that’s thickened you add half a pint of whipped cream, and fold in two beaten eggs whites. Then you put it in the fridge to set. Easy and it tastes great.


The recipe I was (sort of) following suggested sprinkling slivered almonds on top (see above), and I made a couple that way, but I can’t imagine the Caius kitchen would have done that, so I then I made some without (see below).


I served my Soufflés Milanese in glasses from the Geoff Nicholson martini glass collection. I’m absolutely certain the Caius kitchen didn’t have these. I’d definitely have remembered.

WHEN JULIE MET SACHER

On the night that Meryl Streep was winning a Golden Globe for her performance as Julia Child in “Julie and Julia” I happened to be watching it at last on DVD. It was every bit as clever and dumb as you expect a Nora Ephron movie to be.

Apart from Streep’s performance, which really is a wonder, two things stood out for me.

First, that when Julie cooks lobsters the music on the soundtrack is Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” You can see how that might please a man who writes a blog called Psycho-Gourmet.


In fact that story of Julie Powell and her blog is the ultimate blogger’s fantasy. You sit there pounding away, thinking nobody’s reading, nobody cares, but they do, they do! They care so much they’re going to send your money and turn your work into a movie. Of course this is pretty much the same as every writer’s fantasy.

Secondly, in the movie, Julie, or at least the actress playing her (Amy Adams) insisted on pronouncing “boeuf” (as in boeuf bourguignon) as “boof.” I did briefly wonder whether this was some oblique reference to the movie “La Grand Bouffe” in which 4 Parisians move to the country to kill themselves with food and sex. Food, which is supposedly a touchstone of civilization becomes an agent of degradation. Not obvious Nora Ephron territory.

It seemed unlikely until I found an interview Julie Powell did with Salon, to promote her new book “Cleaving” which is about butchery and masochistic sex.

“Why this kind of sex?” she asks aloud. “Why this kind of sex? Everybody thinks about getting tied up and tickled with a feather every now and then—but in terms of that real craving, where was that coming from? … I think that the butchering has the same kind of uncomfortable dynamic. There are knives; the men are very strong; the meat is dead.”


I know this book is getting an absolute kicking, even from the people who liked Julie and Julia, perhaps especially from them, but frankly it makes me like Julie Powell a whole lot more. Hard to imagine Amy Adams being cast in the movie of that one, but I hear Sasha Gray is always up for a challenge. She’s an existentialist too, you know.

TASTE MEMORY

About six months ago the Loved One and I were invited to dinner at Benedikt Taschen’s house, the Chemosphere. These are always daunting but ultimately fun events. Daunting because you never know whether it’s going to be Benedikt, his lovely wife Lauren and a few low key pals, or whether you’re going to find yourself in conversation with Ed Ruscha.

When we arrived there was some guy I’d never seen before taking photographs, but that wasn’t surprising, and even when he started asking people to stand in certain groups for the sake of a better composition, well that didn’t seem so very odd. Which was why it took me such a long time to realize we were being photographed for a magazine.


This meal we were having in the middle of the summer was going to be featured in Food and Wine magazine as their New Year’s Party for the new decade. I certainly wished I’d worn something more December-ish.

The meal was cooked by John Shook and Vinny Dotolo, the two dudes who run the LA restaurant Animal. They’re pretty serious about meat. Their menu is likely to feature rabbit, sweetbreads and oxtail poutine, and I couldn’t help thinking they’d been asked to dial things back a bit for the magazine.


The meal and the company were excellent. But here’s the thing, most often when you have a meal, even a very good one, the memory you retain is essentially imprecise, an overall impression and a few details. In the case of this meal, I could certainly remember that we had some smoked fish for a starter and then an interestingly cooked steak. Beyond that I’d have been struggling.


But then the magazine was published, and thanks to the article, I can tell you exactly what we had; smoked-trout salad with avocado, endive and red grapefruit, skirt steak with paprika butter served with a sunchoke-kale hash with faro, and for dessert there was lemon-curd cakes with lemon syrup and poppy seed cream (I’d completely forgotten about them until I saw the article). Not only that, by consulting the magazine I could even give you the exact recipes.

I can also tell you what wines we had, although at the time I had no idea I was drinking 2006 Bibi Graetz Bugia, made from Ansonica grapes from an island off Tuscany. I wished I’d paid more attention.

So now the meal is secure in my memory. And this, I think, is seriously odd. People are always being asked about their most memorable meals, and this New Year’s meal has become mine, not because the details are particularly intense, but because they’re right there in print. I wonder what Proust would make of that?

The photographs are by John Kernick. I rather assumed I’d end up on the cutting room floor, but there I am in the picture below, marked by the arrow. It’s me, really.

RABAN & PALIN: THE DOUBLE ACT

There’s a dementedly bilious piece in the latest New York Review of Books in which Jonathan Raban takes on (reviews isn’t really the word) Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue.”

Now there are many, many good reasons to dislike Sarah Palin, and Raban shares all these, but because he’s determined to hate every single thing about her, he also has to denounce her eating habits.

He starts out fairly persuasively. In her book Palin says she shops at Costco, eats generic peanut butter and dislikes “fancy food.” This of course is a form of fakery. Even if it’s true, the objection is that she attaches moral superiority to it, as if people who eat non-generic peanut butter are hideous wastrels. the kind of folks who might end up on death panels.


But where Raban really loses it is in denouncing her for liking meat. He quotes her: “I especially love moose and caribou,” she writes, “I always remind people from outside our state that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals – right next to the mashed potatoes.” Call me a bad person but I found myself sniggering at this, although if we really want to get picky, I do believe there are people in the world who might consider moose and caribou “fancy food.”


In any case it surely doesn’t deserve Raban’s assessment that she has a “sarcophagous appetite for flesh and slaughter.” Since sarcophagous means nothing more than flesh-eating, he’s actually saying she has a flesh eating appetite for flesh. Well she would since she’s a flesh eater, wouldn’t she? Just like many, many millions of people in the world, not all of them imbodiments of pure evil.

But the real thing to say is, Raban, dude, lighten up. The woman cracked a halfway funny joke. Even loathsome politicians, or their script writers, are sometimes allowed to crack halfway funny jokes.

Raban is so filled with rage, that he almost (and that’s a big almost) makes you want to see the good in Sarah Palin. For a hysterical moment I wondered whether this was the point, that he was a double agent trying to create sympathy for Palin. But no, nobody could be that demented, could they?