OUTSIDE THE WHALE

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You know me, if I see something on a menu that I’ve never had (or even heard of) before, then I always feel duty bound to order it.  And so in the FuRaiBo restaurant on Sawtelle Boulevard, (over 100 locations in Japan, just two in the USA, according to their business card) I obviously had to order an item called “Hanpen Cheese”  The menu described it as “Fish cake w/Cheese Panko Breaded.”  When it came it looked like this:

Of course, I grew up eating fishcakes from fish and chip shops in England – they were essentially a lump of deep-fried mashed potato with a minimal quantity of fish, this kind of thing:

The Hanpen Cheese was a different kind of thing, although I suppose just about recognizably from the same extended food group.  It seemed to be a kind of sandwich: two slices of white fish (I couldn’t possibly have told you what kind of fish) with a slice of cheese in between them, (is that a line of seaweed in there too?) these slices then pankoed and deep fried. 

Did it taste good?  Well of course it did.  Deep fried fish and cheese, you can hardly go wrong, but it took a bit of research when I got home to discover exactly what I’d eaten.

Yes, hanpen is generally a kind of fishcake, though ham and tofu may be involved, as well as or instead of both the fish and the cheese.  Those mysterious slices of white fish were almost certainly made from surimi – the kind of paste they use in imitation crab sticks or fish sticks, that starts out looking like this:

So mystery solved, and really not all that mysterious as these things go.  Will I order it next time I see it on a menu?  Well I may or I may not, but I'll no longer feel duty bound.

After the FuRaiBo, and still with an urge for novelty blowing through my taste buds, I went to the Nijiya supermarket across the street and bought some of this to take home with me.

It was a curious, sweet, sticky salad of sand lances and walnuts.  The Japanese name for sand lance (which I’d never even heard of before let alone eaten, and is sometimes known as the sand eel though it’s not a true relation of the eel) is Kugini.  And I believe this salad, made by boiling the fish with soy sauce and sugar, is called Tsukudani, but don’t shoot me if I’ve got that wrong.

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I have never seen whale on a menu, not even in Japan, though I did see it in supermarkets there, and (don’t hate me) I’ve eaten it, and it was an interesting rather than a great experience.  The taste really was somewhere between meat and fish, as I suppose befits a marine mammal.

Now, life being as it is, I happened to be reading Jonathan Meades’ An Encyclopedia of Myself.  I’m very fond of Jonathan Meades’ work, and was once mistaken for him.  I was once also mistaken for food writer Jonathan Gold.  Perhaps a pattern is emerging.

Anyway, Meades generally comes across as a pretty thorough-going omnivore, so imagine my surprise at discovering that there’s one food he’ll never eat and that’s whale.  It seems to me that he had it in fairly grim circumstances, on Osmington Beach, in Dorset, and baked in a pie.  (I had my whale as sashimi)  He writes:

“It was a scuddy, billowy day when I ate the whale. Not the whole whale--I was only four--but enough whale to get the idea of whale's quiddity, to get a mnemonic fix, which persists over forty years, and is ocular and palatal and olfactory and haptic.” 

(If you think he’s overcooking his prose there, I think you may have a point.)

Anyway, he hated the whale pie and tried to hide it under the pebbles on the beach.  He concludes, “Since then, I've eaten the tripe of kine and sheep, sea slug (a.k.a. beche-de-mer), ox brain, lamb brain, pig brain and trotter and ear, duodenum and other intestines, spinal cord, flying fishes' eggs, beaver, salmon entails, testicles (rognons blanc), locust, etcetera. But there is a limit to omnivorous curiosity and carnal abandon. Whale is mine. Not another cubic metre will ever pass my lips.”

Does he really mean cubic metre?  That’s a large amount of any kind of food.  Perhaps he meant cubic millimeter.  Also, interestingly, in an earlier version of this piece that appeared in the New Yorker in 1996 he included dog on his list of the exotica he'd eaten, but I suppose he now feels that’s unacceptable, and doesn’t want to be hated.  Even so, given that it’s some 60 years since he last ate whale I’d have thought it might be worth giving it another try, maybe next time he sees it on a menu.

DINING WITH THE DEVIL

Satanic lighting and glasses of water.   Are those spoons quite long enough?

STRANGER THAN NON-FICTION

 Sometimes you find yourself in a supermarket and you see a product – let’s say for example, wine in a can, costing $10 and called Fiction, made by a company called Field Recordings - and you think to yourself what kind of person would buy a thing like that? 

And then you go home and think about it and you suddenly realize – ME, I’m the kind of person who would buy a thing like that.  I mean, I like fiction, I like wine and I even like field recordings (see below), and so somewhat inevitably and only a little reluctantly, I shelled out ten bucks for a 500 ml. can of wine.

It’s a good looking can, and it says on it that the wine is made with 36% Zinfandel, 18% Mourvedre, 14% Grenache, 12% Syrah, 10% Cabernet Sauvignon, 6% Tempranillo, 4% Viognier.  There’s also a description of the wine, invoking, "Heady aromas of blueberry pie, luxurious suede couches, ham paninis, unlit menthol cigarettes and roquefort tarts. Firm tannins anchor flavors of grilled meats, cherry cola, sweet carob and black licorice chews, all cased up together conveniently in a cigar humidor."  I’m hoping this is ironic, if not downright fictitious.

         

And how was it?  Well not bad at all.  The color was probably the best thing about it, really dark and rich, and it tasted pretty good, plenty of nose, quite dry, very quaffable indeed.  I’m sure there are plenty of wines at about that price that are about that good – but heck, if we’re looking for a unique selling point, a memorable name, and some good looking packaging, you could do a heck of a lot worse.  I wanted to make some smart remark about pulp, but it would have been unjustified.

Field Recordings is, apparently, the brainchild of “Winemaker Andrew Jones (who) has a keen eye for diamonds in the rough: sites that are unknown or under-appreciated but hold enormous untapped potential. He strives for unique wines loaded with personality and a one-of-a-kind experience.”  That’s him on the right below; looks like a cheerful soul.

NIPPOPHILIA

I am, as you probably know by now, a bit of a Japanophile: not only, but not least,

because of the food.   And sometimes it seems to me that the Japanese are pulling some strange confidence trick on the West.  Sometimes I think maybe they’re not really as weird as they appear, they’re just pretending to be weird in order to confuse and tantalize us.  So far it’s working pretty well.

I mean, the maid cafes:

The transvestite maid cafes:

The cat sushi:

The cappuccinos, this one’s by “foam artist” Kazuki Yamamoto:

And most recently this – a box of chocolate nipples:

I thought at first this might be the dreaded “fake news,” or perhaps not real food but some kind of conceptual art – though the information comes from the RocketNews24 website who are generally reliable.

According to them:  “A new brand of chocolates manufactured by the Mme KIKI company will be hitting the shelves next year in Japan in the form of women’s nipples. The “CHOCONIP” set will be sold with eight different nipples representing the transformation from a young girl’s nipple to the mature age female nipple.

         “The Mme KIKI company … has said the idea came to them suddenly when they thought ‘Why don’t we make chocolate in the shape of young girls’ nipples?.’”

         Creativity, it’s such a mystery, isn’t it?  They also say it’s got something to do with the Jison-in Buddhist Temple in Wakayama, which celebrates “motherhood” – by depicting lots of boobs. Who knew?  

 And might I suggest that a European or (especially) an American producer of the chocolate nipples of young girls might very well find himself in jail for making these things?  And who’s to say they shouldn’t be?

Meanwhile in my own little corner of Japanese oddness, my pal Marco has returned from a trip to Osaka with these: ramen noodles dried to form a snack food:

It’s not bad at all, a bit more savory and less sweet than a lot of Japanese snacks tend to be.   And let’s face it, it’s not really all that weird at all.

PRESIDENTIAL ....

You know, I think it’s hard to look presidential while you’re eating, although some definitely look better than others, as these much circulated "compare and contrast" pictures of Trump and Reagan suggests. 

Whatever else Trump becomes known for, he will surely go down as our most joyless, and least sybaritic president.  It would be very nice, and let’s face it very surprising, if that’s the worst that could be said about his presidency.  Of course Reagan was a pro: he knew how to work the camera, and how to act as though he was enjoying his food, even if he wasn’t.  

He could even look good with an ice cream, and that’s really tricky.

By no means all succeed:

Even Obama can’t always pull it off.

And a hotdog can be every bit as perilous:

And whatever food Nixon is eating here, well, that possibly isn't the very best way to eat it.

It seems to me that Roosevelt had it pretty well covered.  He looks like a man who knows how to carve a bird, and is actually taking pleasure in it.  Eleanor is certainly looking on in admiration.

Roosevelt also looked damned good with a drink:

And Reagan too could even look good with a drink even when he had to act as though he wasn’t enjoying it.  Admittedly this was in pre-presidential days, and if you want to look impressive it certainly does no harm to have Bette Davis drinking beside you.

As for Nixon, well, here at least he does seems to be handling his drink a little better than Brezhnev.

VIBRANT, YEAH?

In these troubling times, would it lighten your mood any to see what an incredibly, perhaps ridiculously, expensive plate of Ji-Kinmedai (cold smoked golden eye snapper, from Chiba, Japan) looks like?  Well of course it would.  It looks like this:

Was it really worth what it cost?  Well very nearly, although this Ankimo – (monkfish liver - from Boston, as a matter of fact) offered rather more bang for the buck:

Both these dishes were eaten at a restaurant in San Francisco called Akiko’s, on Bush Street, which is pretty special.  One of the curious things about the menu is that it’s divided into two sections “White Fish” and “Vibrant Fish.”  But who wouldn’t go for vibrant?

You want to see a pretty decent and reasonably priced pulled pork sandwich?  Well, here’s one I ate earlier, at Café 5 in the newly refurbished San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:

Did it need to be served on a piece of wood?  Probably not.  Although it did have a little circular hole for the bowl of pickles, and actually it was the pickles that made it.  They were vibrant.

THE TELEVISED MARTINI

I was sitting in the bar of the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles; not the really fancy revolving one at the top, but the semicircular one in the lobby. 

 I was waiting for a friend who has been known to be late on occasion, but he was already later than anticipated.  I was drinking a Bombay Sapphire Martini and I hadn’t expected much but when it arrived it tasted pretty good and it was huge – requiring five olives!!

Photo: Anthony Miller.

While I waited, I watched the TV above the bar.  It was showing the anti-Trump demonstrations taking place around the country (some of us always knew the revolution would be televised).  But then one of the people working behind the bar, an Asian man, switched channels and the TV started showing football.

 

My drinking companion finally arrived.  He had a number of good reasons for being late, the best one being that there was an actual anti-Trump demonstration going on in the streets, and in fact on the freeway, of downtown LA, and there had been street closures.  As I sipped my second martini it was hard to decide whether living well was the best revenge or whether we were fiddling while Rome burned.  I don’t suppose it couldn't be both.

Photo: LA Times

DRINKING NOSTALGIA

Is there anything better than being in a museum and looking into one of the display cases and seeing an exhibit there, behind glass, nicely lit and arranged, and being able to say, “I’ve got one of those and it’s in better condition than that one”?

Well yes of course there are many things better than that, but the above happened to me in the Robert Opie’s Museum of Brands. Packaging and Advertising, in Notting Hill in London.  The article in question was a tin that had formerly held Huntley and Palmers (note the absence of an apostrophe) Cocktail Assorted Biscuits.  Here is my own "museum quality" tin:

As you see the great thing about it is that the tin shows a tin that shows a tin that shows a tin, and so on, ad infinitum.  I like that kind of thing.

Much of the Opie Museum is a big blast of nostalgia.  You get to see all the cans and packets and wrappers that you knew as a kid, all the chocolate bars and breakfast cereal and fizzy drinks, all the way up to a Watneys Party Seven (note the absence of an apostrophe).  And you observe how some designs have changed completely and some hardly at all.

And then there’s stuff you can’t quite believe – Tony the Tiger, for instance, now a lovable feline with a neckerchief was once considered a wild animal and had a big “dog” collar round his neck.

Now, we know the past is another country, but even so, I was surprised just how much cocktail-related stuff there apparently was in the English past.  Even Twiglets seem to have been sold as a “cocktail snack”.

True, my dodgy aunt and uncle who drove around in a yellow and black Ford Zodiac did have a cocktail cabinet with a light inside that lit up when you opened the front – hours of amusement there for a small pesky child.  But I don’t recall them mixing any cocktail.  The cabinet was much like this one:

And of course there’s some stuff you remember that isn’t there, and a lot of stuff that’s there that you don’t remember at all, and then there’s the stuff you find fairly hard to believe.  I mean it doesn’t seem so surprising that Heinz made Mock Turtle Soup.  But Real Turtle soup?  Where’s there time machine when you need one?