SO LONG RUBEN

News just in that Ruben Rueda, the legendary bartender at Musso and Frank on Hollywood Boulevard has died.

This is a great shock though in truth he had hadn't looked well in recent times and had lost a great deal of weight, though he retained the large, tailored, Musso jacket.

I think he made as good a martini as anyone ever has.  Another one bites the olive.

DON'T BLAME IT ON THE MOONLIGHT

So we went the Moon Light restaurant in Brick Lane.  It calls itself an Indian though there’s a definite Bangladeshi influence.  They have a great sign:

The waiter was incredibly intrusive but so exuberantly and naively so that it was impossible to take offence. I learned for example that he had recently married his cousin.  And it was only at the wedding that his parents told him that they were also cousins.  Way  too much information, dude.

The food was fine, a very good lamb biryana, a less good prawn balti, and there was a starter on the menu that I’d never seen before or even heard of, so obviously it had to be ordered ‘Biran Mas – Bangladeshi rhui fish gently spiced and lightly fried.’

That described it well enough though I had to wait till I got home to look up what rhui is.  Apparently it’s a kind of carp (sometimes called Ilish or Hilsha) and it was great, though if you’d told me it was a piece of cod I’d have believed you.

As you see above, it came with what I think of as a standard-issue Indian restaurant, salad the kind you can get in any every Indian or Indian-related restaurant in Engalnd.  They always look much the same, which is to say very unappetizing, and as far as I can tell nobody ever eats them.  They come out from the kitchen and then get taken back again.  Do they get thrown away?  Doe they get recycled?  Does anybody know or care?

But I wonder what the waiters and chefs in these restaurants think about it. Do they think the English have a strange, mysterious and ritualistic attitude towards salad.  They think it’s not meant to be eaten, it’s just meant to be there. Like a raddish rose? I haven’t seen a raddish rose for years, though I do think I might have eaten one once, but I don't really remember.

MORE SPUD ACTION

 Want to see some potato imagery from the Simpsons?  Of course you do. 

Homer Simpson as a potato man:

Marge and her sack of potatoes:

Tom Wolfe eating mash at the Wordloaf Literary Festival:

And do you want to see a picture of Agnes Varda dressed as a potato?  Sure, why not?

THE TYPO-FREE MARTINI

This confused us for a while.  We were in the 5^thView bar, up on the top floor of Waterstone’s bookshop in Piccadilly, and I was enjoying a two-for-one martini, in their happy hour special.  (Why oh why don’t more bookshops sell martinis?  And why don’t more martini bars sell books?)  This is what one of Waterstone’s two-for-one martinis looks like (though you probably knew that):

But our eye was caught by the wine menu, specifically by this line; ‘delicious, well balanced and flavourful, with nots of red fruit and warm spice.’

Obviously ‘nots’ was a typo but it took a while to work out what it actually meant.  My first thought was that it might mean ‘lots of red fruit’, but then I thought ‘knots of red fruit’ might be a possibility. And in the end my drinking companion worked out that it was probably meant to be ‘notes of red fruit.’  She was right, I’m sure, and yet somehow I was left feeling disappointed.

MORE FUSION FUN

You know how it is, sometimes you do something of a food-related nature, and you can’t help asking yourself, ‘Have I just created a paradigm shift or have I done something really stupid?’

I was in Waitrose, looking for something for dinner, and feeling uninspired, and I bought a pack of sushi, actually nigiri, and I knew this wouldn’t quite be enough, and as I was heading to the till I passed the pork pie section so I picked up one of those and then I spotted a tub of potato salad and I bought that too, and then I made my purchase.

I could see that display would would be important with this meal, and I arranged it to look like this:

orderly without being exactly minimalist, a bit of fusion with just a touch of Carl Andre:

The pork pie was a better example of the breed than the sushi, maybe the paradigm hadn’t shifted after all.

WHIFFING OF ONIONS AND ROSES

So Scott Walker has gone.  I’m very, very sorry to see him go, and yet in some way I was ready for it.  And I don’t feel any need to analyze or ‘explain’ the godlike genius of the man: you either get it or you don’t. 

But I have been thinking about the cover for the album No Regrets (above).  It’s a pretty good cover for a pretty good album.  But what is Scott drinking?  
It’s a can of Newcastle Brown isn’t it?  I never had Scott down as a Newcastle Brown drinker, did you?  Shouldn’t it have been absinthe or crème de noisette or a Cuban Breeze? 
Well, I suppose the simple answer is that with Scott Walker it didn’t matter what he drank, he’d always be a hundred times cooler than you and me.

He’s also on this album, which itself has quite a cover.

THE GOODBYE BEER

There are certain lines in novels, poetry, song lyrics, that are unimproveable.  Take this very simple one from Donald Fagen’s ‘The Goodbye Look:’ ‘Won’t you pour me a Cuban Breeze, Gretchen?’

Now, coming up with the Cuban Breeze part can’t have been too hard, but the name of the pourer – that’s a thing you might have had to ponder.  And I believe you could spend the rest of your life trying to think of a better name than Gretchen and I believe you would fail.

This is what a Cuban Breeze looks like. Recipes differ wildly, but vodka, pineapple juice and amoretto seem to be the general requirements.

I was thinking about the Cuban Breeze because I was in a restaurant in Waterloo called Cubana – beans, plants, yucca, shrimps – all perfectly fine.  There’s a mural of Carmen Miranda outside, though Ms. Miranda of course was not Cuban, so I suppose the restaurant is all-purpose Latin.  There was no Cuban Breeze on the extensive cocktail menu.

And I found myself singing, mostly to myself, another couple of lines from ‘The Goodbye Look.’

‘I remember a line of women all in white, 

the laughter and the steel bands at night.’

And I mentioned this to my dining companions who doubted whether there were many steel bands in Cuba.  I did not have a view on this.

In fact I’m not even sure that ‘The Goodbye Look’ is set in specific place, but rather some all-purpose banana republic where the locals hate the colonists.  

But Mel Torme (aka the Velvet Frog) has no such doubts. In his version of the song, (which is 50% horrible - OMG – scat singing!! and he sings 'Won't you pour me a Cuban Breeze ... baby'!!! - and 50% pretty great) he bellows Cuba! Cuba! But he may just be ordering a drink.

         In fact at Cubana we eschewed the mojitos and the caipirinhas, the daiquiris and the fresh strawberry coladas, and had Polish beer, which came in a bottle that looked like this:

We agreed that this was the best beer label we’d seen in a very long time.  I kept mine as a souvenir.

OPTIMISM, MILD OBSESSION, AND SQUID

The other night I had some of the best squid I’ve ever tasted.  It was at a Japansee restaurant in London, called Fushan, in New Oxford Street.  It looked like this:

It was deep fried and coated in a spicy batter, and it was mostly tentacles, but I can’t really tell you what made it so special – just, you know, the crunchiness and the taste (of squid).

And it appeared on the menu like this:

Karaage, I now discover means “Chinese fry” in Japanese, which confuses matters a little, though only a little.

So next day, filled with optimism and mild obsession, I went into the local Waitrose looking for more squid that I’d cook myself.  There was some to be had and it was reduced, though it was just the tubes with no tentacles. I also don’t currently have a deep fat fryer, so the squid was pan fried with garlic, lemon and parsley, and it was perfectly fine but not fantastic.  Looked like this:

And then a couple of nights later in Efe’s in Brick Lane, I had squid breaded and deep-fried Turkish-style, and at this point it started to occur to me that maybe I only really like the tentacles.  They're certainly the bits that crisp up best.

And here is another less than fantastic squid dish that I had in Tokyo; a tube again, and filled with something inscrutable and really not all that appealing.  I’m sure regular readers will explain to me what’s going on here:

And then I thought about Thurston Moore and one of his early meetings with Mike Watt.  He quotes Watt saying, “All I eat is squid.  If I’m going to go to a booze joint, they’d better have squid. So he ordered all this squid and he was shoveling all this squid into his mouth.”  This is Thurston doing his impersonation of Watt eating squid – you can find the  interview, not all of it about squid, on Youtube.

This is Mike Watt apparently eating Euros.

A TONIC FOR THE TROUPE

Sometimes I wonder when the gin bubble will burst and it’ll stop being cool.  Not any time soon I expect since, as my pal Jonathan and I were discussing, gin is essentially so very easy to make.  You take some neutral spirits (which are more or less vodka), add various flavors, historically juniper but these days take your pick – hyssop, frankincense, strawberries, whatever - mix ‘em up and there you have an artisanal uniquely flavored gin.  The possibilities are endless.  Exhaustingly so.

I was having this conversation in the Port House House on the Strand in London, a Spanish wine and tapas bar where they have a gin and tonic menu (of course they do).

What you see above on the left is made with Aviation Gin, which I thought was a basic  gin that I bought in California in supermarkets, but I guess I may have been wrong about that. There’s some lavender in there too. I forget the name of the gin in the one on the right (which is the same as the one at the top of this post) but there’s orange peel in the glass and it tasted vaguely of marmalade. 

And these were just fine but they weren’t the real reason I was there.  When I’d been there before I’d had the morcilla con heuvos cordones, black pudding from Burgos with a fried quail egg on top, which was spectacular - the morcilla rather than the egg - so I had to go back and have it again – and I did – and it was every bit as good as I remembered it, though now I’m thinking I could do it myself if I found a source for the right morcilla.

Also on the menu were Papas Arrugadas, Canarian wrinkled potatoes with a mojo sauce, which seemed irresistible but they were a disappointment – a bit soggy I’d have said, but maybe they were meant to be that way.  

Here’s something similar I made earlier, in fact years back. 

And as if my gin ruminations had come back to haunt me today I got some targeted advertising (yeah right) for non-alcoholic gin and tonic.  I mean, really, why would you? Really.

THE PLUCK THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

In the run up to Burns Night I overbought haggis.  At first I couldn’t find a big one so I bought two small ones and then I did find a big one so I bought that as well, and that was the one I cooked.  

The packaging said it served ten, and since there were only four of us at my humble Burns Night shindgig, I had some leftover.   As with so many things, not least Christmas turkey, and quite a few roasts, the leftovers sometimes seem better than the thing itself.

 So I made a haggis shepherds’ pie, and it was a blast

And then last week, stuck for something for dinner, I defrosted one of the small haggis’s which had been lurking in the freezer,  That was fine but again I had some leftovers and made a haggis breakfast scramble, which was ok but not fantastic.

Anyway as I was doing all this kept thinking about the great Calvin Trillin’s fantastically surreal line: “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.” 

Growing up in the Nicholson household we only ever had leftovers on Mondays, which were the remains of the Sunday roast.  My mother wasn’t good at roasting meat - she kind of boiled it in the oven.  She’d probably have done better with a haggis.

THE MERCURY SANDWICH

I've said it before so it must be true: there is no end to what can be done with a sandwich:

The attempted murderer, identified only as Klaus O., had a basic chemistry lab in his basement, which the Judge Georg Zimmermann described as "more dangerous than all combat agents used in World War II." I'm not sure I exactly know what that means, or what exactly a "combat agent" is in this context, but it does sound like a bit of unnecessary exaggeration.  Maybe it lost something in translation

Klaus O didn’t speak at his trial but prosecutors said they believed he wanted to see his colleagues’ physical decline.  Really?  You think?

DANDY IN ASPIC

And speaking of hippo foot jelly, as we were, this image just surfaced from the depths of the interwebs:

It’s lamb rather than hippo, but as I often say, I think that losing our taste for aspic has been a huge detriment to western civilization.  But who listens to me?  Of course when you think of jelly you think of Bompas and Parr, who used to be known as jellymongers, but are now described as “the leading expert in multi-sensory experience design.”

I read this on a leaflet accompanying an exhibition in the crypt of St Johns, Bethnal Green, titled The Scent of Other Worlds, sculptures by Lucy Hardcastle, smells by Design in Scent, and the whole thing sponsored by Virgin, designed to give you a sniff of what other planets in the universe might smell like. Mars was my favorite:

There was no jelly at the opening party but there were cosmopolitans that came in plastic pouches, like space cocktails, I suppose.  And when I got back home, I found that his image had surfaced too.  

There’s more that one way to jelly your lamb.

THE PIGS AND I

If you find yourself in, let’s say, South Woodford and you see a shop called Transylvanian House, well obviously you’re going to go in there, poke around and probably you’re going to buy something, aren’t you?

Yes, you are.  I bought a pack of smoked pigs' trotters- aka Picioruse Afumate:

And call me a fool but I thought, well they’re smoked so they’re already cooked, so all I need to do is warm them up and serve them with some sauerkraut and Bob (or perhaps Vladimir) is my uncle.

Turns out that neither Bob nor Vlad is my uncle.

The trotters may have been cooked hut they were hard, low on flesh, boney of course, and in the final analysis inedible.  Disaster: and all my own flair.

Poking around on the interwebs the correct method seems to be to stick ‘em in water in a pot and boil them for four hours and eat ‘em with beans.  I’ll know better next time, if there is a next time.