CONSOMME PLEASURES

We went to Musso and Frank last night, which I’m pretty sure is my favorite restaurant in Los Angeles.  Not so much for the food, although their steaks and fries are very good, but more for the general ambiance, and the cool guys behind the bar and the history – knowing that you’re eating and drinking where the likes of Chandler, Hammett, Faulkner and Bukowski have all drunk, and sometimes been very drunk.

Musso and Frank proudly proclaims it’s the oldest restaurant in Hollywood and it always puzzled me that it opened in 1919, the year Prohibition started.  Surely that would have been a very bad year to open a restaurant in Hollywood.  But I’ve just been reading a fascinating new book by Leo Braudy titled The Hollywood Sign.  He tells us that Hollywood was actually founded as a dry community.  It was meant to be a model of temperance and good behavior as opposed to all the bad stuff that went on in rest of LA.  And, says Braudy, Prohibition was actually responsible for destroying Hollywood’s status as an oasis of decency.  Once drinking was banned everywhere in LA, indeed everywhere in the country, Hollywood was no different from, and no better than, anywhere else.  It couldn’t claim any high moral ground on the basis of not selling alcohol.

So in that sense 1919 was probably as good a time as any to be opening  a restaurant in Hollywood.  In LA Weekly’s Best of LA 2010, the blessed Jonathan Gold sang the praises of Musso’s “Best Jellied Consommé (1919)” but I’d never eaten it, and since I still haven’t quite shaken off my jelly obsession I ordered it last night.  I didn't take a picture because I didn't want to look like a tourist.

Gold describes it “a trembly, delicate substance, served in a custom-purposed silver-plate contraption that suspends the aspic above a goblet of crushed ice.”  Well last night it came without any silver-plate contraption and was served in an ordinary crockery bowl, though it was certainly trembly enough.  I’m not sure it was exactly great but I was very glad I ordered it because I’m not sure when I’m next likely to be a restaurant that serves it.

I understand that the Connaught restaurant in London used to serve something called Consommé en Geleé Cole Porter, and if it’s good enough for Cole Porter it’s definitely good enough for me.  According to a recipe in the Saveur archive it came garnished with carrot, kohlrabi and haricots vert, which I think Musso and Frank would consider a bit fancy.  In any case the Connaught restaurant has been all Frenchified and I think they  wouldn’t consider it fancy enough.

As it happens Gourmet Live, for which I occasionally write, has a new editor, Kate Sekules who is a food and travel writer, and a pugilist.  A little light Googling took me to the website daniellespencer.com a deeply curious art website which has a section on Jell-O turkeys from (apparently) a series of annual Jell-O turkey competitions.

Kate Sekules was one of the winners of the 2009 competition.  Her entry was “The Sides as the Bride” and looked like this:

And it was described thus: “This turkey, composed of classic Thanksgiving side dishes, upends the traditional hierarchy of the meal, sublating our normative binarisms. Its operation evinces derridian différance, effectively deconstructing turkologocentrism.”  Go pick the ironies out of that one.

But my favorite Jell-O turkey was this one by Cindy Sherman, yes, THE Cindy Sherman, I think, which was called “Jiggles” and made from (and I’m quoting) “white chocolate with chopped candied walnuts filled with cranberry/pomegranate flavored gelatin (no added sugar) with raspberries.”  It looked like this:

There’s a fairly obscure musical number by Cole Porter titled “What a Priceless Treasure” which contains the following absolutely wonderful lyrics

Let me taste the consommé.

Have a care, don’t let it jostle.

As dear Hollywood would say.

It’s terrific, it’s colossal.

And of course there are also these Cole Porter lines “You’re the Top”

You're sublime,

You're a turkey dinner.

It’s even better because he rhymes it with “Derby winner.”  They don’t write ‘em like that any more.  

EATING MYSELF AND OTHERS

The Loved One and I were eating dinner and discussing Goya’s painting “Saturn Devouring His Children,” you know, the way you do.  She’d known it since childhood, from an art book her parents had in the home.  Her father had told her that parents were perfectly entitled to kill their own children (don’t ask), although at least she knew she wouldn’t be eaten, since her father was a vegetarian and health food nut.

Now Goya isn’t an open book to me, but when I look at that painting I don’t see anybody eating a child, and certainly not children in the plural.  I see a monster eating what appears to be a grown woman, and certainly Goya himself never gave the painting that title.  It was added later by art historians who wanted to class it up by giving it a mythological basis.

The original myth, depicted more convincing in the above picture by Rubens, has it that Saturn (which is the Romanized name of the Greek god Cronos) has been told that one of his children will overthrow him and so each time a new one’s born he eats it: birth control being at a primitive stage back then.  Since Saturn had deposed and castrated his own father, you can see he might have worried about this stuff more than the average dad.

I, of course, grew up eating babies – Jelly Babies.  I was born in Sheffield less than half a mile from the Bassett’s factory.  That’s how it was: the men made steel, the women made sweets.  Looking at pictures of today’s Jelly Babies they seem far less anatomically detailed than I remember them, but I could be wrong about that.

Naturally we fell to talking about Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (that's him above) which features a character by the name of Saturninus, father of Chiron and Demetrius.


Titus tells Saturninus that these sons have ravished his (Titus’s) daughter Lavinia and cut out her tongue, leading to the following exchange:

SATURNINUS: 
Go fetch them hither to us presently.



TITUS ANDRONICUS: 
Why, there they are both, baked in that pie;


     Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,


     Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.


     'Tis true, 'tis true; witness my knife's sharp point.


It sounds as though Shakespeare’s Saturninus doesn’t actually devour his own children (there are no stage directions), and they’re certainly not babies, but since his wife Tamara does the eating, the effect isn’t so very different.  In any case, they all die horribly by the end of the scene.

Now, just to prove the interconnectedness of all things, a couple of days ago, in my role as literary dude, I did a bookstore reading for Slake magazine alongside Mary Woronov, a woman I’ve admired since at least 1972 when I first saw her in a single screen version of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls.  The double screen version would have looked like this:  

I also loved her in Death Race 2000 and, most relevant to this posting, Eating Raoul  which is surely one of the one of the great film comedies dealing with sex, death and cannibalism.  The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is, I suppose, the very greatest.  Here's Ms Woronov with Paul Bartel:

Mary Woronov’s piece in Slake is titled “Jane Says” and it describes the joys of one night stands – and I’m sure it’s shallow of me to wonder just how autobiographical it is.  She writes,  “I like knowing how he feels without ever seeing how he eats his soup, whether he is an asshole about the wine he drinks or a connoisseur of the cheese he eats.”

It’s good, funny dirty stuff, and finally she (or her heroine) concludes, “The only thing a man has made that resembles the female genitalia is the side view of the hamburger, with its labialike buns, and the reason why is because the hamburger is to be eaten the way a cannibal eats the heart of his enemies, hoping to attain some of their power.” 

I’m not sure that’s altogether why I eat burgers, but it would certainly be reason enough.  Some, of course, are considerably more than a mouthful.

WITH A BULLET

At the risk of blogging about blogging, a rather curious statistic has just been revealed by this site's tracking apparatus.

Until very recently the most read post has been "Eating White" a rather gentle and nostalgic piece about eating with my mother, that first appeared in the magazine Gastronomica.

It has now been knocked off by the number one spot by the post "Dining With de Sade." about the eating habits of the divine marquis.

I can't say my I'm very surprised. This I suppose represents the two poles of appetite and consumption; the soft, warm experience of eating in the bosom of the family, and the Dionysian frenzy that goes with sex, death and blood rituals.  Only a fool would entirely reject one at the expense of the other.  Sometimes the things can go rather neatly together.

LET THEM MAKE CAKE

There was a waspish piece in Sunday’s New York Times magazine about Hugh Hefner and the Playboy empire.  It said that Hef “lives these days what appears to be the life of an invalid, or even of a cosseted mental patient: wearing pajamas all day; rarely venturing out of the house; taking most of his meals in his bedroom — the menu seldom varying, the crackers and potato chips carefully prescreened to remove any broken ones.”  This does sound suitably nuts, but the detail about the potato chips may have hit a particular note with the author of the piece - Charles McGrath – who is known around the office as “Chip.”

There’s a story, true as far as I know. that when a certain book editor was at the Playboy mansion in LA, working with Hef on a project, the great man said that if he (the book editor) wanted something to eat he should go into the kitchen and one of the staff would make him something.  In due course the book editor got hungry, went into the kitchen and the staff made him a sandwich.  But while he was in there he noticed a chocolate cake on a display stand under a glass cover.  He asked if he could have a piece of that.  Oh no said the staff that was Mr. Hefner’s own personal chocolate cake and nobody else was allowed to touch it.  They baked a new one for him every day.

The book editor said that surely Hef wouldn’t object to him having a single piece.  How much chocolate cake could Hef eat in a day?  The staff then revealed that in fact Hef never ate any chocolate cake whatsoever.  Every morning they baked a fresh chocolate cake and every evening threw it away untouched.  A command had come down the line some years back that Hef had to have a fresh chocolate cake every day, the rule was established and that was the way it had been ever since. 

Intrigued by this Ruritanian arrangement the book editor asked Hef whether this was actually true.  Hef had no idea.  He saw there was a new cake in the kitchen every day and indeed he never ate any of it, but he had no memory of ever ordering the arrangement.  Hef seemed thoroughly amused by the absurdity of the situation and showed no inclination to rescind the order.  It was just one of the winningly eccentric things that go on in the wonderful world of Hef.

Despite Hef’s personal indifference to food – and I’m sure many 84 year olds feel the same way - good food and good drink were always part of the “Playboy philosophy” and The Playboy Gourmet a cookbook by Thomas Mario, who was the magazine’s food and drink expert for a long time, is an exquisite time capsule of certain ideas about sophistication and high living from the late 1950s and 60s.  My edition is dated 1977 but there are others, and most of the material inside is copyright 1954 to 1971.

Much of the writing is excruciating and condescending, and it would surely have seemed that way even at the time.  The chapter on desserts begins “Although she may one day outgrow valentines, no girl ever outgrows desserts,” and then there’s a bunch of recipes for peaches in champagne, coconut soufflé, and various crepes that need to be flambéed.  There’s no recipe for chocolate cake.

For one reason or another we have a few copies of Playboy from the 1960s in the house.  I hate to say it, but it’s the car ads that hold most fascination for me at this point in history, those and the occasional bit of fiction by Updike or Nabokov.  But some of the food articles are priceless.  Below is a scan of a page from one of my favourites, the “urban luau,” as opposed to the dreadfully uncool suburban luau, I suppose.  It’s from the June 1966 issue, and again it’s the prose stye that makes it special.

Here’s some wisdom from Mario, “Staging an indoor luau is as easy as poi … A single giant model of a tiki god surrounded by a bounty of island offerings serves far more admirably as a mood setter than a plethora of interior decorator-inspired fish-net coverings and cornball colored-glass globes.”  Strange perhaps that the photographer somehow managed to do without a giant model of a tiki god.

The magazine also contains the above ad for Smirnoff.  Ah for the days when any advertiser would have wanted Woody Allen plugging their product.

MARTINIS AND MENDACITY

I used to think I liked cocktails.  And back in the day when I fancied myself as a playwright I thought I’d come up with a wonderful dramatic device for a play.  There’d be a bunch of people staying together in a house for the weekend and one of them, a minor character I suppose, would be trying to invent a new cocktail and every now and then he’d appear from offstage bearing a cocktail shaker full of his latest experiment.  As the play went on he’d get drunker and the cocktails would get ever more revolting.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

         But the truth is, I now think almost all cocktail are revolting.  Oh sure I can knock back a bloody Mary or a gimlet, and I was in a bar in New York last year and had something called a Herb Albert, which was a variation on a margarita, with jalapeno infused tequila and fresh oregano, and all these drinks are perfectly drinkable.  But the truth is, when it comes right down to it, I only really like one cocktail and that’s the martini.  

         Now, readers of Psycho-Gourmet will hardly be surprised to learn that I also enjoy a good piece of bit of pulp noir fiction, and when I bought a 1947 novel by Henry Kane with the title Martinis and Murder it seemed like a convergence made in heaven. My expectations were high, and they didn’t even fall too much when I discovered the book had originally been published as A Halo for Nobody.  Certainly the jacket shows evidence of martini drinking and (possibly) its after effects.

         But it turns out the book itself is entirely martini-free.  Sure, a lot of boozing goes on as characters regularly knock back beer, rye, bourbon, sidecars and even some sherry.  But the legendary silver bullet never passes anybody’s lips.  I felt cheated.

         Well, actually, to be absolutely honest, I didn’t feel as cheated as all that, since as with so many pulp novels I never really expected the words in the book to live up to the title or the cover image.  The book did at least contain some exotically named characters such as Joe Pineapple and Xavier Hoy Ginsburg.  But then things suddenly got a lot better. 

         I looked up Henry Kane and his work on various pulp websites and discovered that some of his books, including Martinis and Murder had been published in Holland.  And there it was, the Dutch title that suddenly made everything all right: Cocktails en Doodslag.  It really doesn’t matter what the book’s about, does it?

I'M WITHOUT THE BAND

Did I ever tell you about the time I had breakfast with Pamela des Barres, aka Miss Pamela of the GTOs and a so-called super groupie (Morrison, Jimmy Page, Keith Moon, Don Johnson, among others)? 

At the time we shared a British publisher and she was in London promoting her memoir I’m With the Band.   I did occasional freelance writing for some very mild men’s magazines, and so I arranged to interview her over breakfast at her hotel just off Baker Street. 

It must have been an unmemorable interview since I remember almost nothing about it but I do recall what she had for breakfast.  She ordered kippers, which seemed a good “when in Rome” thing to do, and when they arrived she smothered them in HP Sauce, for which there’s no exact American equivalent, although A1 Steak Sauce comes close.

To this day I’ve never, ever seen anybody else do that to kippers, and I did wonder at the time whether she was being a bit “Hey look at me, aren’t I wild and unconventional,” but she did actually seem to like the combination of flavors and she certainly ate it.

To the extent that I don’t remember the interview, I don’t really remember much of what’s in I’m With the Band either, but now I’ve been reading Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-And-Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood by Michael Walker for which de Barres is a source and I was reminded of her story of Chris Hillman and the grapes.  That's him below.

Hillman was in the Byrds and the 15 year old Pamela was trying to impress him by any means possible.  She hit on the unlikely plan of delivering him a huge bunch of grapes, brought back from Mexico by her father.  Yes, I too blame the parents.

She writes, “The plan collapsed when the bag tipped open and I skidded halfway down the hill on seedless green grapes from Ensenada, landing on my face.  I scrambled back up, leaving the squashed grapes behind, rolling in profusion toward his front porch …  I would have to think of another way to enter his life.”

The Michael Walker book has some interesting things to say about eating in and around Hollywood in the sixties and early seventies.  For people with long hair it could be quite a challenge.  Walker says that most restaurants on the Strip refused to serve longhairs, and the few that did, such as Ben Frank’s coffee shop (that's it above), were both packed and under intense police scrutiny.

And even if you got served things weren’t necessarily going to run smoothly. Michael Stuart-Ware of the band Love (that's him above) says that waitresses called the cops to clear out tables of customers “even if they were only suspected of something as innocuous as being the kind of people who might not leave a proper tip.”   I have to say that no waitress I’ve ever met would regard the lack of a tip as “innocuous,” but anyway the freaks eventually moved away from the Strip and relocated to Canter’s Jewish deli, on Fairfax, where there’s still a lively after-hours crowd apparently, although when I’ve been there it’s always been fairly tame.

It was in response to the local difficulties that the Rainbow Bar and Grill was opened on Sunset Strip in 1972, a place where rock and rollers and longhairs would be welcome, although by 1972 a longhair was hardly what he or she had been five years earlier.  The Rainbow is still there and on a good night you’re quite likely to see the likes of Ron Jeremy, Lemmy Kilminster and Vince Neil in situ, along with a lot of tourists who have are seeing exactly what they came for. (See below)

Incidentally, a few years back Pamela Des Barres wrote a “My LA to Z” column for Los Angeles magazine in which people say which local stores and restaurants they frequent.  One of hers was Dukes West Hollywood, about which she said, “Right up the street from the Whisky was a place called the Galaxy, which was an amazing club. It’s now Dukes coffee shop, which used to be in the Tropicana Motel. It’s crazy, there’s one sandwich with mushrooms and mustard and, oh my God, it’s great. It’s called the magic mushroom or something. I’ve been eating it for 40 years.”

That may not quite be the same thing as kippers and HP sauce but it’s definitely part of the same culinary universe.

FURTHER FEASTING WITH THE FAB FOUR

And thinking of the Beatles and food and hospitals, here are a few extra pictures I came across while looking for stuff about the lovable moptops. Given what Lennon got up to later life it seems wonderfully endearing, in the picture above, that in his early days he was a dunker of biscuits, even while holding his Rickenbacker.

He certainly looks more sure of himself dunking than he does wrangling the pig in the picture above.  He's doing it to mock Paul McCartney's album Ram,  but the pig looks pretty uncomfortable too.

There’s Paul McCartney eating something or other – an individual trifle maybe – and he’s tackling it with the utmost delicacy. 

And here’s George Harrison, purveyor of all things Indian sitting with what looks like a fairly standard issue late 60s, early 70s spread of British restaurant curries.  It looks pretty good though.

And here’s Ringo in his hospital bed.  He did go into University College Hospital in 1964 to have his tonsils removed, though I’m guessing this is a set up photograph taken when he wasn’t feeling too bad.   I’m sure he didn’t have to eat standard hospital food but what really seems inconceivable are those silver salt and pepper shakers on his tray. 

Dunking biscuits, eating trifles, silver salt and pepper shakers, it’s easy to forget how domesticated and refined certain aspects of the sixties were. 

LUNCHING WITH LENNON

After I made a rather gratuitous reference to John Lennon in one of my blog posts, a couple of people said I should do something about the Beatles and food.  I think this is promising territory, what with songs such as “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “Honey Pie,” “Savoy Truffle,” and the mentions of “fish and finger pie” in “Penny Lane” marmalade skies in “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” and pilchards and “yellow matter custard” in “I am the Walrus.” And so on. 

A little light Googling reveals that this is pretty well trodden territory, and I suppose everything about the Beatles has been thoroughly obsessed and picked over by now.  But one thing I discovered was that the Beatles, especially in America, got their names and images on various food boxes and wrappers that were never seen in Britain:  including bubble gum, ice cream bars, and an early version of Nesquik offered "autographed inflatable Beatles dolls".

However, one of the most amazing of them - the Ringo Roll (below) – does appear to have been a British promotion.  It looks to have been a fairly unexciting loaf of bread and it certainly never found its way into our house, but if you’re going to eat unexciting bread anyway, you might as well have the Beatles’ pictures on the wrapper.

I was also surprised by how easy it is to find pictures of the early Beatles eating and drinking.  I suppose there must be some pictures from those days where the lads look less than fascinating but in all the ones that I’ve found, whatever they’re doing, even when it’s something decidedly uncool - like nibbling a sausage on a stick, eating an apple, having  a cup of tea or a half of bitter -  they still seem incredibly charismatic and photogenic.  This seemed to wear off as they got older.  I guess it wore off less with Lennon than the others, but then he had less time for it to happen.

I always thought Ringo was the great wasted talent in the Beatles, not so much as a musician but as an actor.  I think he’s absolutely wonderful in A Hard Day’s Night, and the picture below is one of my all time favorite images. 

It seems to reveal something crucial about Ringo and England and the 1960s, and especially about English sandwiches from that period.  That sandwich looks so dismal and joyless, and Ringo does look perplexed, but he’s not defeated by the grey misery of it all, he looks resilient and warm and lovable.

I guess that John Lennon has rather rarely been described as warm and lovable, and certainly he doesn’t come across as remotely that way in Albert Goldman’s biography The Lives Of John Lennon, a book which admittedly has been much denounced and discredited. Nevertheless I and trawled through the index looking for references to Lennon and food, and although there isn’t much there, what there is seems highly significant.

According to Goldman, and indeed other sources, in 1965 or so Lennon was described by a journalist as “the fat Beatle,” which obviously had to hurt.  These things are comparative of course: compared to Mama Cass or members of the Turtles, Lennon was a mere stripling, but yes there was something just a bit podgy about the Lennon face in some of those early pictures.  He was also of course the “four-eyed Beatle” but he seemed to be able to deal with that.

Lennon realized that the world will never really love a fat rock star, a lesson that Elvis never learned.  I’ve always thought that if Elvis had stayed thin and Keith Richards had got fat, rock and roll history would be very different from what it is now.

Anyway, Goldman describes Lennon, as “a hunger artist” which seems to be going a bit far, and he says that Lennon developed anorexia (though I think he’s using the term in a totally unscientific way), and also bulimia (more likely) and that he went on a series of “punishing diets and dangerous.”  Well he definitely did develop a lean and hungry look when he lived in New York but I’ve always thought that had more to do with the drugs he consumed rather than the food he didn’t.

Certainly when it came to booze he didn’t deny himself much.  The brandy Alexander was supposedly his favorite drink, at least at one point in his life, but there seem to have been other times when he wasn’t especially choosy.  A man who goes into a club (the Troubadour) with a Kotex on his head probably doesn’t care too much what he drinks.

Now, as it happens, not so long ago I saw the movie My Dinner with Jimi.  The Jimi is Hendrix and the “my” belongs to Howard Kaylan, the less than sylph-like lead singer of the Turtles (op cit) and that's him above.  Kaylan wrote the movie, which is about the rise of the Turtles from gullible teenage popsters to thoroughly sussed out (though never the less exploited) hippy freaks.

 It’s a pretty cheap movie but there’s some great stuff in it, and some great performances.  The centerpiece has Kaylan eating dinner with Hendrix in London’s Speakeasy, which I always thought was just a night club but apparently there was a separate restaurant in a kind of glass-walled box at the center.  The actor who plays Hendrix – Royale Watkins - is especially excellent.

 Kaylan and Hendrix have dinner – we don’t get to see what exactly they eat –  but they talk about music and success and the dangers of the business, and the drink keeps on coming.  Kaylan can’t keep up with Hendrix - few could -and in the end he loses it and vomits all over Hendrix’s new velvet jacket.  You can see a ton of symbolism right there if you’re so inclined.

In the course of the movie we see lots of 1960s rock illuminati, generally very well acted though wearing rather bad wigs – Brian Jones, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, Donovan, and Mama Cass among them

And of course the Beatles put in an appearance.  Lennon is played by Brian Groh, who makes him appear utterly vile.  He’s drunk, arrogant and viciously dismissive, and he sneers at the Turtles, which was particularly hard on bass player Jim Tucker (who idolized the Beatles) and who never quite recovered from the experience. Drink obviously had something, though probably not everything, to do with Lennon’s behavior.  And it was hardly an isolated episode.

One of the more dismal episodes described in Goldman’s book, there are plenty to choose from but this one concerns food, is a dinner Lennon had with Phil Spector at the Brasserie on Sunset Plaza.  They were trying to outdrink each other, shooting jets of vodka and champagne from bottles into each other’s mouths, and when the food came all the could do was play with it and stick it in their ears and eventually get up on the table and roll around in it.

         After they got down they started a game of “I bet you can’t do this.”  After some fork juggling, Spector screamed, “I bet you can’t do this,” and flipped his chair over backwards and smashed his head violently against the floor, and Lennon said, “You win.”  He always did have a way with words.

        

         Incidentally, the Brasserie on Sunset Plaza is no longer in business.  I wonder why.