BUSTERED

Apparently there’s something in the air about Marilyn Monroe right now; or maybe there always is.  I just got sent a copy of a novel by Andrew O’Hagan, called The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, And of His Friend Marilyn Monroe. The book is, as it were, a fictionalized “memoir” by Marilyn’s dog, Maf, (short for Mafia Honey), a mutt given to her by Frank Sinatra.

         Marilyn doesn’t do a whole lot of eating in the book – mostly she drinks champagne – but she does do some.  There’s a meal eaten in her car in the parking lot of a “Jack-in-the-Box chicken joint,” and there’s a terrific scene at Musso and Frank where she’s with Sinatra, Natalie Wood and a “hoodlum chum” of Sinatra’s called Frank DeSimone.  Sinatra keeps telling Marilyn to have the Shrimp Louie, the zucchini, the spaghetti with meat sauce, but all she wants is rice pudding.  Incidentally all these items are on the current menu at Musso and Frank.  I assume O’Hagan is a smart enough novelist to have checked that they were also there in the early 60s; and given the restaurant’s resistance to change, it seems entirely likely that they were.

Maf meanwhile, being a dog, eats whatever he can get: cakes, “small casseroles,” Twinkies, pretzels, nachos, sausages, Friskies and a “plate of morsels” at the Plaza Hotel in New York.  I don’t know if a dog would consider this good food or not, though Maf certainly doesn’t complain.

         Canine eating habits have been on my mind somewhat lately since I’ve been pursuing my intermittent Buster Keaton obsession.  Keaton was one of the few actors who seemed to enjoy performing on screen with animals, and in his real life he had all kinds of pets including a number of St. Bernard dogs, all of them called Elmer, which was the name of a character he played in some of his movies. 

         Keaton said, “Elmer did his own shopping.  HE would look a butcher in the face until the guy couldn’t stand it and would throw him a steak, the best in the house, and then charge it to Keaton.  Elmer ate three lunches at MGM – the original expense account dog.  He lunched at my bungalow at noon, with Marion Davies at one, and with the executives at two.”

         Few dogs, even in America, eat as well as Elmer did.  For that matter few people eat so well either.  And of course we know that even the average American mutt eats better than a great many people in the world.  I’m always simultaneously amused and outraged by those “premium” dog foods, all natural this and organic that. 

         At the same time, of course, there are cultures that are happy to eat dog. And I started to wonder what these dog eaters feed to the dogs that they’re going to eat.  A lot more research is required on that one, but I did find an intriguing reference in Calvin W. Schwabe’s Unmentionable Cuisine.

         He writes that when early British and American explorers arrived in Hawaii, the locals couldn’t understand the westerners’ attitude toward dogs and pigs, why one was to be a faithful companion and one was to be food.  The Hawaiians kept both as pets, and they also ate both of them.  What did they feed the dogs on?   Well, I don’t have a complete answer, but according to Schwabe, the Hawaiian women suckled both piglets and puppies, which I’d have thought was taking even the pet thing a bit far.

         Safe to say that Buster Keaton didn’t eat his dogs, but he was a great lover of gadgets and machines, and at his ranch in the Woodland Hills, he had a model  railroad.  According to Eleanor Keaton, “The toy train came out of the kitchen on a track that ran the length of the pool alongside the fence, and curved over a trestle to a round table.  We used to deliver soft drinks and hot dogs to guests.”

         There are a thousand and one reasons to love Buster Keaton, but this isn’t the least of them.  

CHAMPAGNE WISHES, HOTDOG DREAMS

The Internet has been alive the last couple of days with the “discovery” of Marilyn Monroe’s recipe for stuffing – from the new book Fragments.  That’s it above, written on a stray piece of stationery, though why she’d have a blank sheet of paper with an insurance company letterhead remains a mystery.

Cookbook authors Matt and Ted Lee, who recreated the recipe for the New York Times, said it bore the "unmistakable balance of fussiness and flexibility that is the hallmark of an experienced and confident cook."  Oh come on.  It’s nice that the boys speak well of Marilyn, but clearly it isn’t “Marilyn’s recipe,” it’s something she copied down from somewhere; a book, a magazine, a TV show? 

It seems to me that writing down a fussy recipe doesn’t make you an experienced and confident cook any more than posing with a copy of Ulysses makes you an experienced and confident reader of literary fiction. Marilyn Monroe was one of those people who was always on the cusp of becoming something or someone else; a method actor, an intellectual, a great cook.  I’m sure she was sincere, but sincerity isn’t everything.

A quick zip around the Internet trying to discover Marilyn’s favorite food reveals two answer: hotdogs and caviar.  I tend to believe the latter, and I’ll tell you why.  There’s a wonderful and often hilarious book titled The Prince, the Showgirl and Me by Colin Clark (son of Kenneth, brother of Alan), which is essentially the diary he kept as a young man while working on the movie The Prince and the Showgirl, with Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier. 

Monroe and Olivier were (predictably) a match made in hell, not least because Olivier soon realized that for all her flakiness, her inability to remember lines or even show up with any regularity, she was still acting him off the screen.  That’s gotta hurt.

Clark recounts the shooting of a scene one morning in which Marilyn is seen eating a late supper with Olivier.  She was allowed to chose her own food for the scene, and went with caviar and chicken salad.  It needed a lot of takes to get the scene right, and since the food wilted horribly under the hot movie lights, fresh caviar and chicken were provided for each take.

Clark writes, “However there is a limit to the number of times that even the greatest actress can tuck into caviar and chicken salad at 11 in the morning.  I thought she did jolly well.  SLO (that’s Olivier) kept telling her not to eat, 'just mime,' but MM is now a 'method actress'.”

She drinks vodka and champagne in the scene, the vodka was water, the champagne was apple juice, but Marilyn protested and real champagne was produced, which of course got warm very quickly, though that didn’t stop her drinking it and getting drunk, which nobody seems to have minded in itself, they were just worried about continuity. 

I’m sure they were right to worry but the scene is fantastic.  Marilyn eats brilliantly, expressively, says almost nothing, just listens to Olivier making a phone call, and does indeed act him off the screen.  She also seems to get through an absolute ton of caviar.

THE ROAST KEEF OF OLD ENGLAND

Like much of the rest of the world, I’ve been reading the Keith Richards quasi-autobiography “Life.”   I say “quasi” because he has a great ghost/co writer in James Fox, and because parts of it are oral biography where he simply quotes other people talking about him.

You wouldn’t expect Keith to be much of a foodie, and he’s certainly got no time for fancy-shmancy cooking, but he does CARE about his food.  Not many rock stars, I think are still brooding about school food but Keith’s memories of the Gypsy Tart served up at his infant school in the late 1940s are still fresh and painful.  “It was pie with some muck burned into it, marmalade or caramel ... It wasn’t my idea of a dessert,” he writes, and having refused to eat it he was given lines and had to write out “I will not refuse food” three hundred times.  That’ll set a lad straight. 

Gyspy tart (that's one above) turns out to be a local recipe from Kent, Keith’s native county, made with evaporated milk and brown sugar, and let’s face it, very 1940s post-rationing Britain.  Maybe it wasn’t just the tart he was rejecting.

By 1967, Cecil Beaton (that's him above) was writing in his diary about the Rolling Stones that, “No group makes more mess at the table.  The aftermath of their breakfast with eggs, jam, honey everywhere is quite exceptional.”  Keith quotes this apparently with approval.

Elsewhere there’s Keith recipe for bangers and mash: a pretty ordinary recipe as far as it goes but enlivened by Keith’s real or confected prose style, that includes the direction (re the sausages) “now let the fuckers rock gently.”  And perhaps roll too.

Then there’s some famous nonsense about the back stage shepherd’s pie at a Rolling Stones gig in Toronto on the Steel Wheels.  A shepherd’s pie was delivered to the lounge and some of the security guys ate some it, and when Keith arrived he was furious demanding to know who.  There was still some left, but Keith had to have first pick.  Nobody fessed up and Keith refused to go in stage until a new one had been produced.  The gig was delayed, to Mick Jagger’s annoyance, and I assume everyone else’s, and when the pie arrived Keith just stuck his knife in it (he’s very keen on knives) and then went on stage. 

This story is told in the first person by someone called Tony King who refers to the “pie’s crust,” saying Keith “just wanted to cut the crust,” and Keith agrees with this, “Don’t bust my crust baby,” he says.  But you and I know that a shepherd’s pie doesn’t have crust, it has mashed potatoes, so either this is some unique usage of the word “crust” or the pie was some odd Canadian variation; that’s probably one for future scholars.

And finally Kate Moss is summoned up to tell us that Keith really does do his own cooking.  She says, “Food of the kind he likes is one of the few comforts he has, whereas everything else is all over the shop.”  She tells a rather charmless story of an occasion at Redlands when Keith was making bangers and mash and he chased one of Marlon’s friends with a saber because he’d stolen the spring onions.    “Patti was really worried,” says Kate.  She makes Keith sound like a deranged lunatic, which I suppose was her, and his, intention, and fairly wearisome.  But really, Keith’s very good indeed when he actually talks about music. 

As you’ll have gathered, it’s not easy to find a picture of Keith Richards eating.  Drinking and smoking, sure.  Even on the cover of Beggar’s Banquet (above - you can click on it to enlarge it and see it better) all he’s doing is shoving an apple - or maybe a potato - into Mick’s mouth (go and pick the symbolism out of that one).  But here he is, apparently eating a picture of the queen.  A tasty world!

JELLYMONGERING

Not all gelatin or gelatine (those are the US and the UK spelling variants) is made from pigs: there’s kosher gelatin and halal gelatin, but much of it is. There’s no such thing as vegetarian or vegan gelatin, but there are non-animal thickening agents which get the job done; agar and carrageen among them.  Bompas and Parr, the Jellymongers, are resolutely carnivorous in their jelly making, there’s a famous interview in the Guardian in which they’re asked “Vegetarians: genius or madness?” Bompas replies, “Madness! Totally rubbish! Why would you deny yourself something so delicious?” Parr adds. “AND they can't eat our jelly.”

Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, since we’re on first name terms, get called various things, from architectural foodsmiths to the future of British gastronomy.  I assume somebody somewhere has called them charlatans, but I’ve ever actually seen a bad review for them. They operate on the borders of art and food, between food as event and as chemical experiment, somewhere between Damien Hirst and the Galloping Gourmet. They’re deeply involved with the history, science and technology of food and taste, but they make it a lot more fun than that sounds.

To date they’ve been responsible for various projects including a “History of Food” banquet, which began by analyzing the guests’ “humors.”  They did a scratch and sniff showing of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook the Thief his Wife and her Lover (bad meat, old books etc), an exhibition of glow in the dark jellies at MOMA in San Francisco, a model of Richard Rogers “gherkin” building made of gingerbread, and they’ve attempted to reproduce, or perhaps reinvent, the shield of Minerva (sans lampreys alas).

I’ve just written about them for Gourmet Live, and that should be coming out soon, so I’ll try not to repeat myself.  But I was keen to meet up with them, since the Venn diagrams of their interests and those of Psycho-gourmet seem to have a certain amount of overlap.

I met them at their “artisanal chewing gum factory,” a pop-up operation they’d set up in Whiteleys in London.  It was a sell out event, in which you paid your money then got to make your own gum, and flavor it with 2 from a choice of 200 flavors.  I went for Hendricks’s gin and ambergris, but much wilder options were possible: wormwood and wasabi, myrrh and hotdog, sea urchin and beer.  Mine looked like this; yes, of course it's strange and misshapen, that's what we mean by "artisanal."

A couple of days later I watched them doing an in-store demonstration at Fortnum and Mason’s food emporium.  They handled the event with great aplomb, but I think I wasn’t really seeing them at their best.  And the fact is, the process of making jelly isn’t much of a spectator sport, since there’s usually a gap of a couple of hours wait while the jelly sets.  The phrase “here’s one we made earlier” comes in handy.

What interested me was that although Bompas and Parr are very concerned with the mystery and mythology of food, they’re also in the business of demystification.   Everything is possible: nothing is too difficult.  So they insisted to the in-store punters that there was no great trick to making jelly, you just pick your liquid, add your gelatin, wait a while and that’s pretty much it.  Of course it helps if you have strange and interesting flavors and it’s even better if you’ve got a few quirky jelly molds such as the one of St Paul's Cathedral that Sam Bompas is holding in the picture above, but in the end it’s food, not rocket, science.  Below are some typical jelly lovers at the event.

So, back in California, over the weekend, in honor of Bompas and Parr, and with a few tips from their rather wonderful book called simply Jelly, I made myself a couple of jellied vodka and tonics.  The lads use leaf gelatin but I used the powdered stuff I got at the local supermarket.  As I understand it, leaf gelatin has to be chopped up and melted in a double boiler, but I just mixed mine in to a cup or so of quickly boiled tonic, made sure it had dissolved, added the vodka, then topped it up with cold tonic, dropped in a slice of lemon, put it in the freezer and in about 90 minutes I had it, though I didn’t have it very long.

I suppose this really isn’t a million miles away from being a Jell-O shot, which isn’t exactly sophisticated, but I liked that it still looked very much like a glass of vodka and tonic, and it tasted not entirely unlike one too, and in some ways it tasted better.  The jelly retained and intensified some of the effervescence of the tonic, so that as the jelly touched the very front of the tongue there was a strange fizzing sensation, quite different from the fizz of an actual mouthful of tonic water, and in many ways far more mysterious and exciting.  I’m not sure if this was what the Jellymongers had in mind, but for a psychogourmet it was just perfect.

SNAX AVAILABLE

Being in England, the home of the curiously flavored potato chip/crisp, I of course ate my way through a few curiosities.  McCoy’s Oriental Ribs and Thai Sweet Chicken (that’s two different flavors) were pretty dreadful despite their “flavour ridges” and didn’t taste either of ribs or chicken.  But the Red Sky West Country Bacon and Cream Cheese (100% natural) which didn’t sound especially promising, turned out to be really very good.

Marmite flavor crisps were also sampled, but they were as nothing compared to Marmite oven baked cashew nuts.  The pack said they were “just for Marmite nutters,” which seemed needlessly apologetic, and isn’t “oven baked” a tautology?   What else can you bake in?

Frankly, it sounded like something you might eat for a bet.  It seemed likely that the Marmite would ruin the taste of the cashews, but you know what, it didn’t.  The Marmite flavor was, well you could hardly say subtle, but more restrained that you might imagine, and cleverly balanced so that it was somehow equal and opposite to the taste of the nuts, so that both flavors came through.  The end result was, of course, very savory and salty, and bad for you in several ways I’m sure, but who doesn’t love that?  I was surprised and pleased by Marmite oven baked cashew nuts: a triumph for the jaded British palate.

I wasn’t in England long, and had other things to do besides explore the wilder shores of British snackery (and let’s be honest, a little goes a long way) but since I was on a pork safari, it only made sense to sample some pork scratchings, or as the packaging has it, pork rinds, or perhaps even pork crackles. 

The manufacturers of Mr Porky obviously feel the need for euphemism: anything to avoid using that indelicate word “skin.” There are at least four versions of Mr Porky but we only tried two: “best ever” and “prime cut.”  The prime cut tasted better and porkier, and maybe that was because they had the extra big pieces, or maybe they just used extra salt. The best thing about them was the warning on the packet: “only recommended for people with strong healthy teeth.”

They were OK, but frankly no pre-packaged pork scratching can compare with the “pork scraps” of my childhood (I’ll try not to get too Proustian here), sold in the pork shops of Sheffield and bought hot and in bulk, and yes, perfectly likely to crack your teeth.  They were also cheap as chips.  My fellow Mr. Porky eaters and I did wonder why these modern versions were so damn expensive: about 70 pence for 35 grammes in the case of the “best ever.”  There are a great, great many pigs slaughtered in the world every day, with a considerable quantity of skin on each pig, so why is skin such an expensive commodity?  And given also that so much of the pork you buy in supermarkets these days comes with the skin taken off so it can be sold as “lower fat,” here ought to be an Everest of pig skin just lying idle waiting for the scratching enthusiast to himself.  But there isn’t.  So where does all that skin go?

One answer is into gelatine, which of late has been much on my mind, chiefly because while I was in London I met up with Bompas and Parr, England’s finest and possibly only “Jellymongers.”  More of that in the next post.

ESSEX PIGS

When I told my friend and British publisher Jeremy Beale (who lives in more or less rural Essex) about my pig experiences in America, he said he knew a couple of people in adjacent parishes who kept pigs, and it would be easy enough to arrange a tour next time I was in England. It sounded like a good idea, though I had to ask whether I’d be visiting some Empress of Blandings style idyll or a factory farm of death.

Jeremy said they’d be neither factory farms of death nor back to the land rare breed fetishists (his term) but fairly middle of the road, responsibly housed pig units where, other than when farrowing, pigs had a bit of space to move around in. He reckoned a visit would give me a pretty good idea of a well managed English pig unit.  When I was in England I took him up on it.

Our first host and tour guide was Tom Pitt from the village of Good Easter. He, along with his sons, keep pigs in three locations around the area, in slightly old fashioned but perfectly respectable facilities, mostly barns of one sort and another. The Pitts are essentially in the business of producing sows.  They first get their sows, Landraces, from a company called Rattlerow Farms, whose website while insisting that they’re family owned, also says they “employ a team of world class geneticists to run and monitor the breeding programs and guide research projects.”  Why did that make me think of Dr Moreau?

Anyway, the Landrace sows arrive and are artificially inseminated with Duroc semen (Durocs are big brown, solid Canadian beasts), they get pregnant, deliver a litter and the resulting Landroc sows (called gilts if you want to be precise) are kept for a while then shipped back to Rattlerow for further breeding. But, of course, nature produces males and females in more or less equal numbers so all the males born on the farm, plus a few imperfect females, become bacon pigs, but Tom and his sons are only in bacon production by default.

I understood Tom to say we’d be looking at about 2000 pigs but it seemed far more than that to me.  Tom reckoned there was no great mystery to keeping pigs but you did have to be scrupulous about mucking them out.  A couple of hours, three days a week with a power hose was what was needed to keep things clean and sanitary.  And certainly his pigs looked clean enough and were as free from smell as any farmyard animals are likely to be.

Tom obviously cared about his pigs, constantly touching them in a friendly reassuring manner, though he kept his fingers well out of the way of their mouths, and he kept an eye out for the ones who were being bullied and not managing to get enough food.  Of course this wasn’t simple altruism: sickly, undersized pigs were a financial liability. Even so his concern seemed genuine.  The pigs in their turn, and maybe I’m projecting here, seemed very reassured by his presence.  They certainly came running across the pens to see him.  In my own case they immediately ran away when they saw me, but then their curiosity got the better of them and they came running back.

As a matter of fact, a mature, pregnant sow is quite the force of nature, and when we went into the sow barn (seen in the picture below) the prospect of being trampled under trotter seemed quite likely. Tom did indeed get knocked over by one of his sows, but I think it was because she was so pleased to see him.

These pigs were neither free range nor organic. The story is that in an Essex winter the clay soil which freezes very hard, and free range pigs damage their feet as they dig around.  These pigs lived largely on concrete and straw and since most of their feed came from local farmers that don’t produce organic crops, inevitably their pig feed wasn’t organic either.  Even so, Tom reckoned his pigs had a pretty good life and it was hard to disagree.  He told us he’d had requests to supply suckling pigs to a local butcher, but he wouldn’t do it.  He wanted his pigs to have some life before they were slaughtered.

Of course it’s all too easy to read character into the faces of dumb animals but I was struck by the extent to which there was great variation in the pigs’ faces, and some looked far more alert, intelligent and endearing than others. The appeal of keeping a pig in the back yard certainly reasserted itself.

Later that afternoon, after Tom had completed his tour, we walked round the local area and went to view a mature Gloucester Old Spot being kept as a pet at a place called Yew Tree Farm.  This pig was undoubtedly free range, he had a ton of room, living in a veritable porcine Xanada.  I also wondered if a lone pig might be rather lonely, since pigs do seem to be social creatures and great snugglers, but apparently there was another companion pig lurking out of sight in the barn. 

Then we went to see another half a dozen Old Spots being kept quite literally in the garden of a house belonging to couple called Nicky and Andy.  As you see, there wasn’t much garden left by the time the pigs had made themselves at home.  If pigs ruled the earth, the whole place would be a quagmire.

Like Tom, Nicky and Andy also made pig-keeping sound a pretty straightforward activity, though they admitted for them it was less a business than a hobby, but as hobbies go it definitely beats stamp collecting.  They hadn’t been raising pigs long and so far had barely made a profit, but the demands for their pigs was high: all the ones we were looking at had been presold.  You paid 300 quid, staked your claim, then waited while the pig grew up, and in due course it came to you slaughtered, butchered, cut into portions and plastic-wrapped.  The biggest problem they said was loading the pigs onto the trailer before you took them to the slaughterhouse.  Maybe they didn’t want to go.

We had roast pork for dinner that evening, though obviously it wasn’t from any of the pigs we’d seen (I was going to use the word “met”) that day.  The link between the pig on the farm and the pork on the plate doesn’t strike me as a particularly problematic one, though of course the actual process of slaughtering remains unseen and mysterious, and we’d much prefer it that way. Needless to say, I don’t do my own slaughtering, and I don’t want to, but you know, I don’t do my own plumbing or oil changes either.  Of course we don’t want to make pets of the animals we eat, that are killed in our name, but it’s not bad to be able to look your pig in the eye and be assured that if his death is inevitable, and for your benefit, his life was pretty good, at least up to the moment he got loaded onto the trailer.

THE BIG SPLEEN

I’ve been away on a small jaunt that took me to New York, London and High Easter, which is a village in rural Essex, outside Chelmsford.  It wasn’t a foodie tour per se, but of course a man’s got to eat, and eat I did.

In New York, naturally enough, I found myself questioning that name “the big apple.”  I kept looking at maps of Manhattan and thinking it looked more like “the big buffet,” with Central Park as a salad bar right in the middle.  Or perhaps it was “the big open sandwich” such as this one below that I had at Au Pain Quotidian in SoHo. 

Actually it called itself a “tartine” with “Rustic tuna, hummus & white Bean with tomatoes and basil pesto.”  I’m glad the tuna was rustic: best to stay away from that urban tuna.  It was served on a strange chopping board type thing instead of a plate, the bread was soft and the tuna and beans, of course kept falling off the bread and then off the chopping board thing, but I reckoned I could turn this into a metaphor for the way that so many people come to Manhattan and then fall off the edge and end up in Brooklyn or Hoboken or Jersey City.  Maybe this was trying too hard.

Then I thought that perhaps Manhattan should be called “the big tongue,” though that was partly because the most interesting thing I had to eat in New York was a grilled tongue sandwich, at Breslin which is the bar and restaurant attached to the newly hip and fabulous Ace Hotel at Broadway and 39^th.

As you see, the tongue came with a bowl of borscht, which was good, but what really made it great was a creamy dressing, which I think was horseradish in sour cream,, though the menu description didn’t specify.

The “chef-partner” April Bloomfield was quoted in New York magazine as saying the restaurant takes philosophical inspiration from Fergus Henderson, of London’s St. John, though these days what restaurant doesn’t?  Fairly safe to say however, that Henderson would never serve a three cheese grilled sandwich (good though it was), nor boiled peanuts fried in pork fat (which sounds a good idea but were in fact pretty horrible).

I was able to do some comparing and contrasting a few days later when I got to London and hurried to St John.  It’s my favorite restaurant.  There’s a clean austerity to the place which I find beguiling; white walls, white table clothes, plain white crockery.  And in contrast to this the food is rich, dark, decadent, ancient.

For starters my “companion” and I shared dishes of rabbit offal with chard, and rolled pig spleen with bacon and cornichons.  I can absolutely say it was the best pig spleen I’ve ever eaten.  That's it below.

Then for the main course we had “roast Middlewhite and braised red cabbage,” which was very good but I think it was the whitest pork I’ve ever eaten.  The crackling was spot on, which I think is quite a test for a restaurant. 

The Middle White (as it's more usually spelled) is an interesting critter; a 19^th century Yorkshire breed, half way in size between a Large White and a Small White, the latter now being extinct, which seems a damn shame.  As regular readers will know, pigs have been much on my mind lately, and as you’ll see in the next post, when I got to Essex, I went hog wild.