INDIAN FUSING

 My understanding is, (I mean I read it in a book) that it was the 

somewhat evil Portuguese empire that introduced the potato to 

the west coast of India in the 17^th century.  But then it was the 

far more thoroughly evil British empire that introduced it to the 

rest of India in the 18^thcentury, hoping to replace rice in the 

Indian diet.

 

The results seem in fact not to have been all that evil.  India now produces about 50 million tonnes of potatoes a year, second only to China in world production. But India still also produces about 90 million tonnes of rice. You might think that amounted to a balanced diet.

 

And it has occurred to me that much of the Indian food I like best involves potato in some form: potato samosa, vada pav, Bombay aloo, sag aloo, aloo chat, and so on.

 

At the weekend, being in Bristol, and finding the truck from Gopal’s Curry Shack to be close at hand, I had the masala dosa, described on the chalk board as ‘a rice and lentil crepe with a spiced potato filling.  Served with coconut chutney and coconut dal.’  It was great.

 

I suppose a crepe is similar to, but significantly different from a paratha, and it’s certainly similar to a pancake. 

 

In fact most Sundays as I was growing up, my mum served up pancakes with the roast.  It was the same stuff you’d use for Yorkshire pudding, but fried in a pan rather than baked in the oven, because my dad preferred them that way. There were also mashed potatoes on the plate (rarely roasties) so inevitably you sometimes found yourself eating pancake and potato together.  However this being my mum’s cooking there would never be any spices other than salt and pepper, but that only whetted my appetite for things to come.

 

As soon as I had any independence I’d go up to the chip shop and have chips with curry sauce.  Fusion, n’est ce pas?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FORAGED FROM THE HEADLINES

Maybe you saw some headlines, such as the one in the Evening Standard:

 

And below it a story about mushroom foragers who’d been collecting fungi in large  quantities from Epping Forest, then selling them to fancy London restaurants and markets.

The legality, or otherwise, of this was pretty straightforward.  Foraging is generally legal on public land in the UK, but only if it’s for personal consumption and if you don’t collect more than 1.7kg. 

 

But the professional foragers of Epping Forest were taking much more than that, and they’ve now been stopped.  Some of them have been given fines, and foraging has been completely banned in the forest.  There are wardens to enforce it apparently.

 

Of course John Cage made a significant income from selling foraged mushrooms to fancy New York restaurants, but there was only one of him.

As for that headline, you could argue about whether mushrooms have anything to do with the ‘green lungs’ of London or anywhere else.  Obviously mushrooms are not green because they don’t contain chlorophyll and in most circumstances they ‘breathe’ much the way that  animals and humans do - oxygen in and carbon dioxide out.  You might also note that significant amounts of Epping Forest are not in London.

 

         When I’m out walking I’m always fascinated by mushrooms growing wild and often I take a picture or two and when I get home I try to identify the specimen. I find this incredibly difficult, and I would never dream of eating something I’d foraged.  There’s a reason for this.

 

I used to share a flat with a man who was a hospital administrator in London.  One day, he told me, a family of four pitched up in A & E at the hospital complaining of stomach pains.  They’d been out foraging wild mushrooms, eaten them, and then come down with terrible stomach pains.  The hospital was eventually able to sort them out – a process that involved giving all four of them liver transplants.  A cautionary tale.  

 

According to that Evening Standard article there are over 1,500 varieties of mushroom in Epping Forest. I hope those foraging lads knew what they’re doing.

 

WOULD ANYONE?

Personally I have never judged anybody for what they eat in bed.

THE PRICE OF COCKTAILS

 

Mr Price is in the house

If you live in Manningtree, as I currently do, and even if you don’t, you may well be aware that this was a centre of operations for the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, played in the movie by Vincent Price. 

 

There are so many reasons to love Vincent Price, for his acting primarily, but also for his art collecting and his gourmet skills, including authoring a few cook books, usually with his second wife Mary:

 

These are well known but only recently did I find this wonderful series of adds with Price as a spokesman for, would you, believe Angostura bitters

 

And you know, Pink Gin is really just a martini without the vermouth.  The two editions I have of the Savoy Cocktail Book both instruct you to use a shaker and strain the cocktail into a conical martini glass but last night, to do honour to Vincent, I made one on the rocks.

 

However, regardless of how much I honour the man, I resisted the urge to cook hot dogs cooked in Angustura.  You have to draw the line somewhere.

CHATTO DESPAIR

 ‘No worst, there is none.’ 

That’s the opening of Gerard Manley Hopkins' sonnet, referring to depression, spiritual 

crisis, weltschmerz, and so on.

 

But it’s a phrase I often think of while eating a sub-standard sandwich.  By which I mean I’d never say ‘This is the worst sandwich ever’ because you know there’s always likely to be a worse one just around the corner.

 

I was in the tearoom at the Beth Chatto Gardens in Elmstead, Essex – as a matter of fact Hopkins was an Essex lad too, born in Statford when it was still in the county.

 

After a circuit of the Chatto grounds we headed for the tea room and my eye fell on an egg mayonnaise sandwich, which I bought.  It was only when I got to the table, inside the artisanal polytunnel, that I noticed the bread was gluten free.

 

I'm no bigot and this didn’t bother me until I tasted it, at which point it bothered me a lot.  The 'bread' was like a cross between cotton wool and dry cardboard, insubstantial yet thoroughly unpleasant.  Why would anybody make a thing like this and call it bread?  It wasn’t fooling anybody.

 

If you like bread you’re not going to like 'gluten-free bread' just as if you like alcohol you’re not going to like 'alcohol-free gin.' Making some gluten-free substance that scarcely resembles bread at all, is no solution.

 

‘My cries heave, herds-long’ as Gerard said.

 

The egg mayonnaise inside was perfectly fine though, so the sandwich could have been a lot worse.

 

TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

It was Apple Day in Wormingford, Essex.

 

You had to get some apples – take them along to the Community Education Centre in Wormingford where you, or somebody, cut them into quarters, then they went through a coarse chopper, 

then into a big old press which liquidized them, and then eventually you had a bottle or two apple juice.  Best to take your own bottles.

 

The word was that you only had 24 hours to drink the juice before it went off  so a little cocktail-making was obviously required.

 

To be honest with you, apple juice and whisky (seen above) wasn’t all that great a combination - you could taste both the apple juice and the whisky but they never really combined and melded, a bit like Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler in the movie The Bounty Hunter.

And then we tried apple juice with vodka which of course was just fine because most things are OK when they’ve got vodka in them. 

 

I think I shall call this the Nick and Kylie – as in Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue – the ingredients are both OK, you’re not quite sure what they’re doing together, but the end result is a winner.

(Pics are mostly by Luna Woodyear-Smith, except for the ones that obviously aren't)

 

 

TUCKING IN

 

 

Did you see the headline in the Times, ‘Diet of meat left Crusaders fit for battle’?  

 

Below it there was a short item about research by Gleb Zilberstein, described as an Israeli scientist, which claims that when the Crusaders took on the Muslims, attempting to reclaim Jerusalem in the 12^thcentury, they had an advantage because of their diet. This is ‘proved,’ according to the research, by the presence of Crusader food fragments that have been found on ancient pottery. 

 

By this theory, the Crusaders, under Richard the Lionheart, ate mostly lamb, pork and cheese with very few carbs.  The Muslim armies, led by Saladin, ate mostly carbs, fruit and veg.  According to Zilberstein’s researches, this made the Crusaders slimmer and more ‘cardio’ than the Muslims, which is an explanation for why, according to some accounts, Saladin lost ten soldiers to every one of Richard’s.

 

This seems rather a grand theory to be based on a few food traces on ancient pottery, though I don’t doubt it pays to be a thin soldier rather than a fat one.

 

But a little of my own research reveals that in Sahih Bukhari - the collection of sayings and deeds of the Prophet Mohammad (pubh) - the Prophet is reported to have said, ‘The best of the people are those living in my generation, then those who will follow the latter and then those who come after them. Then there will come after them people who will be treacherous and will not be trustworthy, they will bear witness without being asked to do so, and they will vow, but will never fulfil their vows, and fatness will appear among them.’

 

I’ll just leave that there, while I go off for some pork and cheese.

SKULLS AND HEARTS

 You know, a lot of people say to me, ‘Geoff, where can I eat  lamb heart while staring at a skull?’ And although I’m sure there are many answers to that question, after last weekend, I can say that the café at the Garden Museum, in Lambeth is absolutely fits the bill.

 

The lamb heart looked like this:

 

The skull looked like this (and yes I do believe that’s a hydra next to it):

 

In fact the skull and hydra are on the Tradescant family tomb in the museum’s inner courtyard, aka the Sackler Garden.

 

Now, of course, depending on your point of view, the Sackler family may be considered worse than Satan, because of all that OxyContin business.  Families, eh?

 

But the garden is doing fine.

 

                                        

 

THE BULL IS IN THE HEART

 As often as not you can tell a book by looking at its cover; that’s kind of the whole 

point of a book cover.

 

We could debate whether this also applies to potato crisp/chip packets.

I mean, could any anything live up to a packet like this?

 

Is it a bull playing a guitar?  Or is it a human guitarist who’s been changed into a bull?  I honestly can’t say, but I do like it.  The crisps inside looked like this:

 

They were perfectly fine.  Not quite as intense and full on and reminiscent of a minotaur as they might have been, but perfectly fine. 

 

The Superbon website says, ‘Superbon crisps are produced in the Madrid region, home to the beating heart of the crisp world: the Chueca district.’

 

I didn’t even know the crisp world had a heart.

 

FREEZE DRIED

 

Obviously lots of cafes have toilets but I believe last week I saw what might be world’s only toilet block containing a café, in Cliff Park, Dovercourt, Essex.  From this direction it says pure toilet block 

 

though from the side and front it looks far more like a caff.

 

And they serve a damn fine scone with butter and jam, seen at the top of this post.

We were in Dovercourt to see a (let’s say) modest exhibition called ‘William Friese-Greene and the Birth of Cinema,’ at the Harwich Arts and Heritage Centre which is located in the Mayflower Primary School.

 

Friese-Greene was an inventor, who owned all kinds of patents, chiefly relating to motion pictures, though he also had a colour film process.

 

Like many an inventor he had good years and bad years, fortunes came and went, and at one point he left the fleshpots of London for the seaside calm of Dovercourt, quite a posh place at the time.  This is him:

This is him as played by Robert Donat in the film The Magic Box.

 

This is me pointing at a picture in the exhibition of one of his inventions:

 

The  Arts and Heritage Centre was selling some themed beer ‘Friese-Greene – Inventive Steps,’ created by the Harwich Town Brewing Company. I believe this was the first time I’ve ever bought beer in a school, but I had to take it home it drink it. You can see the same thing on the label that I’m pointing at in the exhibition.

 

 

It tasted as good as it looks.

 

(Pictures mostly by Luna Yearwood-Smith)

THE BRIE AND I

 

 I had lunch at the Rio Café in Manningtree, an honest little establishment, not a million miles away from the River Stour, so the name is more or less justified. I ordered the Brie and cranberry sandwich (with garnish and slaw) and it was perfectly good.  It looked like this:

 

But it did set me thinking about when exactly cranberry sauce became such a regular and apparently essential accompaniment to Brie?  It didn’t used to be that way did it?

 

A short online amble reveals recipes for Brie and cranberry twists, cranberry Brie bites, Brie, cranberry and red onion pithivier,cranberry and Brie bombs.  There’s also an outfit called KK Fine Foods that offers Frozen Mushroom Brie & Cranberry Wellington which sounds unimaginable but in fact looks like this:

 

Didn’t Brie used to come with French bread and at most a few grapes?  This is a largely though not entirely rhetorical question. And when I ask myself, as I occasionally do, what’s the most enjoyable sandwich I ever ate I always come back to a Brie sandwich bought from the café at the Rodin Museum in Paris, and eaten in the sculpture garden.  It was beautifully a chunk of baguette containing some slices of Brie, and nothing else - no salad, no butter, and certainly no cranberry sauce.  I didn't take a picture.

I decided to recreate it at home, but I got down to the Co-op and didn’t like the look of the Brie, so I bought some Camembert instead.  Incidentally there are as many dodgy recipes online involving Camembert and cranberries as there are involving Brie and cranberries:

 

It was good but it wasn’t quite as good as I wanted it to be.  Of course it wasn’t Brie, and maybe I needed to be in Paris, and surrounded by Rodin sculptures, but one thing that definitely wouldn’t have made the sandwich any better was cranberry sauce.

 

And speaking of Brie, there’s a story, apocryphal l suppose, that Henry IV of France was introduced to Brie by his queen, Margaret of Valois, known as Margot.  He liked it so much that when he was tempted to visit his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrées, his wife offered him a slice of Brie and he stayed home. It was a hollow victory.  Henry had the marriage to Margot annulled, as was the style at the time, because she couldn’t give him children.  This is from the movie.