EATING NATURE

 It was John Constable who said, ‘Nature is the fountain’s head, the source from whence all originality must spring.’  And who would argue with John Constable?

 

I was having lunch in a garden, not my own, but the garden belonging to Penny who is in fact connected with the Constable Trust.

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

And I was sitting at table eating home made strawberry ice cream when suddenly a wisteria petal flew in and landed atop the ice cream on my spoon.  It was a strange and perfect culinary moment.  Not fabulously original but an example of how nature and culture come together in Constable Country.

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

Incidentally according to an article in Landscape Research, the year Constable died, 1837, was the year protein was identified, though Wikipedia puts it a year later.  Well worth knowing. 

This is a photograph of John Kendrew in more recent times with a model of myoglobin:

IN FRONT OF THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM

 Word is that Ferran Adrià, he of the restaurant El Bulli, the epicenter of molecular gastronomy fame, which closed in 2011, is about to the premises as a museum.  I like restaurants and I like museums but a food museum strikes me as tricky thing.

As far as I can tell, Adrià’s museum will consist of a lot of photographs of food, making it seem like a living Instagram, along with paintings by Adria, which from what I’ve seen are likely to make it look somewhat like a charity shop. Here’s some art he did earlier:  

 

But perhaps there’ll be art by other people too:

 

It appears there’ll be no museum café, and I don’t know whether or not there’ll be a gift shop.

 

Needless to say I never ate at El Bulli but my old late pal did Jonathan Gold  did, right before it closed, and reviewed it for the Wall Street Journal.  He compared it toYoko Ono’s art and an edible infomercial, which doesn’t sound as though he loved the place, but he talked about it on KCRW radio and I think his main point was it pays not to overthink what you were eating at El Bulli, which obviously is not going to apply in the museum.

 

Closer to home Bompas and Parr did very briefly, for about 3 months, set up The British Museum of Food, in Borough Market.  The museum's aspirations, they said at the time, were ‘to change peoples’ lives by helping them consider what they eat, spread knowledge around nutrition and health and to recognize its role in culture.’  Which sounds fair enough.  In 2016 the museum was looking for a permanent home, and as far as I know it still is.  I believe they have a very good menu collection.

 

In Japan there’s The Museum of Fruit, which I only know about because David Toop made a CD of music for the place. 

 

Originally I thought this must be some ironic conceptual art piece, but no, it’s an actual museum of fruit (kind of). The website says ‘Itsuko Hasegawa 長谷川逸子designed the Fruit Museum in the Yamanashi Prefecture near Mount Fuji in Japan, completed in 1997. The three shell-shaped buildings symbolize the “fruits” of spiritual sensuality, intelligence and lust. 

In a general sense, the buildings are trees producing fruits of creativity in the visitors who themselves will spread a sensitivity to our frail environment, and hopefully produce green buildings themselves.’

So no, not your average museum of food or anything else, but it does exist in the real world.

As most certainly do the two noodle museums dedicated to Momofuku Ando, the founder of Nissin Food Products and inventor of instant ramen.

 

There’s one branch of the museum in Ikeda and another in Yokohama. The latter ‘offers the virtual experience of being a noodle in a huge factory, and going through the entire manufacturing process from making the noodles to shipping them.’

I think I might give that a miss and head for the tasting room. Yes this is a food museum where they actually give you food.  

 

And finally, I was thinking of the Brighton Pavilion, some way from being a museum of food but it’s the kitchen that I always remember best.  It looks pretty good as it is now, 

but it was probably more fun before it became an exhibit. 

AND INTO THE BLACK

 Facebook reminds me that 9 years ago I ate this plate/bowl of bangers and mash at the Blue Legume, Stoke Newington. Just like tucking into a pile of madeleines innit?

 

To be fair, I remember the sausages quite well – they were Cumberland - but I couldn’t possibly have told you the name of the restaurant, or that I’d put the picture up on Facebook.

INCONSTANT CRAVINGS

 You know, as I get older I think I ‘crave’ food much less than I used to, and crave of course is a very contested word.  What exactly is the difference between a craving and just being a greedy pig?

 

I mean I do sometimes really feel the need for a fried cheese sandwich (that’s grilled to my American readers) with baked beans, 

 

and if there’s fish and chips on the menu I’ll most likely order it, 

 

but do I actively crave these things?  I don’t really think so.

 

Anyway, I woke up this morning with what I’m prepared to say was a craving for asparagus and hollandaise sauce.  

 

You know, I think I was quite old before I ate asparagus.  I think it was ordered for me in a wine bar by a small time film producer who wanted to appear classy but didn’t want to spend much money.  

 

Well, the local Co-op is not a cornucopia of foodie delights but they had asparagus spears – (I’d have preferred them whole) and the hollandaise was in a packet that allegedly ‘serves four’ - they’d have to be rather an abstemious foursome.

Yeah, yeah, I did used to make my own proper hollandaise in a bain marie but you know, I had higher goals and expectations back then.  And slightly at a loss as to what to have with the asparagus, I saw that the Co-op, had smoked mackerel in the chiller cabinet.  Why not?

 

I can tell you that the asparagus comes form Hampshire and the mackerel comes from the East Atlantic which seems a big vague though the packing assured me it was responsibly sourced.  The packet of hollandaise comes from Pegasus Way, Haddenham, Aylesbury; so that’s OK.

 

And you know the packet of hollandaise with far less milk than they recommended and with a squeeze of lemon juice was much better than I could have made from scratch and above all, it may not have satisfied every synapse and tastebud but -- IT WORKED.  On the night, it hit the spot.

 

That’s what cravings are all about, right?

TWO GLASSES OF BLESSINGS

 

There’s an essay by Jonathan Lethem in which he says 

that every summer he goes on holiday, taking a Barbara 

Pym novel with him.  He says it doesn’t matter which 

novel because he can never remember whether he’s read 

it or not, and in any case they’re all pretty much the 

same.  This may sound like a complaint or a criticism but 

in fact he’s a big fan of Barbara Pym, as am I, and I know 

just what he means.

 

The other day I started reading, in fact rereading, Pym’s A Glass of Blessings.  To be fair to myself I did remember certain aspects of the plot and I saw that I’d dog-eared a page or two here and there so I must have read at least some of it.

 

The martini makes an honorable appearance, just as it does in Pym’s earlier Jane and Prudence, 1953, in which Prudence consoles herself by eating alone in a good restaurant ‘A dry Martini and then a little smoked salmon; she felt she could manage that.’ Pym capitalizes Martini.

 

I don't believe Pym's heroine looks even remotely like this.

Early in A Glass of Blessings, 1958, the heroine/narrator Wilmet Forsyth’s husband Rodney, known as Noddy (yes really), brings home a work colleague from the Ministry and busies himself making drinks.

‘I think I’ll have a dry Martini,’ says Wilmet.

‘Gin always gives me a dry mouth,’ says Sybil, who is Wilmet’s mother in law.      

        ‘You sure you wouldn’t prefer a gin and lime, dear?’ says Rodney to Wilmet, his ‘hand hesitating on the Noilly Prat bottle.’

        ‘No, I’d rather have French please,’ says Wilmet.

 

Some interesting nomenclature there.  Gin and lime is presumably a synonym for gimlet, French apparently a synonym for a martini or is it just for vermouth?

 

Later at some church social Wilmet observes ‘I myself seemed to belong to two very clearly defined circles - the Martini drinkers and the tea drinkers though I was only just beginning to be initiated into the latter.’

What a world in which Martini drinking precedes and supersedes tea drinking. That’s my world, actually.

FUN WITH FOOD

Carrot humour:

Photo: Gannon Studios

And the face in the guacamole:

POLA VORTEX

 Say what you like about Pola Negri, but she knew how to pose with a glass:

But really, who can really compete with Bette Davis? - a glass and a shoe!

THE GROOVE IS IN THE PORK

 What better way of celebrating Earth Day and the end of 

Ramadan than with a nice roast pork shoulder?

 

Cooking pork is isn’t all that – it’s the anxiety about crackling that can make a man lose his mind.  

Salt it or not salt it?  I’d say salt it?  

Oil it or don’t oil it?  I’d say oil it but I’m not 100% sure about that.  

Scald the skin with hot water?  Well, I can see some logic in that but all the authorities say how important it is for the skin to be really dry before you roast it so if you’re going to scald it, it has to be done at least a day in advance, and I can never think that far ahead.

 

Here’s some I did earlier, quite a long time earlier - I had a better oven in those days:

 

and here’s one cooked by some fine chefs in Vienna – I can’t even imagine what ovens they have:

In the current case, at the end of the roasting period, the pork looked good but the skin looked at best so-so.  Bits of it looked like acceptable crackling but a lot of it didn’t.

 

And having done a little bit of research earlier I happened to have found a source that said when in doubt detach the skin and stick it in the microwave.  I had never done this before and frankly it sounded like the devil’s work but I felt I had nothing much to lose so in it went and OMG it worked really very well indeed.  Perhaps not the VERY best crackling ever but not at all bad:

On the plate it looked like this - and yes I know those roast potatoes lack poise - another source of anxiety.

SOMETIMES THE MAN EATS THE SANDWICH, SOMETIMES THE SANDWICH EATS THE MAN

PHOTO: CAROLINE GANNON

It's not easy to take a good and informative photograph of a sandwich. I think this is largely because it’s hard to glean much about the inside of a sandwich from seeing the outside.  Of course you can open up the sandwich to disaply the ingredients but at that point it no longer looks properly like a sandwich.  I suppose the problem is solved if you only eat and photograph open sandwiches but that seriously limits your scope.

 

And then (see above and the two below) I was looking at the Instagram feed of Sandwich magazine, a publication which according to its website ‘takes an iconic sandwich and uses it as a lens for cultural essays, features, photo stories and more.’  Well, why not?

They solve the above aesthetic problem by stuffing their sandwiches with such massive amounts of filling you might identify it from across the street.  They’re great photographs, though the sandwiches don’t look at all easy to eat.

 

The problem was further driven home to me t’other day when I made a sandwich of sliced pork, cream cheese and pickled carrot on olive bread. But you probably wouldn’t know that unless I told you.

 

And then yesterday I was in the Gardeners Rest Restaurant (do you think there should there be an apostrophe in there?) at Hyde Hall, a place that I think aspires to being a proper restaurant (I mean they have 4 kinds of Sunday roast). The inamorata and I shared a couple of sandwiches  ‘Double egg and watercress on thick sliced granary bread’ and a ‘Pastrami with dill pickles, mustard mayonnaise, rocket and Leerdammer cheese,’ again on thick sliced granary bread.’

 

They were pretty decent sandwiches but they didn’t make for wonders of photographic sandwich art.  The tomato and basil soup was much more photogenic.  But you know, being photogenic isn't everything, as the first picture in this blog goes to prove.

 

SECRET INGREDIENTS

 I had lunch at Soho House this week with some honest film production people.  I hadn’t been there for ages, not since I used to have an agent with loose pockets.

 

The dining room was very nice indeed. In other circumstances I might have taken a photograph, but there were notices around the place saying you shouldn’t take photographs so I didn’t. This is from Tripadvisor:

 

I had, in fact we all had, the club steak, chips and peppercorn sauce, which was very good.  The chips came in a metal container, of course; and of course I didn't photograph it.

 

The menu was satisfying short – but there was one thing on it that threw me sideways:  “hispi cabbage, black garlic, toasted yeast.”  I had no idea that yeast could be toasted but apparently it can.  And according to the Internet, it looks like this:

 

I often order the thing on menus that I’ve never had before or even heard of.  But there are limits. 

 

There was also steak tartare on the menu but I didn’t order because here’s one the inamorata made over the weekend (the secret ingredient is venison):

PENULTIMATE SUPPER

In anticipation of the Easter festivities we had some rabbit-related food: bunny-shaped crumpets, 

 

with poached eggs 

 

and then an actual rabbit

 

which tasted much better than it looked.

 

Scholars differ in their specualtions about what was actually eaten at the Last Supper: definitely bread and wine, and if it was a Passover Seder there’d have been eggs, a shank bone, charoset and the ever popular bitter herbs.

 

So definitely no oysters (Leviticus and all that), but we thought that they added considerably to the festivities.