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.

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

 At 

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.