GOODISH GRAVY

 I’ve been thinking about gravy.

 

A few years back there were reports of a restaurant about to open in Manchester called the Gravy Bar selling nothing but gravy.  It turned out to be a hoax and frankly I found the satire a bit broad, but I don’t think a gravy restaurant is the worst culinary idea I’ve ever heard.

 

I know there used to be a restaurant in Manhattan called Gravy and I went there once, and although I don’t remember what I ate, I know they didn’t only sell gravy.

 

And then just the other day an advertising leaflet came through my door for the Mistley Fisheries, a local fish and chip shop, with a menu that’s more interesting than some (battered burgers, saveloys, rock eel), and there on the list of extras is gravy to go on your chips or pie.  

 

The price as you see is £1.80 which I couldn’t help thinking was a bit high a helping of gravy.  I mean, a jar of Bisto Best Beef Gravy only costs 2 quid. 

 

And then Ann Fishbein, of Culver City, a very fine photographer often of food and drink put up this picture of a leaflet that had been slipped into her door the day after Thanksgiving.  “I buy Leftover Gravy.”

The satire’s still a bit broad but I like it. 

 

Of course the average English person finding themselves in an American diner can be very confused by the concept of biscuits and gravy.  But heck, they’ve got to learn sometime.

PRETTY AS A PLATING

I saw this thing on Jay Rayner’s Instagram: “The best tasting food is rarely the most beautiful” - and I’ve been wondering if this is true.

I think Rayner's a good egg, and I’m definitely prepared to give his opinion some credence , especially since the other night I had this stuffed squid at Josephine’s:

 I thought it tasted great, but I’m sure some diners would have been put off by the way it looked. Well, that’s their problem, innit?

Certainly I like food that looks good, as when the beloved Anne Fishbein photographs it for LA Weekly, though I sometimes suspect the food looks better in her photographs than it tastes in reality:

I certainly don’t like prettified food, but ugliness per se isn’t a guarantee that something will taste good. This kebab didn’t look good and didn’t taste good either, but I’m sure others might have thought differently on both counts:

And then of course you get all those kitschy, and sometimes horrifying, old food ads that people on the internet seem to love, like this:

 and this:

And usually anything that involves Jello gets a lot of flak online, but you know, this image may be pretty strange looking:

But you know it contains cottage cheese, vinegar, onion, mayonnaise, lime and seafood salad.  I’ll bet it tastes great.

FLASHING

Once again I’ve been thinking about food photography, which also of course includes drink.  It seems, in many ways, that it could be a very difficult and frustrating profession, but the only food photographer I know, of any sort, Anne Fishbein who and as far as I can tell is a perfectly happy woman, and takes photographs like this, which are great:

As discussed passim on this blog, most photographers of any sort, have at one time or another taken photographs of food and drink, not least William Eggleston, although his photographs always seem to be about something other than food and drink, which is obviously a very good thing.

And I was indulging my Eggleston obsession the other day and came across an article and interview in Vanity Fair by John Heilpern from November 2015, titled “Does William Eggleston Love Women? You’re Damn Right!”  I really don’t know how many ironies there are in that headline. Anyway, at the end of the interview Heilpern asks if he can take a picture of Eggleston on his cellphone.The article runs:     

“‘Go ahead,’ he obliged. I took three of him. Then he sportingly offered to take a cellphone shot of me, although he confessed he didn’t know how. After a little explanation, he figured out my cellphone’s push button and took one picture, scarcely glancing through the lens.   

“The difference was laughable. Mine were just the usual snapshots, while his was a single, masterly composition of someone seated amid the day-for-night kitsch of El Quijote. He’s a magic man, that’s for sure.”

Well yes, Eggleston is a magic man, but I still don’t quite know why so many of his interviews seem to involve El Quijote – a slightly grim Spanish restaurant next to the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.

         

Hold these thoughts. Last Friday I went out with Jason Oddy, a man who seems as far from being a food photographer as is possible.  But he told me that Eggleston was one of his great heroes, and it was seeing photographs by Eggleston, more than any others, that made him want to take photographs. Oddy generally takes photographs like this:

         

We were having an art and food night. We started out at Mosaic House in Earls Court at an exhibition by the Persian artist Behjat Sadr (1924-2007), titled Dusted Waters.  There was a DJ set by her grandson.  Her work looks like this:

There was wine to be had at the Mosaic Rooms, and afterwards we rolled out into the night and thought it would be only appropriate to go to a Persian restaurant and we ended up in Apadana, in Kensington High Street, which has been there since pre-revolutionay days. It was founded in 1967.  So obviously there was wine there too.

It was a decent enough place - we had the hot mezza sampler, spicy Koobideh, and seabass.

And I’m no fool, I don’t brandish my camera when “real” photographers are around, but I asked Jason to take some photographs, and he did, and everything looked great – better than I’d have taken (obviously) and better than it actually appeared in “reality.” There was also this fellow in the restaurant:

The next day I looked up another article about Eggleston, this one by Augusten Burroughs, from The New York Times Style Magazine, dated October, 2016. The title of the article was “William Eggleston, the Pioneer of Color Photography” – I can imagine more banal titles, but not easily.

And the end of the article runs, “We leave the offices of the Eggleston Trust and go to his apartment. The first thing one sees upon entering is a bright red plastic sign with a yellow border, printed with capitalized white sans-serif text. It warns, “THE OCCUPANT OF THIS APARTMENT WAS RECENTLY HOSPITALIZED FOR COMPLICATIONS DUE TO ALCOHOL. HE IS ON A MEDICALLY PRESCRIBED DAILY PORTION OF ALCOHOL. IF YOU BRING ADDITIONAL ALCOHOL INTO THIS APARTMENT YOU ARE PLACING HIM IN MORTAL DANGER. YOUR ENTRY AND EXIT INTO THIS APARTMENT IS BEING RECORDED. WE WILL PROSECUTE SHOULD THIS NOTICE BE IGNORED. THE EGGLESTON FAMILY.”

Both Augusten Burroughs and I find ourselves wondering where exactly you find a doctor who prescribes a “daily portion of alcohol,” and what exactly is the dosage.  It wouldn’t happen in Tehran, I’m sure.

A LITTLE SANDWICH LORE BEFORE THE HOLIDAYS

 First it was reported (i.e. I’m not entirely sure I believe it – I’ve only found one source for it) that Flight Captain Noushad of Pakistan International Airlines delayed take off a flight from Lahore to New York for two hours, while he waited for a sandwich to be delivered to him from a five star hotel.

Noushad supposedly said he "needed sandwiches at any cost" (I know the feeling) after he learned that there were no “gourmet treats” on board, only peanuts, chips and cookies. He continued demanding the sandwich even when he was told it could take two hours to get one from the hotel.  And apparently it did.  The flight was due to take off at 6.45 and didn’t leave till 9.15.  (All this is “allegedly.”)  Food on Pakistani International Airlines sometimes looks like this:

Type “Pakistani sandwich” into google and you’ll find a surprising number of surprisingly unexotic sandwich recipes.  On the website pakistanifun.com you can find a recipe for a French Chicken sandwich, but at least it’s in Urdu.

Meanwhile the BBC reported that in Khartoum rising prices mean that people can no longer afford their traditional falafels, so they’re eating cheaper foods in their sandwiches and coming up with exotic names for them.  A banana in a roll is now a Gigabyte sandwich.  Another sandwich, the Sound System, contains cows' ears.  I find it surprising that bananas are cheaper than chickpeas even in Sudan, cow ears I’m not so sure. In any case they're lining up for it (below).

A company here in the US called Best Buy Bones specializes in selling cow ears  as dog treats, “A Grease Free Alternative to Pig Ears” they say.  They come in blueberry, cherry and vanilla flavor, which is obviously going to push the price up, and they sell for about $2 per ear, which still strikes me as extortionate,  but I imagine that price is based on what the market will tolerate, and that nothing’s too good for people’s effin dogs.

In other sandwich news Anne Fishbein a very fine photographer, not exclusively but not least of food (you can see her work on http://www.annefishbein.com), published this photo on her Facebook page showing that sometimes minimalism is good too:

Compare and contrast with the this bit of sandwich engineering:

I also came across this school detention slip on a website that collects such things.

It took me a while to realize that YOLO means “you only live once,” and I suppose different people have different ideas of what constitutes living, but you can’t help thinking that the “youth of today” might come up with something a bit more zesty than sandwich throwing.

Crossing my own sandwich threshold – I ate a Langer’s Number 19, which is by all accounts a very famous, not to say iconic, L.A. sandwich, and as you see above it contains pastrami, cheese, coleslaw.  It was terrific, not least the coleslaw, but it was a funny thing, as I ate it I was well aware that the Loved One would enjoy that coleslaw even more than I did.  Such is the nature of long-term relationships.

And then at the weekend we found ourselves in Sherman’s New York Style Deli and Bakery, in Palm Springs, where I had great food envy.  I ordered an open face corned beef and chicken liver sandwich, which was very good indeed and looked like this:

But I kept looking over covetously at what the Loved One had ordered, the grilled cheese sandwich with crinkle-cut fried potatoes.  She let me have a couple of potatoes.  Such also, fortunately, is the nature of long-term relationships.