THE WORLD YOUR SARDINE

 Did you know (and I certainly didn’t until about 24 hours ago) that sardines belong to the clupeoid group of fishes, in which there are  over 300 species?  These include Sardinia pilchardus pilchardus, Sardinella  aurita,  and Sardinops melanosticus, to name but a few.

This is only to say that I have no idea what kind of sardines we bought and ate last weekend from our trusty local fish man, who had gutted and decapitated them in advance.  But unidentified though they might be, heck they were good – dredged through a little seasoned flour, fried rather than grilled (though I gather grilled is the approved method) and served with samphire - how could you go wrong?

ABOVE PICS BY CAROLINE GANNON

After the fact I consulted Alan Davidson’s  The Oxford Book Companion to Food which tells us, ‘Canned Sardines are among the few canned products which have their own retinue of connoisseurs.’

I can see how that might work, though I think mostly I’d be in it for the design of the cans, which can be deeply wonderful:

 

And just in case three sardines each weren’t enough (though they were), and despite there being no R in the month (though only 2 weeks to go) we had a few oysters as well.  

They were some of the most difficult oysters I’ve ever had to open, but I got there in the end, and they tasted great - and no, I can't tell you what family they came from either.

 

 

SNAIL MALES AND FEMALES

A little while back I was at Milsoms, an interesting restaurant in Dedham, to celebrate my pal Nicola’s birthday. I saw snails on the menu as starter so immediately ordered them.  They came looking like this.

 

My own bad phone picture.

They were fine but a bit sweet and sticky.  I hadn’t read the menu in any detail so only later did I realized they were ‘Garlic snails on toasted sourdough, madeira & thyme sauce with parsley mayonnaise.’  And yes, that's a kind of potato waffle type thing perched on top. 

Three issues arose: one that I’m not very fond of madeira, two that it was a very long time since I’d last had snails – didn’t you used to see them on sale in any decent deli?  And three, my pal Penny who was also at the dinner said she thought snails were just a delivery system for garlic, butter and lemon.’ And you know I think she was absolutely right.

 

So I decided to have my own snail adventure.  First, I happened to know that the local antiques emporium had snail plates for sale.  They had a few different options and they’d been there a while, which was further evidence that eating snails may have gone off trend. I went for these metal numbers:

And then I bought a can of Burgundy snails (Helix Pomatia).  I had to go online - I didn’t know where else to get them.  And they were much more expensive than I was expecting – about 12 quid.

In a better world I would have bought shells as well, but that would have added another tenner to the price, making it a very expensive starter.  And yes we did use them as a delivery system for lemon, butter and garlic. Also parsley.  

Photo by Caroline Gannon.

I wish I could say that mighty bunch of parsley came from my own garden but it actually came from the farmer’s market, and cost less than a pound.  ‘You don’t get that in Sainsbury’s,’ the woman on the stall said, and how right she was.

 

And so it all went well.  Lemon, butter, garlic and parsley were all duly delivered. We ate them with untoasted slices of baguette which was fine – don’t overcomplicate things!

 

I’ll be trying again soon.  Now, I ask myself, am I spearheading a snail revival?  It seems unlikely.  However, according to Alan Davidson in the Oxford Companion to Food, a taste for snails has regularly come and gone throughout history.  The Mesopotamians ate them, the Romans domesticated them and bred them in vivaria, but there seem to have been centuries when few people ate them at all. Of course in Britain we associate snails with the French which means that many British folk have felt obligated to hate them.  Davidson writing, in 1999 or so, says he hopes such attitudes have gone never to return. He was an optimist.

TARTARE FOR NOW

 Lately I’ve been thinking about steak tartare. 

It supposedly gets its name from the Tartars (Mongols) who tenderized meat by keeping it under their saddles, and then eating it raw.  This is almost certainly apocryphal, but here is Ghengis Khan – the world’s best known Mongol.

 

A friend of mine, American, worldly, a very good French speaker, used to tell the story of her first time in Paris when she went into a somewhat fancy restaurant and saw steak tartare on the menu.  So she ordered it and asked for it well done.  French hilarity ensued.

 

I don’t disbelieve her but according to Alan Davidson inThe Oxford Companion to Food, the French term for steak tartare is steak à l'Americaine, which spoils the story, and I’d no more argue with Alan Davidson than with Ghengis Khan.

 

Anyway I’d been thinking a lot about steak tartare. I wasn’t craving it exactly, but I was feeling I’d like to have one if the opportunity presented itself, and it did a couple of weekends ago when I found it on the menu of the Bear in Rodborough, Gloucestershire.   Naturally I ordered it.  It looked like this:

 

It wasn’t a standard issue tartare, and actually you know I’m not sure there is an absolutely standard recipe.  Everybody seems to have their own version.  Beef, gherkins, lemon juice, capers, onion, Dijon mustard, Worcester sauce, and a raw egg are pretty much always involved, but some include horseradish and Nigel Slater even favours anchovies but then he’s a maverick.  The menu description at the Bear read ‘Native dry-aged beef tartare, shaved black truffle, Tunworth soft cheese, sorrel oil, beef dripping toast.’ There was no mention of raw egg for example, for which I was on balance grateful. I mean I’ll eat it if it’s there, but if it’s not there I don’t feel deprived.  It came looking like this (it tasted better than it looked):

Photo by Luna Woodyear-Smith

Under the garnish, there was a reddish goo, which I suppose must have contained the cheese since I couldn’t detect it in the beef.  Could there have been ketchup in there too?  And possibly an egg yolk?  As for sorrel oil I never knew there was such a thing but I suppose it would be tart and zingy and much like oil and lemon juice, which was fine by me.  The whole thing was pretty good, though I could have done with a bit less salt.

 

When I got home, having the bit between my teeth, as it were, I decided, a few days later, to make my own steak tartare. Perhaps surprisingly even to me I’d never done this before.  I mean it ain’t rocket science.

 

Being pathologically incapable of following a detailed recipe I consulted multiple sources; the likes of Nigella, Gordon and Martha: the usual suspects. My perfectly ordinary version was much as described above steak, gherkins, lemon juice, capers, onion, Dijon mustard, Worcester sauce, salt and pepper.  No egg.

 

Photo by Luna Woodyear-Smith

The result was pretty damn good if I say so myself. In retrospect I think I could have added a bit more of each of those seasonings, but I didn’t want to go too crazy on my first time.  The Platonic ideal of the steak tartare remains elusive but time is on my side.

THE ANNOTATED CHEESE

I’ve been reading Alice in Wonderland, more correctly Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  I’d like to be able to say ‘rereading’ but I can’t really, because I’ve never actually sat down and read it from beginning to end.  I suspect not all that many have.  It's one of those books where people pick out their favorite bits.

And it seemed to me that it was food, food, food all the way – the Madhatter’s Tea party (obviously), the Lobster Quadrille, the stolen tarts, the treacle well, the mock turtle, Father William and his goose, 

and of course all the drink me business, and the eating of the mushroom that made Alice change size.  

No doubt this must say a great deal about Victorian tastes and desire for food but I’m not absolutely sure what.  Presumably Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell were well-fed at a time when not everybody in Britain was.  It seems to be rubbing it in.

To be honest with you I was reading Alice with a plain text in one hand and Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice in the other.

Much has been said, some of it by me, about the problems of annotation, and Gardner’s special problem as an American explicating for other Americans is that he explains a lot of stuff that doesn’t need explaining for an English reader.  And inevitably there are some things that could do with a lot more explaining.

And one of these things is the Cheshire Cat.  Gardner says ‘We know that Cheshire cheese was once sold in the shape of a grinning cat. One would tend to slice off the cheese at the cat’s tail end until finally only the grinning head would remain on the plate.’

Well, do we know this?  I certainly didn’t.  A lifetime’s obsession with cheese, with Cheshire as one of my favorites, has never brought me this bit of information.  And in any case I can’t picture this cheese cat, was it moulded in three dimension?  It certainly sounds like it from Gardner’s description, but how many cat moulds would a cheese maker need in order to produce them in any quantity?  It's not like a butter mould where you can press one out and move on.  Or was there a whole class of 19th century English cheese carvers?

A root around in the books in the Psychogourmet Library, and indeed the internet, reveals nothing whatsoever about this cat-shaped cheese.   Alan Davidson in the Oxford Companion to Food  has a lot to say about Cheshire cheese (Domesday Book, Gerard, giant American 300 pound political cheeses) but nothing feline.

Anybody got any views or further info on this?

MORE AVO

Well, I tracked down some avocados at the Tesco Metro, (I mean it wasn't exactly an expedition) and a can of lump crab (i.e the white stuff) at the Co-op – a squirt of mayo, some lemon juice, a bit of seasoning and I was ready to go all Sylvia Plath:

It tasted fine and there was no food poisoning: so win, win.

And I did a bit more avocado research. It seems they were a tough sell in Britain partly because of the name ‘avocado pear.’  People assumed that since it was called a pear you could just bite into it, like a pear.  Some education was required and provided.  This is Australian:

I also discovered from Alan Davidson’s Oxford Book of Food that one of the first Europeans to eat an avocado was Fernandez de Oviedo (spellings differ) 

who ate it with cheese, as though it was an apple.  Other Spaniards added sugar, which I suppose made it more like a pear in certain respects.

MOLE AND TANDOOR

I had lunch last week at Loteria (6627 Hollywood Boulevard) – a place I like a lot, and it seems very successful, though I somehow feel it doesn’t quite get as much love as it deserves.  I ordered a couple of enchiladas, one cheese, one chicken, with mole poblano.  It looked like this:

It was so dark and intense it seemed to absorb the Los Angeles daylight - which has much to do with the chocolate it contains, of course – and the result is something Huysman might have approve of.  It was great, if frankly a bit intense for lunchtime.

And then as I was leaving, a fellow from the restaurant asked me casually if I’d enjoyed my lunch, since he’d seen me take the photograph of it.

It was the cheery fellow above, Jimmy Shaw, the begetter of Loteria – born in Mexico City, he renounced a career in advertising to become a chef.  He said he’d seen me in the restaurant before, and I said sure, I come fairly often, and it’s a great place to have in the neighborhood.  He obviously knew what I’d ordered, and he said, and this may not be an exact quotation but something very like, “Mole is to Mexico as curry is to Asia.”

It sounded fair enough but when I got home I realized I wasn’t sure I knew exactly what a mole was, so I did a little digging.  It some ways it seems to be just another word for a sauce, but that doesn’t really say much.   And I found this evocative, if faintly excessive, description in Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen.  “When it’s made from scratch, no matter what regional variation you’re tasting, the sauce will offer the fullness of a 20-piece dance band, the intricacies of a Persian rug and the intensity of a Siqueiros mural.”  Though frankly I’m not sure that any dish could be quite as intense as this  Siqueiros mural, especially not at lunchtime.

And then, life being what it is, I opened my Sunday New York Times Style Magazine yesterday and there's an article titled "Mole In Mexico" and I thought I probably ought to read that.  So I read the opening line, "The word 'mole' doesn't translate into 'infinity,' but it feels like it should."  Seems that mole plays havoc witha man's prose style.

Fortunately I also found a couple of online interviews with Jimmy Shaw.  In a piece on chefsinsight.com he said his mole has 27 ingredients, and then, “Mexican food is truly fusion food of centuries. If you think about today’s mole poblano, you think 'that’s truly a Mexican recipe.' But mole was made originally by Spanish nuns for a viceroy to showcase indigenous and Spanish cuisine together. We’re talking about 500, 600 years ago.”  This story is much repeated in the annals of mole – in some versions an angel is involved.

Well it so happened I went to another restaurant the next night – Animal (435 North Fairfax), which cooks the kind of food I love (sort of post-Fergus Henderson nose-to-tail) without necessarily always cooking it quite as well as I might wish.  With curry on my mind, I ordered the “tandoori octopus – tamarind, yoghurt, kumquat.”  It looked like this:

And when I got home I realized I wasn’t sure I knew exactly what a tandoori is.  I mean, I know it’s a clay oven, but not much more than that, and I’m not sure that Animal actually has one of these:

Still, looking it up in Alan Davidson, he tells us the tandoor is a bread oven originally found in the middle east.  But, and now be prepared to set your face to stunned, “Tandoor meat cookery has been popular since 1948 when a Kashmiri restaurant named Moti Mahal became a fashionable dining spot for politicians in New Delhi.  As a result Indian tandoori restaurants have sprung up all around the world.” 

Only since 1948?  So - tandoori cookery is quite the Johnny-come-lately of Indian cookery, and the man behind Moti Mahal was one Kundan Lal Gujral.  This is him, another cheery fellow, apparently:

Moti Mahal Delux is now a global chain with 120 franchises.  The picture below is from their website – uncaptioned so I can’t really tell you what’s going on, but I'll bet the dialogue was lively.

And I have no idea whatsoever of what's going on in this one:

KIPPERED

I was in Fillmore, California, a little way inland from Ventura, and I’d eaten some potato skins (above) at a sports bar named Central Station, and afterwards we wandered down to an antique store that had a great selection of paper items, menus and postcards, including this one of a Manx kipper, sent from Douglas in the Isle of Man, to a Mrs. F. L. Peavey in Chicago, on August 10^th 1907.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I think there’s nothing better than a good kipper when you’re in the mood, and Alan Davidson, one of my favorite food writers, called one of his books A Kipper With My Tea.  In the title essay Davidson is extremely snippy about the vinegar bore and the olive oil bore but insists that “without becoming a kipper-bore ... one can exercise a certain discrimination.”  He says that he’s particularly fond of the kippers made by the Robson family in Craster, in Northumberland.

He writes, “We certainly enjoyed the Craster kippers, but what really held our attention there was an extraordinarily cheap piece of real estate. Perched high on the cliff, looking over the tiny harbor and the North Sea – a really amazing view - was a small cottage going for a song.  When we heard about the song we started having fantasies about a second home in Craster, writing inspired by the view, kippers every day, and so on.  But then a neighbor enlightened us.  The cottage had been part of the kippering complex and its stone walls were so deeply impregnated with herring oil that that no known technique could remove the overpowering smell.”

I can see why you mightn’t buy a place like that, but I reckon I can think of worse food smells.

         The Robson family is still very much in the kipper business.  There website is here:  http://www.kipper.co.uk