BLUE ROADS

I can’t remember when I first heard of Jane and Michael Stern: it seems like they’ve always been there.  Their book Roadfood  was first published in 1977 and has been much updated, and they had various columns in food magazines, and I believe still do. This was them back in the day.

Their original idea was brilliantly simple – they drove around America, originally in a Volkswagen Beetle, eating in ‘ordinary’ American roadside restaurants, and writing about it.  Sounds like a plan, doesn’t it?

 

They also wrote a book titled Blue plate specials & blue ribbon chefs: the heart and soul of America's great roadside restaurants.  Now that phrase ‘blue plate special’ is about as all-American as it gets, and as far as I can tell as a non-American, it refers to specials served in cheap and cheerful eateries around the States.

I’m not sure that these meals were always served on actual blue plates but some undoubtedly were, and sometimes the plates were segmented – perhaps in the interests of portion control. 

 

The term seems to date from the very end of the  nineteenth century, at Fred Harvey Restaurants, usually found in railroad stations.  It also seems to have something to do to do with willow pattern plates.  My grandmother had a couple of those but we never ate from them – they were wall decorations.

 

All this has been on my mind since I recently bought a couple of low-priced blue plates from the local Asda.  

 

In general I’m in favour of plain, simple white plates, but you know, I discover that most things look pretty darn good on these blue numbers.  That's snapper and samphire, if you're interested.

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

And then, synchronicity being what it is, I was looking at Fuschia Dunlop’s posts on Instagram and up popped this fabulous picture of a table centerpiece at a dinner she was at, I think in Beijing. Looks great to me. 

 

Yep, blue is the colour!

Oh and incidentally, my pal Sue Hutchins tells me that she's a big fan of blue plates and directs me to this fine example - a blue (and white) plate with a dodo!  Oh my.

 

ACID MOTHERS DIGESTION

 We went to Chelmsford, the inamorata and I, to see Acid Mothers Temple (the greatest Japanese psychedelic trance band in the world, and therefore definitely in Chelmsford) at the Hot Box, a fabulous venue with a capacity of 90 people, in the railway arches by the railway station.

It did occur to us that we might eat some Japanese food before the gig but in the end we went to the Brew House and Kitchen and ate nachos and salt and pepper calamari.  I don’t think makes us bad people.

Photo by Caroline Gannon

 And the gig was all we wanted to it to be.  This kind of thing.

 

And afterwards we rolled a few hundred yards from the gig to the budget hotel we’d booked into and slept the slept of the just, the transcendent, and the slightly deafened and beered-up.

 

But next day on the way home I spotted, actually within the railway station itself, the Ume Garden's Sushi and Bento, 

and in the interests of completing the cultural experience, I bought a box of something named Rainbow Set (Nori, Rice, Vinegar, Salmon, Prawn, Tamago, Inari, California Roll, Prawn Avocado Roll, Cucumber) and took it home and had it for dinner.  Looked like this, and tasted good enough.

 

Was it ‘authentic’?  I suppose not altogether.  But following Acid Mothers Temple on Facebook I see they often cook in their hotel room (not the same budget hotel that we were in, evidently) using a portable hot plate, and sometimes cooking rice in an electric kettle: 

And sometimes apparently it’s necessary for them to put a tent over the whole thing, which I suppose is to stop the smoke alarm going off.

 

Ah, life on the road.

THE TASTEBUDS OF THE BEHOLDER

 Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this before, but many years ago when I worked Mondays at the Bath Hotel in Cambridge as ‘relief chef’ (a massive exaggeration of my capabilities), the manager said to me, ‘If they’ve got a full plate and it looks good you can get away with murder.’ I wasn’t trying to get away with murder, and his idea of a good looking plate was one strewn with handfuls of cress, which even then I thought was a bad idea, but even so I could see the guy sort of had a point.

 

Now, for one reason or another I have lately eaten sandwiches in a couple of Costas. (I had my reasons). The presentation, let’s call it that, is varied, sometimes on a plate, sometimes on a paper bag, which is not exactly stylish, but even so I thought the sandwiches themselves looked pretty decent, mostly because of the melted cheese on top.

 

But what was inside tasted pretty awful. Yes, we eat with our eyes, but we don’t completely eat with our eyes. Once the food gets into your mouth a quite different sense takes over.

 

Which brings me to toad in the hole. Now, I like to think I make a fairly decent Yorkshire pudding.  I learned how by watching my mother make them at least twice a week.  She never actually taught me how to do it, that would have been far too metrosexual: I just watched and absorbed.

 

My mother never made toad in the hole, but since I like both sausages and Yorkshire pudding I thought I was on reasonably safe ground making it.  And I more or less was.  The sausages were from the local butcher, my batter was up to my usual standard but when it was cooked it didn’t look pretty, even if it tasted just fine.

 

I had a couple more attempts without any great visual improvement

 

And then I started hunting around online and you know, ALL the toad in the hole looked fairly ugly, whether it was the BBC:

Tesco: 

 

or even dear Jamie Oliver:

 

I don’t hold this against any of them, and of course I understand there’s more to food than it being photogenic.  Thanks to Instagram everybody and their uncle thinks they’re a food photographer but I recall an occasion when I was being a ‘real’ food journalist and I went up to Yorkshire for the Daily Telegraph to interview some people who made soup (the company name long forgotten), and I was there with a real food photographer, whose name, I’m sorry, also escapes me. The day went well, the soup people were very hospitable, the interview went well, and by the end of the afternoon I’d got everything I needed and went off to my hotel (yes, the Telegraph was paying).  But the photographer and his assistant toiled on,adjusting the composition, changing lighting, rearranging props and garnishes, photographing soup from all angles and showing no sign of letting up.  They looked like they might be there for the rest of the night.

I can’t immediately lay hands on a copy of the article but I do have a Polaroid that I was allowed to take away as a souvenir.  This:

 

 

 

THE RAW AND THE UNPALATABLE

  

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s a culinary idea.

Supposing you had a couple of duck portions in your fridge and you couldn’t be fussed to do all that time-consuming roasting, baking, crisping, confiting or whatever, well you might think to yourself, ‘I know, I’ll make duck tartare.’  I mean, I’m very fond of steak tartare, red meat is red meat, and there are plenty of recipes online saying this is a very good thing.

 

So we did the chopping, the seasoning, the adding of onion, capers, cornichons, mustard, chives and whatnot, and served it on crostini with rocket leaves.

It tasted OK but the texture was a bit slimy on the tongue and it looked vaguely disgusting, like this:

I didn’t say it was a good culinary idea.