WHAT HAVE I BECOME?

I was in Cartons, a café in the Broadway, Stanmore: nice place, friendly staff, a long menu featuring multiple variations on eggs Benedict, copies of the Jewish News (‘Your free weekly of the year’) lying around if you need one to help pass the time.

 

I had the Sausage, Bacon and Cheese Panini, so obviously Cartons doesn’t cater solely for a Jewish clientele.  It looked like this with, as you see, a little garnish of salad:  

 

And after the waitress had set down the plate she asked me if I wanted any dressing and I said what kind do you have.? And she replied or anyway I thought she replied, French, mayonnaise or sour cream.

 

And I thought how nice it would be to have a little sour cream dressing with the salad and sandwich so I asked for that, or thought I did, and the waitress brought over this:

 

She had said Salad Cream.  I had heard sour cream.

 

Yes, it’s true, I have become an unredeemable sophisticate in matters of salad dressing.  I am not a man with impossible demands, but with impossible expectations.

 

No such problem at Rio’s Coffee Lounge, Walthamstow.  What you see here is one tuna panini, one chicken and avocado panini (shared).  No salad. Salad always complicates everything.  

 

 

ONE HAND FLAPPING

 I never really used to read A.A. Gill when he was restaurant critic of the Sunday Times, though of course I devoured his famous Vanity Fair takedown of the Parisian restaurant L’Ami Louis, part of which ran like this:

‘Nothing I have eaten or heard of being eaten here prepared me for the arrival of the veal kidneys en brochette. Somehow the heat had welded them together into a gray, suppurating renal brick. It could be the result of an accident involving rat babies in a nuclear reactor. They don’t taste as nice as they sound.

 

Pictures like the one above have always suggested that he and I wouldn’t be best buddies, but I’ve been reading his collection Talk Table and I think it’s pretty good.  In an article titled ‘Picnic’ he writes, ‘Sandwiches were made for the big outdoors; whatever you do, don’t get cute with them.  Don’t stuff them with mountains of esoteric gear.  Peanut butter on Wonderloaf is far nicer than aubergine kumquat and herring on focaccia.  Sandwiches are engineering not cooking; they must have stickablity, or when you unpack them they’ll look like a badly held bridge hand.’

I don’t actually know what a badly held bridge hand looks like but I’m on board with the rest of what he says.

How different from the episode of the TV show Taskmaster in which contestants were told to make an ‘exotic sandwich.’  Now I don’t give a hoot about Taskmaster but I am quite fond of Mel Giedroyc who was one of the contestants, and she made (I’m quoting) ‘a sweet multi-layered sandwich out of white bread, Turkish delight, Crunchie bars, KitKats, Double Deckers, Chocolate Oranges, M&Ms, chocolate spread, Maltesers, Twix, Snickers, chocolate eggs and marshmallows.’ 

 

Now we all know this is just junk TV and who can be bothered to rail against it but the obvious objection is that there’s nothing remotely exotic about any of those ingredients.  And the end result looked terrible, perhaps even like a badly held bridge hand.  

 

Young Giedroyc is still ok by me, however.

GIN AND IDA

Ida John

 Here is Ida John (nee Nettleship, Augustus John’s first wife) writing to Dorothy Salaman in 1894 or 5.

     ‘… wouldn’t it be lovely to be free of self for a little while - at least consciousness of self, I mean.  For ever - just to be a beautiful mind growing from outward impressions,  I think self-consciousness is like gin – it stops the growth!”

     

Does self-consciousness stop the growth?  I had no idea.

As for gin … more research may be required.

            

THE (PICKWICK) CLUB SANDWICH, KIND OF

Over the New Year we were in Ipswich for an afternoon and had a sandwich at Pickwicks Coffee and Tea House.  

What you see above is two half shared sandwiches, one a tuna melt, one a cheese and chorizo.  On the day, at that hour, they hit the spot.

 

You know I haven’t read so very much Dickens, (as a boy I was alienated by worthy BBC tv adpatations) but somehow we all know that The Pickwick Papers is a jolly, rollicking and full of food. 

 

The word sandwich or sandwiches appears 8 times in finished text. There’s no mention of tuna or chorizo, though there is a reference to German sausage. The best cluster of sandwich mentions is this one, as Mr Pickwick boards a coach.

 

‘Heads, heads—take care of your heads!’ cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. ‘Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children—mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look round—mother’s head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head of a family off—shocking, shocking! Looking at Whitehall, sir?—fine place—little window—somebody else’s head off there, eh, sir?—he didn’t keep a sharp look-out enough either—eh, Sir, eh?’

‘I am ruminating,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘on the strange mutability of human affairs.’

 

Well, it’s something we all do once in a while, sometimes over a sandwich.

 

JOSE CUERVO - HE'S BARELY A NODDING ACQUAINTANCE OF MINE

 

 Well, we’ve made it to the New Year and supplies of tequila are adequate for at least a while.  I realize the above photograph makes it look as though I was drinking alone.  In fact I wasn’t but I only had the one genuine Mexican tequila shot glass with the agave moulded into the base, so that has to do for the picture.

And frankly I don’t suppose Anjelica Huston was really drinking alone in this advertising picture:

 

Nor Joan Collins in this one:

 

Given that, according to the advertising copy, Joan mixes frozen lemonade concentrate with her tequila and eats it with caviar, she probably didn’t deserve to get much company.  But I bet she did. 

GIVE IT UP

 An article in the Guardian by Michael Pollan about (briefly) giving up caffein.

I have a lot of time for Michael Pollan who is a good writer, no doubt he didn't write the headline.

But really, has nobody at the Guardian heard of Betteridge's law of headlines? 'Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.'  

Which is exactly what Pollan concludes in the article.

DANGEROUS POTATOES

It being the festive season, I was thinking about potatoes and reading Redcliffe Salaman’s majestic The History and Social Influence of the Potato, first published in 1949.

The book’s all good but I especially like this part of the preface, describing the toil that went into the writing.  He says, ‘…there have  not been  wanting  those who  have  regarded these  activities  with a  shake  of the  head  and an  indulgent  smile, indicating  that  nothing, short  of  mental instability,  could  excuse a  lifelong  attachment to  the  study of  so  banal a  subject.’

 

Damn fools.  You’ll get no head shaking from me.  I love this stuff.  I also love this passage from chapter two titled ‘The Archeological Record,’  

‘Cieza  de Leon  gives  a remarkable  account  of a scene  observed by a  priest in  May  1547, and  attested by him in  Cieza’s presence.  It relates how  a  great gathering  of  Indians took  place  at the  call  of the  drum  in Lampa in the Collao ...’ There was a parade of richly dressed young boys and girls, ‘Then followed native labourers with plough on shoulder succeeded by six pages, each with a  bag of  potatoes.  After a ceremonial  parade, and the labourers, holding the bags of potatoes high above their heads, had  danced  to the  beating  of the  drums,  there was brought in a one-year-old  llama, “all  of  one colour”, and this was taken to the chief and then killed and its bowels withdrawn and given to the sorcerers.  Then certain Indians collected all the blood they could from the  llama and poured it on the potatoes in the  bags.  Unfortunately, at this critical moment an overzealous catechumen of only a few days standing arrived on the scene and, having denounced them all, dispersed the gathering.’

 

Well, I’ve never consumed llama blood, though I’ve eaten plenty of black pudding.  I also know there are sources of llama meat, imported from Argentina, but I’m sure it’s not the same as freshly slaughtered entrails.

 

Thoughts of potatoes and strange rituals inevitably make me think of Brian Harvey, of the boy band East 17.  

 A tragic figure in many ways, he’s the man most famous for eating three baked potatoes and then, at one in the morning, getting in his car to drive over to a pal’s place. However the baked potatoes sat uneasily in his stomach, and he knew he was about to throw up. He opened the car door, so as to vomit outside the car's interior, as anyone might.  However, the car’s motor was still running and the car was in gear, and Brian managed to fall out of the car, which then ran over him.

 

Brian’s not looking so great these days – it may have nothing to do with potatoes.

 

XMAS FOODIES

This being the season of good cheer and good food ...

...I found myself reading a wonderfully sour article by Jonathan 

Meades, titled ‘Meat on Canvas.’  Here’s a good bit about food 

photography,

‘As a result of the food photographers who see themselves as heirs to Archibaldo and Miro … chefs have submitted to the dictates of art direction. They make food which is to be looked at … They talk about presentation, all the time, believe me they do.’

 

   

 

Of course he was talking about professional food photographers and professional chefs, and this was written in 1986 when ‘social media’ were a sci-fi writer’s fantasy.  But these days, half the world seem to be food photographers, and a quick riffle through the social media of people I follow has brought up all manner of pleasures, that are a long way from being Archimbaldian

Here, for example, is William Basinski’s  ‘Xmas schorgasboard … root beer glazed ham, quiche lorraine, buttahmilk buisquits, brie and Italian salami and crackers & what-not for noshing and grazing.’

 

This is Christmas Gumbo as eaten by Lynell George:

 

This is a mutant Santa from Food Sake Tokyo:

 

 

And this also Tokyo, and more or less unimprovable, is a photograph Carl Stone put on Instagram labelled 熊すき焼きwhich I gather translates translates as Bear Sukiyaki.  

 

And since you ask, this was my pheasant and chestnut casserole; which could have been better, though I’m not sure what I’d have done to make it better.  I don't think snazzier presentation would have been the answer, though it could have done no harm:

TRIM FOR CHRISTMAS

 I had another Christmas sandwich, this one from Costa.

 

It called itself ‘Turkey & The Trimmings’ but really it was more trimmings than turkey.  The cheese on top could have overwhelmed a meatier sandwich than this one, and if you’d told me I was eating a stuffing sandwich I’d have believed you; and actually that would be OK. I think I prefer stuffing to turkey, but even so ….

 

And then there was this:

 

Have you ever thought of taking piece of Wensleydale cheese and mashing a spoonful of mincemeat into it? No, of course not but if you did, it would taste very much like the ‘Yorkshire Creamery, Limited Edition, Yorkshire Wensleydale Mince Pie.’  It looked like this:

 

And it tasted exactly the way you’d imagine it would.  It was strange but you know, it wasn’t altogether bad.  This is a list of the ingredients.

 

It just wouldn't be Christmas without fructose.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE TIME HAS COME

          Oysters.

         Oysters haven’t been especially easy to get at my local farmers' market lately.   The fish man hasn’t had any.  The autumn was warm and he lost a fair bit of stock, he says, so he stopped selling them for a while.  But on Saturday he had some – well, just six, so I bought them.  They were biggies – and cost 1.50 rather than the usual pound.

 

Photo by Luna Woodyear-Smith.

When I say they were whoppers I should perhaps say they were monsters, which is also to say it was one heck of job to get them open.  And one of them looked a bit dodgy so here are the other five.

 

Photo by Luna Yearwood-Smith.

In fact the job was so Herculean that I broke my oyster knife on one of them.  My oyster knife isn’t especially treasured but I’ve always thought it was pretty serviceable.  So I was reduced to using the point of a knife and that broke too.  This adds to the pain (and the cost) of the pleasure.

The oysters' revenge.

 

EATING AND SPREADING

 This chap’s been in the news lately: 

It's David R Chan – a 72 year old, LA–based, retired tax  lawyer, of Chinese heritage. The BBC report said he ‘claims to have dined at nearly 8000 restaurants across the US and counting.’  It’s the word ‘claims’ that’s a problem, as though there might be some doubt, but I believe him.  Lawyers have money, they can afford to eat out a lot, and in any case he’s got an honest face.

 

The BBC also seems unusually crass in using the headline ‘What I learned eating at 8000 Chinese restaurants’ as though obsession and food consumption had anything to do with learning.

 

Of course I’m deeply fascinated by obsession, collecting and accumulation, by ordering and organization, and in this case by the fact that according to the article, ‘Each (restaurant visit) is archived in a spreadsheet that he has maintained for four decades, along with thousands of restaurant business cards and menus.’

 

Now, there have been times in my life when I’ve accumulated (or even collected) large numbers of food books, menus and business cards, but I suppose it’s an indication that I’m not truly obsessed, that most of these items were ditched in various acts of nomadism and downsizing.  All I’ve kept are a few favorite books, and a box of restaurant business cards. The latter are especially satisfying because they’re small and compact.  But I’m not sure this constitutes a collection, much less an obsession, and there’s certainly no organization

 

I’ve been following David R. Chan on Instagram, which is a reasonable way of being obsessed (both for him and for me) and (for him) also a way of sharing or showing off his obsession.  When I last looked, i.e. a few minutes before I wrote this, Mr. Chan had 9242 followers which is impressive by my standards if not by Kim Kardashian’s.

 

His photographs are wonderfully artless such as this ‘Chicken and fried egg sandwich on a Hong Kong pineapple bun at Alice’s Kitchen in Monterey Park.’

 

Or these ‘Cheeseburger dumplings with cheese crispy at Ms Chi Cafe in Culver City.’

 

It all made me realize how rarely I eat in Chinese restaurants.  Below is a spread from one I went to in L.A’s Chinatown after a slightly grim night organised by Lucky Peach (Kim Gordon had recited a recipe for corn with miso butter and bacon while making guitar feedback - don’t ask).  I’ve forgotten the name of the restaurant though I think I could find it again.

 

         And here’s the food at a wedding reception I went to, some years ago also in an L.A. restaurant.  I’ve no memory of where the restaurant was, or what it was called.

 

Kind of makes me wish I had a spreadsheet.

 

And yes, that is shark fin soup, though I didn’t know it at the time,  And yes, I am ashamed.