MUCH DEPENDS ON THE LIVER

I’ve been reading an essay by Joseph Mitchell (that’s him above) titled “Obituary for a Gin Mill,” it’s in the collection Up In The Old Hotel.  It’s about Dick’s Bar and Grill, in New York, and is a lament against gentrification.  It first appeared in this issue of the New Yorker in 1939.

I have to say it has the feel of a short story as much as of journalism but I’m not complaining about that.  The premise is that Dick’s was once a fine rough, tough, spit and sawdust establishment, but now Dick has moved into fancy new premises a little way up the street and got ideas above his station. “There is nothing,” Mitchell writes “that will make a gin mill look so cheap and spurious as a modernistic bar and a lot of chairs made of chromium tubing.”  Well that and a menu written in French.  Here’s a short extract.

Even in the old days Dick often put strange things on his mimeographed menu.  He had a friend who worked in a soup cannery up the street and one day the friend gave him a bucket of turtle livers.  Dick put them on the menu.  A customer said, “Well, that’s something I never et.”  He ordered them, and while he ate, Dick watched intently.  When the man put down his fork Dick went over to his table.

         “How were them turtle livers?” he asked.

         The customer deliberated for a moment.

         “Fact of the matter is,” he said, “they were kind of unusual.”

         “Well,” said Dick proudly, “I want you to know you’re the first man in New York to eat turtle livers, so far as I know.”

         The customer shuddered.

Personally I think I should not have shuddered in those circumstances, equally I’m not sure I’d have believed I was the first man in New York ever to eat a turtle liver, but why spoil a good story.  And in any case the point of the anecdote is that when Dick’s gets fancified, the same dish appears on the menu as “Pate de Foie de Tortue Verte.”

If you type “Pate de Foie de Tortue Verte” into Google you get precisely one citation.  It comes, need I say, from the Joseph Mitchell piece.

On the other hand there are plenty of recipes for turtle liver that’s not turned into a pate.  The Peruvians seem especially keen on frying it, and the Japanese favor the hot pot (that's it above).  The North Koreans, it seems, like turtles any old way, though of course a lot of people in North Korea don’t get to eat much of anything.

This from the Korean Central News Agency, February 13^th 2010.

Turtle Dishes Begin to Be Served
Pyongyang, February 13 (KCNA) -- Okryu Restaurant in Pyongyang has begun serving dishes made of snapping turtle on the occasion of the birthday of leader Kim Jong Il, February 16. One can be treated in the restaurant with various kinds of turtle dishes such as turtle soup, raw dishes made of turtle heart, liver or spawn, steamed or fried turtle and turtle porridge. Liquors of famous brands including Pyongyang Soju brewed at the Taedonggang Foodstuff Factory are adding to the taste of the dishes. The dishes are associated with leader Kim Jong Il's loving care for improving the people's diet as required by a thriving nation. He gave meticulous instructions as to turtle breeding and cookery, hoping turtle dishes, good for health, would be served well to the people at restaurants. Refurbished Okryu Restaurant, famous for Pyongyang cold noodles, took the lead in making preparations to successfully realizing the leader's wish. Its employees built a habitat in order to raise turtles on a large scale. They completed a unique cookery for diversified turtle dishes to suit the Korean people's taste through several sampling parties. Along with turtle food the restaurant also delights customers with caviar and other rare dishes. It has a plan to include bullfrog, salmon and other high-grade dishes in its menu.

*

The restaurant, improbably but all too believably, looks like this.

It now has branches in China, Nepal, Thailand and Dubai, which some might think was getting ideas above its station:

SATURNALIAN STUFFINGS

Christmas is coming and I had this really lame but festive idea.  I take it you’re familiar with the turducken: a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken.  And there’s a bunch of stuffing in there as well. 

I had a commercial one a few years back, and I was very glad to be spared the boning and reassembling, and it wasn’t bad, but the real problem was the stuffing.  I guess I’m a bit fussy when it comes to stuffing (I reckon my own is pretty good) and this commercial stuffing (3 different kinds as I remember) was actually pretty poor.  I can’t remember the company that sold it and I don’t want to accuse anybody unfairly.  And it definitely didn’t look nearly as good as this:

Then, the year before last, the Loved One, who in a former life may have been a veterinary surgeon working on the brains of small birds, decided we’d do our own version: that woman just loves deboning.  So we did. 

In fact we’re neither of us madly keen on turkey, so we decided we’d go duck, chicken, Cornish game hen; which I suppose would be a duckenhen; no worse a name than a turducken.

The boning looked like hard work but fortunately my role chiefly involved making the stuffings, which I do believe was better than the commercial varieties. 

It looked pretty good when it was assembled and cooked and before it was carved, but it was a nightmare to slice.  Unless you had a miniature and very precise chain saw I don’t see how you could cut it into attractive slices.  And it certainly tasted good, but even so, in the end, we weren’t sure it was quite worth the effort.

 So this year I had my idea.  Instead of a turducken, how about a potato stuffed with a potato stuffed with a potato?  Potatoes come in all sizes, they come in various colors, why not a white potato stuffed with a purple potato, stuffed with a red potato.  Why not indeed?

A pot-pot-pot-atoe?  A Pot-ato-ato-ato?  It’s not the catchiest of names, I know.

Some hand carving was involved (not actual deboning, though I know the Irish like their potatoes "with the bones in 'em") and I did wish my outermost potato had been bigger, but eventually it all fitted more or less neatly together, and then it was wrapped in foil and baked.

When it was cooked it looked like this, and again I admit again you could imagine more aesthetic arrangements.

And how did it taste?  Well when salt and pepper, and butter and sour cream were slathered on it, it was just fine, but frankly a lump of carpet tile seems not so bad when salt and pepper, and butter and sour cream have been slathered on it.

The flesh of the potato was a bit wet: and that may have been inherent in the potatoes or inherent in my cooking method: I’m prepared to take my share of the blame.  All in all it was one of the more minor triumphs, and yet I can’t help thinking I’m on to something conceptual here, and maybe I’ll come up with a new and improved version before Christmas.  Maybe a potato stuffed with stuffing will be enough, though frankly I doubt it.

LIBATIONS WITH LEROY AND LYNCH

A sign that I may be entering a new phase of my dotage:  I was looking at a picture by LeRoy Neiman recently and I thought, You know, that’s really not so bad.

Plenty of art snobs have sneered at the late Mr. Neiman’s work and I admit I’ve sometimes joined in.  A painter who does a lot of pictures of sportsmen and a lot of work for Playboy really isn’t all that likely to be embraced by the world of high art, and it seems not to have bothered him.  He famously said, ““Maybe the critics are right. But what I am supposed to do about it?”  But the picture that really got to me, was this one:

It shows the bar of the Pump Room in Chicago and was done in 1956.  It’s perfect in its way, and it seems to me that it shows a Platonic ideal of what an American bar should look like, but in reality very rarely does. Turns out Neiman did quite a few bar pictures, including this one of Frank Sinatra at Rao’s in New York.

Now, life being the way it is I went to a local bar here in Los Feliz, in LA, on Sunday afternoon, a place called The Rockwell.  It has an interesting space, a sort of indoor/outdoor patio with a tree growing in the middle.  It was quite fancy but very friendly and it was a very satisfactory place to lose part of a weekend afternoon. It looked more or less like this:

I’ve had quite a few conversations with people about whether you’d rather have good food in an ugly restaurant or bad food in beautiful one.  Of course you want to say the former, but sometimes I’m not so sure.

Of course when it comes to drinking there’s less at stake.  Naturally booze is more expensive in a fancy watering hole than in a dive, but less markedly so than food.  And so the Loved One and I discussed which were the best looking bars we’d ever drunk in. 

We began by admitting that the majority of bars we’d been to had not been chosen on the basis of their attractiveness – we’d gone to them because they were there.  But we agreed that we both used to love a bar called simply ñ (and pronounced enya) in Crosby Street in lower Manhattan – the interior looked like this:

It’s closed now but at least it continues to exist on yelp – where you’ll find this picture - a scene to which LeRoy Neiman could have done justice:

The last place I lived in London was walking distance from a pub called the Warrington.  One story had it that it used to be a brothel, with ladies of the night displaying themselves on that curved staircase.  

And you can just about see a mural at the left above the bar that I guess is Art Nouveau although it also looks a bit like a psychedelic album cover.  It was a genuine local pub and I once I had a conversation with a lad in there who gave me a brief consumer’s guide to the various local prisons in which he’d done time,  “Wormwood Scrubs – it’s like a fuckin' holiday camp,” was his opinion.

I find it hard to believe that David Lynch spends much time in bars, what with all the coffee drinking and the Transcendental Meditation®, and such, but he sure knows what people want in a bar, whether it’s a great neon sign, or a dark space where lights flash, people take their clothes off and the music is pretty great.  I’m describing the creepy, sexy, wonderful club in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.  

Commentators describe it by various names, but in the screenplay it appears like this:

INT.  BORDER TRUCK STOP - NIGHT

         The front room is a bar and restaurant with about THREE PATRONS.

         Above the bar is a sign that reads:

                     CAN - A - DO and U.S. OF FUCKIN' "A"

         The BARTENDER presses a release underneath the counter that allows

         Laura to take her three friends thru a door over which a sign hangs

         announcing in red neon letters:

                                    "PARTYLAND"

135.        INT.  PARTYLAND

         The group enters a large room with the filthiest wall to wall carpet

         imaginable.  In the back corner is a small stage.  On it a three

         piece HELL-METAL BAND is building up toward oblivion.  The LEAD SINGER

         is dressed in a buffalo skin complete with at least half the buffalo

         head and horns.  He wears spray painted, day glow orange cowboy boots.

         Some HALF DRESSED GIRLS and COWBOYS are dancing to the band.  In

         darkened corners away from the stage other groups are racing the

         band to oblivion.

         Laura leans over to Donna noticing her shocked look.

                                       LAURA

                           Don't expect a turkey dog in here.

                                             *

Of course Lynch’s bars are fictional, a matter of cinematic smoke and mirrors, but sometimes the distinction gets blurred.  One of the very best reasons for having a time machine would be to go back to 1966 and visit, as Life magazine described it, “The hottest place in the San Francisco suburb of Sunnyvale.”  

They’re referring to a joint named Wayne Manor.  Life again says it was “named after Batman’s straight self, Bruce Wayne … The Dynamic Duo of Batman and Robin are painted in throbbing colors on the walls, and villains cackle in fluorescence. Behind a plate glass screen, girls dressed like Robin lead the crowd in the Batusi. Batman sells tickets at the front door, the maître d’ is the Joker, and drinks are served by Wonder Woman.” Well yes, maybe, but in the Platonic bar of my dreams I think the drinks are served by Catwoman.