LET'S ALL GO DOWN THE STRAND

 As I understand it, imperfectly no doubt, there’s only one real-world pub still in existence that appears in the works of PG Wodehouse, and that’s the Coal Hole, 91-92 the Strand, originally an extension of the Savoy Hotel though now it’s a Nicholson’s pub (no relation).

The place is visited by Ukridge in the short story “The Debut of Battling Billson,” first published in 1923.  The narrator is Bruce "Corky" Corcoran, who seeks out Ukridge when he discovers that he’s deposited a red haired man in his rooms.  He finds Ukridge emerging from the Gaiety Theatre in the Strand.

“The audience was just beginning to leave when I reached the Gaiety. I waited in the Strand, and presently was rewarded by the sight of a yellow mackintosh working its way through the crowd.

“Hallo, laddie!” said Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, genially. “When did you get back? I say, I want you to remember this tune, so that you can remind me of it to-morrow, when I’ll be sure to have forgotten it. This is how it goes.” He poised himself flat-footedly in the surging tide of pedestrians and, shutting his eyes and raising his chin, began to yodel in a loud and dismal tenor. “Tumty-tumty-tumty-tum, tum tum tum,” he concluded. “And now, old horse, you may lead me across the street to the Coal Hole for a short snifter. What sort of a time have you had?”

“Never mind what sort of a time I’ve had. Who’s the fellow you’ve dumped down in my rooms?”

 

The fellow is Battling Billson a boxer: Ukridge intends to make his fortune as a boxing manager but inevitable complications ensue.

My pal Jonathan and I had lunch in the Coal Hole a few days ago.  We ordered the three bar stacks for the price of two and half.  Now I don’t doubt that Wodehouse was a more sophisticated and experimental eater than most of his characters, even so I doubt whether he’d have ordered the Lightly Dusted Calamari, the Crispy Cauliflower Florets, and the Hand-cut Nachos.

  It was all perfectly good and the Coal Hole does offer a sense of eating and drinking in history.  One room is dedicated to Edmund Kean, though as far as I could see there was no mention of Wodehouse.

         The Coal Hole also had a cocktail menu though we thought that was a bit fancy for a weekday lunchtime.  I don’t know whether Wodehouse would have been so reluctant.  Here he is mixing his own cocktails (almost certainly martinis) with his wife Ethel, at their home in New York.  I think it’s my favourite ever author photograph.

 

 

 

 

SETTLE DOWN DEER

 I was prepared to be a little disappointed by St John, Marylebone, not because I thought it would be bad but because the inamorata and I love the other two branches – Smithfield, and Bread and Wine - so much.  

This and the vast majority of the other pics by Caroline Gannon

Also the menu didn’t include bone marrow, which is the single thing I like best about the other St Johns.  But we had an American friend over from California and he said he wanted to go to St John, any St John, and since you apparently have to book months in advance for the other two, off we went to Marylebone.

 

Well, I was a fool even to have contemplated disappointment.  Admittedly the appearance of the martini (above) didn’t reassure completely.  How on earth do you make a martini look as cloudy as that? Though it tasted absolutely fine.

 

But then the food arrived and it was as good as anybody could wish.  The so-called Rarebit was a revelation.  I expected it to look this this:

but in fact it was a Deep Fried Rarebit, so it looked like this:

which if I hadn’t known better I might have thought was a rissole or even a croquette.

 

There were Crispy Sweetbreads with Aioli which were top notch:

But star of the show was the Roe Deer with Celeriac.  I’m not sure exactly what they did with the venison, slow-cooked it in a fine broth I expect, but the result was fantastic.

     Now, I’m not sure I could tell a plate of roe deer from any other kind of deer but some apparently can.  I remember a terrific piece by AA Gill in which a waiter tells him the special is venison. 

“What kind of venison?”  

“It’s the fillet sir.”

“No, where does it come from?”

“From our specialist supplier.”

And so on for some time, until in the end, having eaten the meal, Gill concludes, “Anyway, the deer was roe and it was a buck … I could tell.  It had that odd tang buck gets when it’s rutting.  It’s some sort of secretion.”   No competing with that.

 

And to round it off there was an Eccles Cake with Lancashire Cheese, for the inamorata and I:

and our American friend had a Bread And Butter Pudding, seen here in a mise en abyme:

HANDS ACROSS THE SEA

I can’t imagine that anybody will ever take a better photograph of a drink in front of an airplane window than this one by William Eggleston.

 

But that doesn’t mean you can’t try. Here’s one I took a few years years ago on a plane to Tokyo.  I mean it’s not terrible, though the absence of the hand and the ice and the clouds and the stirrer make it a bit nothing.

And then a couple of weeks ago I was sitting beside my companion Caroline Gannon when she took this picture on a flight to Dublin.

I very much like the clouds and the lemon slices and the bubbles in the tonic, and I can take a very, very tiny piece of credit.  The hand model is me!  Of course it does make me wish I had more elegant hands ....

MORAL PUB GRUB

'Cheese is a mity elf,

Digesting all things but itself.'

Folk rhyme, apparently.

 

 

I remember, when I started, or started trying, to read Joyce’s Ulysses, when I was about 16 years old.  Much of it went over my head, as I suppose much of it still does, but I was all fired up by the scene in the ‘Lestrygonians’ chapter when Leopold Bloom goes to Davy Byrne’s (the apostrophe seems to come and go) pub for lunch. This is a heavily edited version of the part that did the firing.

—Have you a cheese sandwich?

—Yes, sir.

A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?

—Yes, sir.

Mr Bloom cut his sandwich into slender strips. 

—Mustard, sir?

—Thank you.

He studded under each lifted strip yellow blobs. 

 

I was a cheese lover from a very early age, and my parents were moderately indulgent in buying me moderately exotic cheeses. I’d never eaten gorgonzola at the time I read that bit of Joyce, though I knew what it was, and I’d definitely tasted Danish blue. My grandma told me it had worms in it, which I doubted even at the time.

But reading that passage in Ulysses, I was confused by the reference to mustard.  Who puts mustard on a cheese sandwich?  A great many people, no doubt, but it was news to me, and still doesn’t strike me as a good idea.

 

         Anyway, being in Dublin last week, off we went (Anthony, Caroline and me), to Davy Byrnes, now definitely without an asterisk and styling itself a gastropub. The “Classic Gorgonzola €13.00 Classic Gorgonzola and brown bread served all day (pair with a glass of Pinot Noir for €20)”is still on the menu, and apparently it looks like this, 

 

Very appetizing though not as I ever imagined.  It’s an open-face sandwich I suppose, but it would be hard to cut it into strips.

 

We didn’t order that. Instead we had Connemara oysters, 

Davy Byrnes photos by Caroline Gannon

Cod Croquettes - yep I'm still on my croquette kick

and Sneem Black Pudding with ‘Charred tomatoes, apple chutney, Lyonnaise onions and Guinness brown bread.’  I might have wished for apple rather than the tomato which actually appeared totally uncharred, but let’s not quibble. 

       It was all very good indeed – and the place was full of Joyce memorabilia, and the staff were great, not least the owner - Bill Dempsey, I believe - who was very chatty and charming, and it was karaoke night, though fortunately that was happening way down the other end of the room.

 

       And other things about Dublin …  Now, I am not the world’s greatest drinker of Guinness – I drink about a pint of it per year. So during my time in Dublin I probably had a decade’s worth.  There is, apparently, much discussion about where the best pint of Guinness is to be, and The Gravediggers, adjacent to the Glasnevin Cemetery, is high in the list of contenders.  

As a non-connoisseur I might be inclined to think that all Guinness tastes pretty much the same, but no, the one I drank at The Gravediggers was very superior indeed. VERY superior.

 

THE MOORE THE MERRIER

 

As everybody knows, Thurston Moore (that’s him above on the left, standing next to some bloke from Sheffield) is a great guitarist and a wonderful human being, and as far as I know he has no connection whatsoever with Thurstons Fine Foods of Luton.

 

Nevertheless when I was down at the local market, at the stall selling ‘food that’s probably fallen of the back of a lorry’ and I saw they were selling Thurstons brand olives stuffed with tuna, how could I resist?  

And you know, that picture on the can showing olives and chunks of tuna was very appealing.  So I bought a can, took it home, opened it – and discovered I had been deceived.  The picture on the label bore very little relation to what was inside. These olives weren’t stuffed with chunks of tuna but with something called ‘tuna paste’ which I suppose is acceptable but that’s not what’s shown on the label.

The olives were all right, and perfectly edible but I’m not sure I’d have been able to indentify the filling as tuna.  We live and learn.

 

And then, looking for connections, I dug out an interview in GQ with Mr. Moore, containing the searching question, ‘Do you make lunch at home?’ And Thurston replied, ‘My midday lunch thing will generally be a tuna sandwich. It's the best.'

Elsewhere in the article he says, ‘You do not get a bagel in London. I have sincerely attempted to figure out where the New York bagels are, or even the Montreal bagels, for God's sake, but they do not exist.’

 

I feel his pain. However, last week I was in the café at Royal Institute of British Architects (yes, I get around), and I ate a wonderful brown bagel with mackerel and mayonnaise.  It really rocked.

 

In honor of Mr. Moore I just went to my shelves and thought I should play some of his music with a foodie theme.  I didn’t do all that well.  The best I could manage was ‘Sympathy for the Strawberry’ which sounds like this

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbd9Kth5JjI

GAME FOR MOST THINGS

 I asked the butcher in our local market if he had any rabbit for sale.  I assumed he hadn’t because there wasn’t any on display but I thought I was worth asking.

    “No,” he said, “the lads are all out deerstalking.”

I don’t believe I ever heard the word ‘deerstalking’ used in a sentence before, but at least this meant that the butcher had venison.  So I bought a haunch.  It looked like this:

 

ALL VENISON PICS BY CAROLINE GANNON

Now, I believe some people can taste a piece a venison and tell you the species and gender of the deer, but I’m not such a person.

 

 I’d never cooked a haunch of venison before but all the recipes suggest it’s not a tricky thing to do -  sear it, roast it with some veg, and Bob’s your relative.  What can go wrong?  Not much apparently.

 

And here’s the beauty part.  The haunch looked a bit big, and since there were only two of us eating it, we sliced off one end to keep for later.  Guess who’s having venison tartare at the weekend.

 

Incidentally the picture at the top of this post shows a few of the many deer that used to wander into my garden when I lived in Los Angeles.  I did wonder if I might hunt (or I suppose ‘deerstalk’) them but the law says it’s illegal to discharge a fire arm in your own garden.  I considered other methods – wrestling the beast to the ground and stabbing it to death with a knife being the main one, but I decided against it. I’m not a monster.  I’m not even a butcher.

 

 

MR McLACHLAN - STILL RULES

I hear that the great cartoonist and illustrator Ed McLachlan has died.  This seems a terrible a shame, even if he was 84.  His work has enlivened Private Eye and my imagination for many a long year.  His work also appeared in all sorts of other places, including the Oldie, Spectator, even Punch – if you young folk remember Punch.  

 

Above and below are a couple of examples of his great food-related cartoons.  May he doodle in peace.