HAVE YOURSELF A MINCING LITTLE CHRISTMAS

I don’t know if the food of Los Angeles is getting more Anglicized – it seems unlikely I know - but I do find it easier to locate English things required for the festive season - such as mincement.  (Admittedly this may be just because I now know where to look.)

The local Vons supermarket stocks Crosse and Blackwell mincemeat, “made with heirloom pippin apples,” though I’m not sure what’s so good about that - it also contains corn syrup and sodium benzoate.  This stuff is a bit thinner than I’d like, and a bit bland, and of course there’s no suet in there, but it’s easy enough to zest it up a bit with brandy and whatnot, all essential stuff since Xmas without mince pies seems like no Xmas at all.  Here are some I made earlier:

But it’s a funny thing about mince pies, however superior your homemade pies are, there’s still a place in the heart for a store-bought factory-made mince pie of the Mr. Kipling variety.  Frankly I’m not sure I need them to be enforcedly merry, let alone exceedingly merry, but I suppose I have to live with that.

And of course, and I know this has been doing the rounds so many of you will have seen it already, there is in England the option of going along to Iceland and buying the Minge Pie.

I mean really, there’s no way in the world that says “mince,” is there?  I blame the typographer, though frankly I don’t blame him (or her) a whole lot. I’m sure when you design packaging for Iceland you need all the subversive fun you can get.

But wait … just when you think the martini can’t get any more abused or bastardized, my English spies send me this from the old country:

 The mince pie martini from Marks and Sparks, who say,   “A delicious festive cocktail, creating all the delicious flavours of mince pie in a glass.  A mixture of raisins, figs, apples, dried plums, cinnamon, lemon peel, dried orange peel, nutmeg and cloves was used to make this delicious celebratory.  Country of origin: France.”  We know the French aren’t always very keen on the English, but do they really hate us so much?

QUIXOTIC DRINKING

The new Vanity Fair contains a (frankly rather perfunctory) interview with the great photographer William Eggleston.  The picture below is from an entirely different source - and I'm sorry that I can't find the name of the photographer, nor can I tell you what he's drinking.

The interview takes place in El Quixote restaurant, adjacent to the Chelsea Hotel.  I used to eat there once in a while when I lived in New York. I always ordered the paella.  My memories aren’t the clearest but I seem to recall the food was pretty good but also kind of overpriced, and there were always tales of people getting upset stomachs, though my own cast-iron constitution never suffered.  And I never saw any of this mob there:

Anyway, during the Vanity Fair interview Mr. Eggleston doesn’t order any food.  If he was going to have any, we’re told, he’d have the “signature lobster,” but he doesn’t.  He has and I'm quoting now, “champagne mixed with vodka in a tall glass,” which strikes me as a drink of pure evil, though at the age of 76, Mr. E is obviously entitled to drink whatever the heck the wants.

Anyway Eggleston and the interviewer have a conversation in which the scribe discovers that old William likes women and guns – something that any sane person might already have intuited by looking at his photographs, and he rounds off the session by ordering another drink:  double vodka, no champagne. 

It doesn’t sound as though the great man took any photographs while at El Quijote – which is a shame because, as I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, his food photographs are among the best ever taken.

More than that, William Eggleston is also massively photogenic, and always looks good with a drink in his hand.  The picture above is taken by Stephen Shore, the one below by Jurgen Teller.  A drink in one hand, Charlotte Rampling's head in the other, does it get any better than that?

HOT DOG AND PONY SHOW

You know, I spend a lot of time thinking I arrived in Los Angeles at least a few generations too late.  Where are the cool, Googie restaurants of yesteryear?  Dark, dark, they’ve all gone into the dark.  That’s where you’ll also find Scandia – offering a “taste of Sweden” (above) just down the Strip from Dino’s Lodge, as in Martin, (below) and a great many more.

 Of course some classics remain – and a few new places work hard on recreating a retro vibe, but until time travel is perfected it’s just not going to be the same.

Until recently it would have been possible to go to Papoo’s Hot Dog Show on the Burbank/Toluca Lake boundary (I admit that it gave me a certain Californian thrill to type “Burbank/Toluca Lake boundary”) but until last Sunday I didn’t even know of Papoo's existence, at which point I simultaneously discovered it had closed down and become another branch of Umami Burger (a perfectly good chain, though I think its fans overstate its charms).

To be fair, the new regime has kept a lot of the old hot dog joint charm (though not the really cool sign, inevitably) and there’s also a hot dog list, though to be equally fair, I imagine the old customers and probably the management of Papoo’s would have run a mile at the mere mention of “umami.”

My friend Joe, I discovered, had his fifth birthday party at Papoo’s – he doesn’t remember the hotdog but he does remember being given a whistle in the shape of a hotdog.

So, going there last Sunday, I had the Manly Burger (of course) “house beer-cheddar cheese, bacon lardons, smoked-salt onion strings, Umami ketchup, mustard spread.” It was good, and I could easily believe it contained the world’s biggest lardons, actually more like great chunks of pork, which is fine by me.

But being the folks we are, we started speculating about what a Girly Burger – as opposed to Manly Burger - would be like.  It would have to be pink, surely, but girly girls obviously don’t want rare pink beef, and we suspected that in fact girly girls possibly don’t eat burgers at all, and certainly not with lardons and probably not with smoked salt onions, or the pickle plate, which looked like this:

So maybe the Girly Burger wouldn’t be a real burger at all but some kind of confectionary made out of cupcakes and fondant.  But since the women in our own group were tucking into chili dogs and onion rings and wolfing down pickles, we pretty much decided we didn’t know, or care, what girly girls eat.

A little online googling doesn’t reveal much about what a real, or speculative “girly burger” might be, though I did find a game called Burger Girly which involves a girl – or at least a chef or possibly a waitress - assembling a burger, although those ingredients look butch enough to me.

I wonder if there could be a future for the gender-inclusive burger, which might, of course, simply be called a burger.

A THANKSGIVING MEMORY

Thankful I wasn't a turkey.

Thankful I didn't have to eat turkey.

BEER AGAIN

As Marge Simpson says in a Tree House of Horror episode, “Hmm, I guess you should judge a book by its cover.
” And a nearby secret agent agrees, “Definitely! Especially if you count the inside flap as part of the cover, it usually gives you a great idea of what the book's about.”

You might argue about whether this is actually true of certain books, but in any case, how about beer? Can you judge a beer by looking at its label?

A literary drinking buddy and I were knocking back a bottle of Spiral Jetty that I’d brought home from Utah.  I asked him how he liked it.  “It’s fine,” he said, “but somehow it doesn’t taste the way I expect a beer called Spiral Jetty to taste, but then I don’t really know how I expect a beer called Spiral Jetty to taste.  Salty?  Sandy?  Arty? Of the land?”

         A good point, I thought, and I had no answer, only more questions, for instance: how should a beer taste that’s called Superfuzz Blood Orange Pale and has a label like this one?:

Should it be acidic, psychedelic, distorted, hair-curling, a bit sixties?  In fact it was perfectly OK – a bit cloudy, a bit thin, and to my ravaged taste buds without any taste of orange, bloody or otherwise.  But I don’t blame the beer for not living up to its label, because really how could it?

And how about a beer that has a label showing Thelonius Monk, with a keyboard halo and a skull?  Should it be improvisational, dissonant, idiosyncratic, straight with no chaser?  I had no idea.

Again, I thought that a probably no beer could live up to that image on the label, but then I tasted it and wow – it totally knocked my socks off.  It was intense strong, dark, tangy, smooth, complex – most of these traits definitely shared with the great Thelonius.  And the best thing of all – regardless of any label – if you drink enough of it, it gets you nicely drunk.