THE WILD HEDGEHOG (A RATHER FORCED ALLUSION TO IBSEN'S THE WILD DUCK - IBSEN WAS NORWEGIAN, RIGHT?)

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Image from Norwegian Bakers website.

Every Saturday at Manningtree market there’s a stall from the Norwegian Bakers, who in some sense hale from Wivenhoe, who sell enticing looking and fairly expensive bread and pastries.  But you know, you’re only old once, so we bought a hedgehog loaf which looks like this:

 

The outside is coated with olive oil and chunky grains of salt, and it  tastes great.  The resemblance to a hedgehog is visual rather than taste, but then I don’t really know what a hedgehog tastes like.  

 

The only slight problem is a visual one.  The moment you cut a slice from the loaf, it looks a very great deal less like a hedgehog and becomes something far more quirkily sculptural.  The Norwegians may have a word for that.

If you go to the Norwegian Bakers website you can learn actual Norwegian words such as ‘Matglede,’ and this is how you use it in a sentence. ‘At Norwegian Bakers, we embody “matglede” by delivering the joy of food through our cakes, buns and breads, all lovingly crafted for your enjoyment.’

 

There’s also ‘Helgekos’ meaning ‘weekend cosiness.’  Why not? 

 

 

 

 

THE CROQUETTE AND I

 Sometimes during school holidays when I was a lad growing up in Sheffield, my mum would take me out for lunch at the Sidewalk Café in Chapel Walk.  I remember it being a nice enough place but photographs from its early days make it look way cooler and hipper than I could ever imagine, let alone remember.

 

I remember two things about the food. One, that on the counter there were huge bowls of sliced onion in vinegar, which you could scoop out and have with your cheese roll, which is what I usually had: you could take as much as you wanted. Also, and I don’t suppose this went with the cheese rolls, they served potato croquettes which I’d never come across before and which I loved and which seemed the height of sophistication and exoticism.

 

Well, the years go by and I’d have said that these days it’s pretty rare to find croquettes on a menu, and yet in the last few weeks I’ve had two different kinds in two different places.

 

The first were at the Cabbage Patch, a pub in Twickenham – they were leek and black pudding which I think is hard to beat - that's apple sauce in the little pot:

The second lot were at a pub called the Goose, in Walthamstow, and went by the name of Spanish Ham Croquettes with ‘smoky baconnaise’ – which I  suppose is mayo with bacon in it, though I couldn’t taste any bacon and in fact it seemed more like Marie Rose sauce.

 

The Cabbage Patch has a terrific pub sign outside, like this:

 

The current sign outside the Goose is quite muted, with just with the pub name on it, no illustration, though it does have this strangely appealing sign for its not very secret garden – it’s the chain that makes it special.

 

However the signage hardly compares with the old days when the Goose was The Tower, complete with folly tower and a giant concrete head.  I do wonder what happened to the head:

 

And here from the interwebs is what claims to be the world’s biggest croquette, made in Assabu, in Hokkaido, on July 23, using 600 kilograms of potatoes, 50 kg of ground meat, 200 eggs, and weighing 279 kg.

 

It doesn’t look in the least like my idea of a croquette but probably it’s a cultural thing and in any case it’s in the Guinness Book or Records so I suppose that’s good enough.

LOVELY LIFE, LOVELY GRUB

 I can’t absolutely swear to it, but I do believe I was once in the same room as April Ashley, one of the first Brits to undergo gender reassignment surgery, male to female. The room was the bar of the Chelsea Arts Club and somebody told me that the distinguished-looking woman across the way was Ms. Ashley.  I had no reason not to believe.

         

After the op April Ashley became a model, among other things, and in 2012 received an MBE for ‘services to the Transgendered community.’  She died in 2021.

         

And now there’s a new book titled Bonjour Mademoiselle! April Ashley and the Pursuit of a Lovely Life by Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts.  At this point I’ve only read the reviews but there seems to be some dynamite stuff in there about food, the most immediately engaging is that Ashley became a front of house person at a restaurant I’d never heard of called AD8, a pretty dodgy establishment apparently, with a signature dish of champagne and camembert soup.  One night, apparently, April drank 32 martinis, which certainly deserves a medal if not necessarily an MBE.

 

The book was reviewed in Saturday’s Times just a few pages away from a review of Diane Abbott’s memoir A Woman Like Me, which seems a bit short on the martini drinking but there is some interesting food stuff. 

When Abbott was in a relationship with Jeremy Corbyn they went on holiday, in 1979, to the south of France. They travelled on Corbyn’s East German motorbike which kept breaking down, but Abbott consoled herself by thinking that sooner or later they’d arrived in the south of France where she’d eat ‘delicious Gallic Cuisine.’  It was not to be.  Corbyn opened the panniers on his bike to reveal ‘a week’s supply of instant macaroni and other processed food.’ 

SAUCE WITH EVERYTHING

 

The whole point of reading the Daily Star Sunday, is that you get to see what some obviously quite smart journalists come up with when they channel their inner idiot.

Last weekend there was the headline BROWN SAUCE SICKOS: BRITS SLAP HP ON ROAST.

 

There in the fine print you’ll learn that one in ten of the 2000 people polled by the manufacturers of HP sauce said it was a ‘must’ on their roast.  It seemed to be more prevalent in younger age groups, and the Geordies were the main enthusiasts, 20% of them splashing it on.  At the same time a woman for Edinburgh said she was ‘horrified’ at the idea.

 

Now personally I wouldn’t put HP sauce on a roast but a bacon sandwich without it is like a day without sunshine.

Being the wishy-washy liberal I am, I’m content for people to put whatever the heck they like on their food.  And I’ve never altogether understood why certain sauces supposedly go with certain foods but not others.  I mean, apple sauce on pork is great but it wouldn’t be bad on lamb would it?  Whereas mint sauce would be OK on certain chicken dishes wouldn’t it?  Orange sauce ‘goes with’ duck but wouldn’t it also go with rabbit?

 

Now, back in the day when me and the lads in Sheffield, had been out for a pint or three we’d pop into the chip shop on the way home and, have a pile of chips with curry sauce. We thought this was madly exotic. And it tasted great.

 

And not so long ago I bought the above tub of Sauce Granules Chip Shop Curry.  It came from a shop called Well Worth A Pound, though in fact it cost £1.45. It’s not as good as the curry sauce I remember, but it’s all right.  Don’t think I’d put it on a roast but if I did I wouldn’t want to be mocked by some smart lad from the Daily Star.

 

LITTLE BIT OF COMFORT, VERY LITTLE JOY

 I’ve been thinking about comfort and I’ve been thinking about food.  Whether this is the same as thinking about comfort food, I’m not sure. 

The simple, immediate cause of these thoughts was that I’ve been hit by a hideous dose of flu, like being run over by an Ocado truck, scarcely able to get out of bed. I was looking to find comfort anywhere I could, and food seemed a better place than most.  

 

Now the online Cambridge Dictionary definies comfort food as ‘the type of food that people eat when they are sad or worried, or food that people ate as children.' I suppose I was sad and I suppose I was worried, but mostly I felt like I was on another planet.   

 

The BBC Good Food website gives examples of comfort food that include Beef enchiladas, Chicken chashu shoyu ramen, and Three-cheese meatball lasagna Someone’s been at the cooking sherry, right?  These things were not going to comfort me.  But I thought I’d better eat something.   I tried a bowl ofmuesli – it was like eating a mix of gravel and sawdust. 

 

I had a clementine which was OK but it didn’t taste much like a clementine usually tastes.  I thought about making a cheese sandwich, a generally reliable source of comfort, but it was far too much trouble.

 

Now, if I’d been craving the food of my actual childhood this would have meant a yearning for tripe and onions, liver and onions, and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie in a tin.  None of these would have brought me any comfort whatsoever in my flu-ridden state.

 

Nevertheless it so happened that I had a can of Heinz oxtail soup stashed in the cupboard.  Now one way or another, I pretty much grew up on oxtail soup (it was only many years later that I saw an actual ox’s tail) and I’d bought it recently, experimentally to see if it had any Proustian resonances.  This seemed like the moment to crack in open.

 

Reader, it did not have any Proustian resonances.  I know my taste buds were all over the place but it was pretty dreadful – and adding lemon, cream and Worcestershire sauce was only a slight help.  Of course if I hadn’t had the flu it might have been different but I suspect not so very different. I became philosophical.

 

I asked myself, as I have before; if food doesn’t bring you comfort why would you bother to eat it in the first place?  Of course you could say if you’re starving you’ll eat anything but in that case anything will bring you comfort.

 

Of course sometimes you make the mistake of going to a bad restaurant, but in those circumstances you weren’t choosing discomfort.  You had it forced upon you. It wasn’t what you hoped for.  Or perhaps it was something you made yourself and the recipe went wrong because you overestimated your culinary skills.  You damn fool.  So there may be all kinds of reasons why food makes you uncomfortable.

 

There is also the question, which I’m still wrestling with, of whether comfort is the same thing as pleasure, and I’m edging towards saying not.  I love oysters, I love steak tartar, I love octopus.  These things certainly bring me great pleasure but I’m not sure they bring me comfort.  Certainly they’d have been no help at all during my hideous bout of flu.

 

    You know what worked best – a mug of hot Rose’s lime juice and two Ibuprofens: a very minor, but in the circumstances, a very significant coming together of comfort and pleasure.

 

 Also it must be said that for much of my incapacity, the inamorata did her very best bedside duties.  Thanks, young Caroline.

PARTY TIME WITH JC

 Let’s have a belated celebration of John Cage’s birthday, September 5^th, though frankly I’m prepared to celebrate him any day of the year.

 

And I did see the above photograph on Gary Leonard’s Instagram feed, taken on September 5th 1987 at a party given for Cage at the Triforium in downtown Los Angeles. (He was born in 1912 – looking good, John).

 

The Triforium is a piece of public sculpture in downtown LA created in 1975 by Joseph Young, made from concrete and illuminated Venetian glass prisms and connected to a programmed sound system.  Music and lights moved in harmony. This is a picture I took in 2022.

 

It was silent for quite a long time but thanks to the folks at the Triforium Project there were live performances in 2017 and 18.  And I was at one of them, though as I recall they didn’t play any John Cage

 

I was there with my psychogeographic pal Anthony Miller, who knows all and sees all, and he said, ‘Isn’t that Gary Leonard over there taking pictures?’ Gary Leonard is a legend in LA, having photographed the great and the good and the deeply obscure, from LA punks onward.

 

And indeed it was Gary Leonard, and we talked to him a little bit.  Now Gary Leonard did a great book, also now a website, called  ‘Take My Picture’ and it took a certain amount of will power not to say to him, ‘Take my picture, Gary,’ but we managed it. Sometimes I think that was a mistake.

 

Anyway, now in further celebration of John Cage and acknowledgement of his status as foodie, mycologist and wit, here is a ‘story’ from his work Indeterminacy.

ALL YOU CAN STOMACH

You’ve probably been hearing about this place Les Grands Buffets, an all-you- can-eat restaurant (though they don’t use that term) in the city of Narbonne, in France.  It’s been mentioned in various places but an article by Lauren Collins in the New Yorker promises to be the defining word.

They serve what they consider real French food, the price is fifty-two euros and ninety centimes for the food, which sounds kind of reasonable though the drink costs extra.Reservations are incredibly hard to come by which I’m sure adds to the desirability for some people. 

 

Two things in the article stood out for me. First, that Guinness has certified the restaurant’s cheese platter, with its 111 varietes of cheese, as some kind of world record, although Lauren Collins says it’s more of a cheese room.

 

That picture actually vaguely reminds me of the cheese department at Harrods, a store that I worked in for much longer than I intended to. (I was in the furniture department). 

One of the small perks for employees was that first thing in the morning before the shop was open, you could wander into the food hall and ask the man setting up the cheese counter if they had any left over offcuts from the previous day.  Sometimes he had, sometimes he hadn’t, and sometimes even if he hadn’t he’d just cut a chunk off a perfectly good slab of cheese, put it in a bag and say, ‘Now it’s an offcut.’  Good times.

 

The other thing, as the article attempted to investigate the economics of the business, it quoted Pierre Cavalier, the general manager, who said that the average customer goes through 1.3 oysters and 7.4 plates.  That surely means that quite a lot of people must eat no oysters at all.  If I was at an all you can eat oyster bar, I’m pretty certain I could hit the 2 or 3 dozen mark and possibly many more besides.  But I’m also pretty certain that I won’t be going to Les Grands Buffets. I’ve never much enjoyed buffets, generally because I  eat too much and yet still feel unsatisfied. 

 

Whether the success of Les Grands Buffets signals the return of the buffet, I don’t know, but a riffle through the archive reveals several postcards of 1960s American buffets, or perhaps more accurately smorgasbords.

 

This is The Stockholm, in Manhattan: 

This is Bit of Sweden, in Hollywood:

This is Old Scandia in Opa Locka, Florida:

 

Of course I’ve never eaten in any of them but they look better than any buffet I've ever eaten from – just one more use for a time machine.

WORLD EATS

You know, a lot of people say to me, “Old father, old artificer, is there one thing I should know as I travel around the world feeding my face?”

 

And I say yes, it’s this, that when you arrive in a brand new place for the first time, the first meal you eat, whether good or bad, is always going to be the least representative.

 

I’ll give you an example.  When I went to Tokyo for the first time, I emerged from the hotel in Shinkjuku, unpleasantly jet-lagged but quite pleasantly culture-shocked, I had it in my head from reasonable sources that if you wandered into any Tokyo  department  store you could always get something decent to eat.

 

But I was so off the clock and I got up so early that when I went out of the hotel, the department stores hadn’t yet opened, and the only place I could find to eat was some kind of deserted but open touristy tearoom (name and location lost in the mists of memory) and I stumbled in there and sat down and the waitress brought a menu and the only thing I liked the look of was the croque monsieur.  It looked like this (note the Japanese pickles), and it tasted very good, but it was hardly typical of Tokyo eating.

Now, I know I’ve had a few croque monsieurs over the years, and I think I must have had at least a couple of them in France but my recall is very vague.  Then last week, just a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus, I was in Zedel ‘a Parisian brasserie with a 1930's interior’ and that interior in itself would be reason enough to go there though in fact I sat outside at table on the pavement watching the world go by, and I ordered a croque monsieur - it looked like this and it tasted fine:

 

Was it ‘authentic’?  I suppose it must have been; Zedel has Frenchness oozing from every pore.  Was it better than the one I had in Tokyo?  Well yes, probably, but not nearly as much better as you might expect.  Maybe there’s a limit to just how good a croque monsieur can be.

 

PIECE BE WITH YOU

I can’t say I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about the eating habits of Sharleen Spiteri, from the band Texas, but there she is in the Observer Food Monthly telling the world, ‘Every time I come off stage, I always have a piece and crisps and a cup of tea. I call it a piece and crisps because I’m Scottish, so basically for your readers that’s a crisp sandwich. Two slices of bread, proper butter – you can’t have crappy butter – and a pack of crisps and squeeze it down. I have that everywhere apart from when we get to France. Then it’s baguettes. Because then you’re getting the good shit.’

 

Hair and makeup: Sarah Reygate. Photograph: Alex Lake/The Observer

 

I hadn’t actually heard of a ‘piece’ in this context, but good for her although later in the article she says she doesn’t like lamb or pork so that’s probably less good.

 

Naturally my mind drifts back to a story about Mark E. Smith in Stuart Maconie’s book Cider With Roadies. Maconie is in Smith’s flat after a boozy night out and Smith asks if he wants something to eat and Maconie says sure, so Smith goes into the kitchen and bangs around for twenty minutes and comes out carrying two plates of crisp sandwiches. And because Smith is a surprisingly good host, he asks Maconie, “Do you want a pickled onion with that?” 

 

You don’t have to be Scottish or a Mancunian to enjoy a crisp sandwich, below is one I made much earlier in Los Angeles: 

The eagle-eyed may spot that I used mayo rather than butter which some, including Sharleen Spiteri, would consider a mistake.

And here's another one with crisps and bacon:

 

And shortly after that I started to fantasize about the BLP sandwich.  For one blissful second I thought I’d had a really great idea, if not a money-making one. 

Whereas the BLT contains bacon, lettuce and tomato, I abandoned the tomato and replaced it with potato, and not just crisps but fried potatoes – they’d be called scallops where I come from in Yorkshire - but I’m sure there are regional variations,

 

Obviously it’s slightly time-consuming because you have to fry the bacon and the potatoes: opening a bag or crisps is a whole lot easier, but I thought it was well worth the effort.

 

It didn’t catch on but you know, I never really thought it would.