COOKING WITH DEVICES

As you may have seen in a comment below from Jonathan Gold, somebody has already come up with an acetylene torch-like cooking device: the Searzall by Booker and Dax.  As yet it seems to be just a Kickstarter project, but they’ve already raised $226,425.

The Searzall, they say “Turns a blowtorch into a hand-held supercharged instant-power broiler. Sears fish, sous-vide, pizza, cheese, foie, and everything else.  The Searzall is a revolutionary hand-held cooking tool for the professional and home cook. It gives you the power of raw fire but also the ability to moderate and control that power. It's a carefully engineered attachment that fastens onto a common blowtorch and shapes and moderates the torch flame to make it far more cooking and flavor-friendly. The Searzall puts the power of a bed of hot coals in the palm of your hand – instantly.”  One could go on.  And they do.

Anyway, this got me thinking about toasting forks.  Back in the day at university, we used to stick a fork in a piece of bread then hold it in front of the flames of a gas fire until it made toast.  This, I suppose, in many ways is the reverse of the Searzall, and in any case it probably wouldn’t have worked so well with foie gras.

Of course we used ordinary domestic forks, but there are some very elegant toasting forks out there, both antique and modern.  And I must say that in the rooms of Tree Court we never got as far as toasting crumpets.  But I think we should have.

And now I just got an email from Sam Bompas, of Bompas and Parr fame, and wouldn’t you know it, as is their way, they’ve been taking things too far.  They’ve been cooking with lava. Yep, you heard right.

Sam writes, “Here's Harry cooking with lava last week at Syracuse University. Prof Robert Wysocki has over-clocked a copper smelter and we're working with him on a larger public gustatory event. The team there are brilliant. As the rock is heated to 2100F it cooks pretty quickly. They've done 100 pours but this was the first time the heat has been used to cook. Totally the funnest thing we've done all year.”

And the year is scarcely half over.  All of which makes smoking a duck in my “Masterbuilt electric smokehouse” (as I did over the weekend) seem a very modest enterprise indeed.  But believe me, that’s one heck of a good duck.

WELL, IF YOU HAD AN ACETYLENE TORCH AND A SANDWICH ....

... then why wouldn't you?

The artist is Arthur Sarnoff, and here it is in another manifestation:

and here, in "life."  You see see that the model is having some (understandable) trouble 

holding those slices of bread together:

EATING AND BLUFFING

These days the late broadcaster Robert Robinson is regarded as a figure of fun, if he’s regarded at all.  Partly it was the comb over, partly it’s having been thoroughly mocked by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie doing a parody of “Call my Bluff.”

Robinson used to present a radio show called “Stop the Week” which was referred to by people I knew as “Clever Dicks”.   The show was broadcast on Saturday afternoons, but they evidently recorded it on Fridays, and after the show, Robinson and his fellow broadcasters would go drinking in a famous pub just down from the BBC, called the George. 

I was working in a bookshop in the same area and some of us would also go into the same pub after work.  We never quite got over the fact that Robinson usually wore a rakish hat.

Anyway, these days find myself having quite fond memories of Robinson.  And I’m particularly fond of a slim volume he wrote, titled The Dog Chairman – a collection of very short prose pieces and the occasional longer essay (hey, he interviewed Borges!).  The title refers to an offer he had to make a commercial where he would have been chairman leading a discussion of dogs talking about dog food.  He declined.

There’s another piece in the collection titled “How Not To Write Books” in which he discusses his attempts to write a memoir of his days at Oxford.  He says he could never come up with the sort of stuff his publisher wanted.  He writes, “I kept conjuring up terribly literal tableaux, like the time a man called Young tipped up a plate of sausage, beans and chips into his lap at the Lyons in Cornmarket Street.  He leant on it with his elbow and it turned right over.    He just sat looking down at the beans running into his turn ups and I think he was on the verge of tears.  We were all very interested in food in those days – that’s to say we liked it copious and cheap – and Young had actually paid for an extra portion of the beans.  ‘I’ll always be one __ing  dinner down,’ he said quietly, when he’d got control of himself, ‘and, as you all know, I was proud of the trousers.’”

There’s also a short piece, not quite a review, of the British Good Food Guide, always an easy publication to mock (and now published by Waitrose I understand), and I don’t know what edition he’s writing about but obviously pre-1982 since that’s when his collection was published. 

He describes a restaurant near Oxford Street, which would therefore be close to the BBC and the George and the bookshop where I used to work, “run by a family called the Wees, and specializing in marinated bracken shoots, and another not far away where they not only don’t have a licence, you mustn’t bring your own drink either because says the Guide, ‘they disapprove’.”  He swears he’s not making this up.

NEW YORK GASTRONOMIC QUESTIONS TO PONDER - NUMBER TWO:

Should you go to a restaurant just because you find the chef (sexually) hot?

THE ANSWER: Well, you know in your heart that you probably shouldn’t, that it’s likely to end in tears, nevertheless the heart has its reasons and so I went to the Empire Diner at 210 12^th Avenue, largely because the executive chef there is Amanda Freitag.

I first saw her on the TV show Chopped where she’s suitably stern and austere, but something told me she might have a soft, melty boozy center, like a liqueur chocolate, a notion not discouraged by seeing pictures of her looking disheveled in leather and/or with a beer in her hand.

Of course I’m not a fool.  I didn’t for a moment expect a celebrity chef, much less an executive chef, to be manning the grill on the brunch shift, and so it proved.  Opportunities to bask in the erotic culinary Freitag glow were as limited as expected.

The place was stylish, the service was friendly and the food was pretty darn dismal.  My grilled cheese sandwich looked like this.

I reckoned it wasn't quite dark enough to actually send back.  The Loved One even said that was how she liked her grilled cheese sandwich, but I sort of wish I had.  But surely nobody in their right mind would want to find this lump of dodgy-looking tomato in their grilled cheese sandwich, or anywhere else.

FROM THE GENIUS THAT IS "VIZ" MAGAZINE

ART FOOD (AGAIN)

Actually, it appears I may have picked the wrong week to be in New York.  Had I been there this week I could have schlepped along to Vanderbilt Hall, in Grand Central Station to see a “mini gallery” set up by Costello cheese displaying “famous still-life paintings alongside replicas made entirely out of cheese. Works by Flemish artist Clara Peeters, as well as American still-life artists Raphaelle Peale and John F. Francis will be recreated, among other noted masters of the genre.” Or so I read - I'm quoting from Gothamist.  Clara Peeter’s Still Life With Cheeses, Artichokes and Cherries, c 1625, looks like this:

Are they really going to make artichokes and cherries out of cheese, I wonder?  Certainly they might have more trouble recreating Picasso’s ­Still Life With Cheese, 1944.  

In any case, at some point in the proceedings, late in the day presumably, punters will be able to eat these works of art.  Cool.

I also read that “food artists Jim Victor and Marie Pelton will be hand-carving some new works out of Selection Hirten cheese, a hard cheese akin to Parmesan. “Previously they created Manhattan for a Castello pop-up store, which looked like this: 

As a man who has constructed, and then deconstructed, Stonehenge out of butter, I feel suddenly, improbably, part of an artistic community.