JAMMY DODGES

‘I got a letter from the government the other day’ – actually it was a text from the NHS, telling me how to cope with the lockdown, and they helpfully suggested I might read a book or watch a film. (Some grown person was perhaps paid to come up with this idea).

So, of course, since I would always do exactly what the government tells me, I started reading The Code of the Woosters and when I came to page 99 I found this description of dinner at Sir Watkyn Bassett’s country pile, Totleigh Towers.    

Bertie Wooster narrates: ‘Whatever Sir Watkyn Bassett’s moral shortcomings, he did his guests extradorinarily well at the festive board … it was plain to me in the first five minutes that his cook was a woman who had the divine fire in her.  From a Grade-A soup we proceeded to a toothsome fish, and from the toothsome fish to a salmi of game which even Anatole (that’s Aunt Delia’s chef) would be proud to sponsor.  Add asparagus and jam omlette and some spirited sardines on toast, and you will see what I mean.’

Well, I was doing OK until the jam omlette.  I’d never heard of such a thing.  I mean obviously I could work out what it was, but I didn’t know anybody actually ate it – but apparently they do.  A little light googling reveals they eat it all over the world.  In no time I found these versions:

Australian:

This is from taste.com.au

Polish:

         

This is fromcookpad.com

And of course American:

This one's from mrbreakfast.com

The general feeling seems to be that it’s a ‘sweet breakfast treat’ but I suppose anything you can have for breakfast you can have for other meals, even between the salmi and the sardines.

The film I watched, actually rewatched, was Edward Scissorhands – and this time I was struck by the wives who come to the party to welcome Edward to the neighbourhood, bearing dishes that they hope will please him.  The star of these dishes is Ambrosia Salad which I’d vaguely heard of as some kind of all-American suburban extravaganza, but I’d have struggled to tell you what it was. 

from realhousemoms.com

Turns out to be a fruit salad, made with canned fruit – chiefly though not necessarily exclusively, mandarin oranges, pineapples, cherries - along with mini marshmallows, the whole thing bound together with some kind of dairy product, such as whipped cream, sour cream, yoghurt or cottage cheese. 

I think it might be a quite hard work to get that down between the salmi and the sardines, but thanks to the NHS I'm prepared to give it a go.

BLACK AND SHINY

It's so black and shiny!

Yes, that'll be the plastic.  Tasted pretty good though.

And let us never forget David Goodis:

Where black pudding is a metaphor for revenge.  Who know?  Nobody in the black pudding-making community, I suspect.

DRIFTING STILL

Just so you know, I’m keeping on walking – in accordance with government guidelines, naturally.  There are lots of cats and birds just walking in the road – because there’s so little traffic.  There is also an increase in road kill – not cats, but pigeons, plus the occasional rabbit and hedgehog.

But how about this for a surprise – growing up in the road between the tarmac and the kerb – garlic!!

I don’t know if it’s wild garlic or an escapee from somebody’s garden.  It smells great, and in general I believe in foraging but somehow gutter garlic seems a bit unappealing.  Call me overdelicate.

PHEASANT FUN

I’ve had the above image in the files for ages.  As you can possibly see from the bigger version below, it’s a wartime ad for the Milwaukee Road station which appears to be in Aberdeen, in the heart of South Dakota’s pheasant country.  That sounds like a lot of miscellaneous geographical references, but that’s not my area.  The rest of the ad says they serve 20,000 pheasant sandwiches a month to servicemen, which is a lot of pheasants.

And it so happened that my local Co-op apparently over-bought their supply of pheasant breasts, and were selling them off cut price, so I snapped up a couple.  No, I did not panic buy. 

And I thought of doing something fancy with them but couldn’t decide what, and in the end I fried them up and went for a pheasant sandwich, so that I could feel solidarity with the brave lads in South Dakota, some seventy odd years ago.

GIN AND LIT.

OK, I accept that reading books and drinking gin may not be the complete solution to our Corona-virus troubles but they certainly help.  And will it surprise anybody that there’s some crossover between these two things?

Here for example is Anthony Powell’s Journal entry for August 29 1990.  Roy Jenkins has come to lunch: ‘Before lunch Roy drank gin on the rocks with a dash of sherry, somewhat exotic taste.’  Which frankly surprised me.  Powell was a sophisticate, surely he’d been around enough to know that Jenkins was drinking a not very exotic variation on a martini.

Barbara Pym’s name pops up from time in time in Powell’s journals, though as far as I can tell they never met, and this led me to her novel No Fond Return of Love.  It’s a cracker. There is some less than exotic gin drinking here, drunk at room temperature with water, no ice or slice.

          And there’s a funny, if not altogether convincing, episode when two of the novel’s characters – Pym would have had no problem referring to them as spinsters – go into an off license to buy a quarter bottle of Gordon’s.   

Dulcie says ‘Perhaps we should have a corkscrew.’

‘A corkscrew? Oh madam,’ the salesman laughed quite pleasantly, ‘you won’t need that, I can assure you.’

         When her fellow spinster says she surely must know how a gin bottle opens, Duclie replies, ‘I know you don’t need a corkscrew for champagne, but I’d forgotten about gin.’

It was a different time, the book was written in 1961, but it still doesn’t quite ring true that a somewhat formidable middle aged woman wouldn’t know that gin bottles have screw caps.

The naivety of course is the character’s, not Barbara Pym’s.  In Jane and Prudence, Prudence is consoling herself by eating alone in a good restaurant ‘She must be unusually kind to herself today.  A dry Martini and then a little smoked salmon; she felt she could manage that.’ 

This was written in 1953.  There was still rationing in England!  I have no statistics but I imagine that very, very few women were drinking martinis alone in restaurants in 1953, though I’d love to be proved wrong.

I haven’t been able to find a picture of either Powell or Pym with a drink in hand, but as you see, cat pictures are comparatively common.

LIVING THE LOCKDOWN DREAM

Cocopops and blueberries.  Anti-oxidantalicious.

TODAY'S PSYCHO LOCKDOWN SANDWICH

Long ago and far away I was in a 'subversive' production of 'You're A Good Man Charlie Brown' - I still remember far too many of the lyrics, including 'Happiness is sharing a sandwich ...'

TODAY'S BURNING QUESTION

At what point does a pork pie become a mini pork pie?

AND ANOTHER

A LOCKDOWN POSTCARD FROM THE PSYCHOGOURMET ARCHIVE

(if my wifi wasn't so pitiful I'd post one of these every day)

NOT A HOST

Last year's last olive, with this year's daffodils in the rear - none of them strictly edible.

WALRUS-RELATED

The oysters don't even know there's a crisis.

TIED TO THE CRACKLING POST

If you’ve got to panic-buy and stockpile something, and it appears that you do, then why not pork crackling?   They do have a long shelf life.  The 'sharing,' of course is optional.

The above, I think, are of Filipino origin (they were certainly bought in a Filipino supermarket, but the packaging was pretty vague), and what the Filipinos don’t know about pork isn’t worth knowing.

Incidentally I do think that roast pork flavour is the very best flavor for pork crackling.

MATTER EATER LAD

The last line - does the fact that he has no SPECIAL girl friend mean that he has lots of not-so-special girlfriends?

DAMIEN'S DAMIENS

Someone, I think it may have been Terence Conran, once said, ‘Everybody wants to write a novel, and everybody wants to open a restaurant.’

I, of course, am guilty of the first of these, but I’ve never, ever wanted to open a restaurant, and it strikes me that the non-professionals who do it must be more or less insane.  Which brings me to Damien Hirst.

There’s a lively interview with him in the current Idler.  Much of it is actually agonized boasting – he lost so much money because he HAD so much money to lose, and he has indeed opened a restaurant or two.

Hirst says, ‘I remember there was a restaurant of mine that was losing £20,000 a month and I went there and looked at the people eating dinner and I thought: “You c***s.  I’m paying for your food.”  Possibly this is how many restaurant owners feel.

I imagine, though I’m not sure, that Hirst is talking about Pharmacy, the restaurant he opened in Notting Hill in the late 1990s.  I walked past it once in a while when it was open, and I used to think it looked like an interesting place, and it was full of Hirst's art, but it never occurred to me that I would actually want to go there to eat, and I didn’t.  Obviously some others did, but maybe not enough of them, or maybe there were other problems with the business plan.

Digging, around I find that when Pharmacy opened, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society threatened legal action under the 1868 Medicines Act, on the grounds that people might confuse the restaurant with an actual pharmacy.  This sounds pretty bogus to me – I’d guess they just wanted attention - but naming restaurants is a tricky business.

How many people have wandered into the Oxo Tower Restaurant hoping to buy a few Oxo cubes?  How many people have mistaken the Ivy for a garden centre?  How many had their hopes dashed when they went to the Gay Hussar and failed to find gay hussars?

I did, however, once eat at Elaine’s in Manhattan, and was amazed to find Elaine was actually there.

ONE AFTERNOON A SLAVE

If it’s a Sunday afternoon and a man is in possession of sherry, gin, prosecco, an egg, and a copy of The Savoy Cocktail Book, there’s nothing to stop him following the recipe for a White Slave cocktail, a drink that wasn’t in the original 1930 edition, but can be found in the 1965 version.

The instructions say use equal quantities of sherry, gin, prosecco, and the white of an egg, and then ‘Shake well in ice and strain into a medium-size glass.’

Well, this is madness of course.  Shake prosecco ‘in ice’ and you’ll get an exploding torrent of prosecco. So I shook the other ingredients and added the fizz at the end, which any sane person would do.

It wasn’t bad at all, if not especially enslaving.  However, and this is something I don’t say very often, it could have used a little bit of sweetness, no doubt from the sherry.  I used amontillado – partly in honour of Edgar Allan Poe - but I might have used something less dry.

I don’t suppose white slavery is better or worse than any other kind of slavery, but – while being very respectful - I did give a thought to Tom Bullock, the legendary black bartender at the St Louis Country Club, in Missouri, not a slave at any time as far as we know, but author of The Ideal Bartender, published in 1917, 13 years before the first Savoy Cocktail Book. I wondered whether he gave a recipe for a White Slave – but no.  It would have been very surprising if he had.  

His book however does have a recipe for the Diarrhea Draught (which I must say I read at first as  Diarrhea Delight, but that's me all over): and I suppose it's a cure rather than a cause of diarrhea, but I haven’t made one as yet so I can't be absolutely sure.

OLD JAPAN

My favourite ever receipt from a supermarket, in London.

THE SHROOM AND I

I went to the exhibition at Somerset House titled: Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi curated by Francesca Gavin, which according to the publicity is celebrating ‘the remarkable mushroom, and all the progressive, poetic and psychedelic wonder it evokes’ – i.e. it seemed to be heavily directed towards fans of ‘shrooming, though in fact when I went there quite a few mothers and children, ‘Oh yes, little Fiona just loves psilocybin.’  For obvious reasons I didn't photograph the children.

         The exhibition also, and I’m quoting here, shows ‘ground-breaking experiments in design, textiles and architecture that utilise mushrooms in exciting new ways – from upcycled agro-waste to sustainable shoes made with mycelium.’ I’m no fashion maven but if the shoes in the exhibition are anything to go by, it may take a while before they catch on.

         Fortunately there was art too, lots of ‘emerging artists’ I’d never heard of but also work Cy Twombly, Beatrix Potter, Carsten Höller (who made the mushroom suitcase above), and quite a few others including Takashi Murakami.  



Want to see a picture of me standing next to Takashi Murakami?  Of course you do.  I'm the one on the left.

There were also books in display cases which I always like, 

and this included a copy (actually an artist’s proof) of Mushroom Book, actually more or a folio, by John Cage, Alexander H. Smith, and Lois Long.  Since it was only an edition of 75 this is, as they say, ‘a rare chance to see.’

And frankly I was glad for the presence of Mr. Cage, (I pretty much always am) because given the rest of the exhibition you might never have known that mushrooms were things that people actually eat for food.  Cage used to forage for mushrooms and sell them to fancy New York restaurants.  He even appeared in Vogue with his recipe for ‘dogsup’ – a version of ketchup with mushrooms (type unspecified) brandy, mace, cayenne, allspice and other good things.

I came out of the exhibition wanting to have my consciousness expanded but more urgently with the urge to buy and cook some mushrooms; which I did.

Now mushrooms, as you probably know, are low in calories and fat, and cholesterol-free, they’re rich in copper, potassium, magnesium, zinc and some B vitamins, and antioxidants such as selenium and glutathione. Now I’ve never met anyboy who said, ‘Mmm I’ve really got a hankering for selenium and glutathione,’ but possibly such people exist.

I bought some brown and white shimeji, they were from China, and enoki, they were labeled ‘product of Korea’ - south, I’m assuming.  Did I feel guilty about their lack of localness, well of course I did.

I fried ‘em up with garlic and rocket, and stirred in some cooked gnocchi and a bit of grated cheese – and they weren’t bad at all, though when I do it again there’ll be a LOT more garlic, and perhaps a splash of psilocybin