VISIBLE CHIPS

When did this happen? When did comparatively modest restaurants start serving their chips/French fries in little metal containers or baskets?

 

I ask this because I went to a couple of places in Suffolk at the weekend, and they both served their chips that way. This was the Boardwalk Restaurant on the pier in Southwold

 

This was Satis House, in Yoxford.

 

I’m sure Heston Blumenthal has a lot to do with it.  Once you’ve made a big thing out of triple cooking your chips you want to show them off.

 

Obviously it looks kind of classy, but there can be problems. A metal container can hide a multitude of sins, and less reputable establishments can put their broken, under or over cooked, generally less visually attractive odds and ends at the bottom where they lurk unseen, at least initially. Though of course that doesn't happen with a basket.

 

And I suppose the arrangement is here to stay. You can buy the little containers at Ikea – only 4 quid a pop:

Am I being pathetic if I say I'm tempted?  And I ask myself, are my chips worthy?

 

MY YEAR IN NOSH

 It being the end of the year, the assiduous blogger obviously has to do a round up of things eaten and formerly unblogged about.

 

Here for example is a tuna melt eaten at Caffee Torelli, right by Kew Railway station:

 

Here is a galette at L’Hirondelle in Walthamstow:

Here’s a Cornish Pasty and a can of Diet Pepsi (I drink at most one can of Pepsi a year and afterwards usually wish I hadn’t).  

I was sitting alone eating my pasty on the seafront in Dovercourt when this dog came along and stared at me in a beseeching way:  

 

His owner came along knot shortly after, riding on a mobility scooter, and said told me that dog had recently become ‘a beggar.’  His begging did him no good.

 

This is a scone with butter and jam, from the caff at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire:

 

Must say I never really crave scones and yet when one’s put in front of me I tend to enjoy it.

These are Gyozas and Sushi Tacos (yes, really) from Kensu Kitchen, an establishment within Medz Corner, a kind of food court in Kensington High St.  The sushi tacos worked, more or less.

This is a fairly dreary plate of sausages with extras at Dirty Dicks in Spitalfields – the sausages themselves were the problem.

This is a ham and cheese sandwich with chips at The Mad Bishop and Bear in Paddington station:

And these are some truly remarkable and excellent seasoned chips from Ousia in Charlotte Street, London:

 

Then then there were two weeks in California, and the brakes came off.  (Nobody wants to eat while wearing gloves)

 

There was this very substantial tuna salad sandwich at the 1919 Cafe in the Huntington Gardens, San Marino:

These are Beef Wellington Bites at Zin in Palm Springs:

 

These are some so-so eggs Benedict at the Lakeview Bistro in the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown LA.

 

All in all it wasn’t such a bad year food-wise.  I hope you can say the same. Cheers.

 

 

 

 

 

MORE SPUD LORE

So I went back to Franklin and Company to have their waffle cut duck fries.  They were good, although you could easily have imagined something gamier and more duck-intense.  I suppose I was thinking of goose fat, which I know costs more than duck fat, though I’m not entirely sure why: roast yourself a goose and the fat just pours out - enough to   satisfy most of your fat needs for at least the next year.

Even so, it’s really it’s all about the potatoes, and my idea for a grand and quixotic book titled something like The Secret Life of the Spud hasn’t been completely abandoned.  And so, being the freewheeling researcher that I am, I Googled “potato+porn.” In a world of “food porn” and “ruin porn” I thought this might be quite innocent, and in the main it was.  

There’s even a (rather neglected) tumblr site:  
http://potatopornpotatoporn.tumblr.com
It has very few words, though there are links to recipes and pictures like this one:

But the world being as it is, my googling also brought up quite a few pictures (more of men that of women) doing ill-advised things with potatoes – pretty much the opposite of eating them.  Here is a more decorous image (which I suppose is actually selling the handbag), by James Piatt and Ted Walton, though those names took some finding.

And I did discover that there’s a (completely unpornographic) Potato Museum in Munich - Das Kartoffelmuseum.  I’ve been to Munich – how did I miss that?  In that museum they have one of these things:

       It’s a ceremonial vessel, dedicated to, possibly in the shape of,  "Axomama" – the Andean potato goddess.  There’s a lot to be said about these things, and The History and Social Influence of the Potato by Radcliffe Salaman says a fair amount: human sacrifice and mutilation of the upper lip seem to have been involved.

       It now seems that I might not get to the Idaho Potato Museum, after all, so here’s a picture of their prime exhibit, what they say is the world’s largest potato chip, measuring 25 inches across - though in fact as you can see, it’s actually a giant Pringle: 

Now I’d have thought Pringles were so “constructed” you could make them any size you wanted. Why stop at 25 inches? You could have one ten feet across.  But more than that, the Honorable Justice Warren, British High Court Judge, has declared that Pringles do not met the legal definition of a “potato crisp” at all, since they’re made from potato flour, corn flour, wheat starch and rice flour together with fat and emulsifier, salt and seasoning, with a potato content of a mere 42%.  Quite right, Judge.

EATING UNPECULIARLY

And of course while in England I ate what the English would call potato crisps, and what my American neighbors would call potato chips.  I selected these two as a couple of interestingly similar examples - both sausage and mustard flavour.

You’ll notice that Corkers don’t immediately declare themselves to be either crisps OR chips, but rather “Natural British Crunch” which sounded to me like a euphemism for some sort of chemical construct, although the promise of East Anglian spuds on the packet was vaguely reassuring, and indeed potato crisps is what they are.

Both varieties definitely seem to be peddling some dubious version of British nostalgia.  Corkers have silhouettes of phone boxes, Minis, cricket bats and whatnot.   Tyrell’s have happy girls, perhaps from the farm, perhaps from the factory, and they tell us, just in case we’ve been living in a bunker for the last 30 years, that crisps go well with a pint of ”ale.”

I can’t say I’d ever heard of Ludlow sausage – there’s no mention in Antony and Araminta Hippisley Coxe’s Book of Sausages  (which is my bible in these matters) but of course it’s declared online that they’re part of a long and noble tradition.  This may just possibly be true.

In any case I didn’t get a strong sausage taste from the Tyrell’s, more of an all-purpose savory flavor, and they were perfectly fine, and no doubt better still with ale (perhaps in a flagon for old time’s sake).  The list of ingredients runs as follows, “Potatoes, Sunflower Oil, Sausage and Wholegrain Mustard Flavour (Lactose, Sugar, Salt, Mustard Powder, Yeast Extract Powder, Onion Powder, Sage, Spice Extract, Pork Powder, Citric Acid, White Pepper, Garlic Powder, Flavouring, Colour: Paprika Extract)” which leaves me wondering whether there’s any actual meat or sausage in the mix.  Again, I had never heard of pork powder, but I now know it’s a pork-free seasoning, containing hickory smoke, dried jalapeno and a bunch of other things.

Corkers tasted far more like the real deal.  There was a big tangy burst up front, which I suppose was the mustard, though if I’d had to guess I might have said it was vinegar, and then at the end there really was a genuine, intense, lingering pork taste.  How they managed that, I’m still not sure.  The pack lists as the ingredients as “Potatoes, Sunflower Oil, Yeast Extract Powder, Potato Starch, Whey Powder (from Milk), Salt, Wheatflour, Sugar, Spices (including Mustard), Natural Flavourings, Herbs, Onion Powder, Natural Colour: Paprika.”  So again no obvious presence of meat or sausage, unless sausage can be construed as a “natural flavouring.”

And finally, for those who want to believe that British food is a series of unnatural shocks that flesh is heir to, may I present the Very Peculiar Marmite chocolate bar. 

Now, I think anyone who goes out of their way to proclaim peculiarity is already trying too hard, and so it was here.  It really wasn’t very peculiar at all.  It tasted fine, rather like one of those bars of chocolate with sea salt.  I got the savoriness, and once you know it’s Marmite then you can taste it quite clearly, but really I’m not sure I’d have got it in a blind tasting.

The problem I think is that it’s 98% chocolate and only 2% Marmite, and I reckon 2% is way too low.  As a man who tends to have both chocolate and Marmite in the house I shall be doing some experimenting – 3 per cent, 5 per cent, spreading Marmite thickly across a chocolate bar as though it were a slice of toast.  Hey – don’t judge me!

SWEET AND SOUR SPUDS

Every time I go to India Sweets and Spices, my local Indian supermarket, I end up buying some kind of subcontintental potato chip/crisp.  This seems a reasonable thing to buy, since the Indians obviously have a pretty good way with potatoes, whether it be Bombay aloo or sukhi bharji or wada pav.

That’s a wada pav above (spellings vary), essentially a potato sandwich, and to those of us who grew up in the north of England eating chip butties, it seems both natural and comparatively sophisticated.

The Indians also have perfected the aloo paratha: unleavened dough into which spicy potatoes have been incorporated, then rolled out and cooked on a griddle   with butter or ghee.  That’s the “proper” method anyway, but I once had a version in an Indian Restaurant in London, that was an ordinary unstuffed paratha that had simply been folded over and heap of mash shoved inside.  I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing.

So yes, I’m always optimistic when I buy my Indian potato snacks, but they always turn out to be strange and disappointing. 

Take those curious little suckers above - Anand Potato Chips (Masala), masala being a term that doesn’t meant much more than mixed spices, and spicy they were, in fact they were so hot that the aftertaste was as though you’d shaken chili pepper directly into your mouth.  But at least they had a crispness about them.

Another attempt was Mo’pleez Spicy potato chips (above), masala again, which delivered the experience of eating dry, tasteless crackers that had been left in a drawer for a couple of months.  Mo’pleez is a terrific name but my real feeling and that of people I shared them with was “no mo’ ever again, thank you.”

Still hope springs eternal, and when I had the chance to try three different varieties of potato “wafers,” manufactured by Balaji Wafer Pvt. Ltd, based in Gujurat, and according to their website, “In year 2003 Balaji Group took pride to introduce this biggest fully automated Potato processing machinery plant in India which can process 4500 kg. potato and make 1200 kg. of chips per hour.”  Impressive.

         The three flavors, as you see, were Simply Salted, Cream and Onion, and Magic Masala (of course).  Simply salted was a little too simple for my tastes, and perhaps lacking in salt, and the Cream and Onion was not bad at all, though common or garden all-America sour cream would have been zestier.  But the Masala: oh my, I’d never tasted anything quite like it.

I’d try one and think, what is that flavor, Mint? I’d try another.  Was that sugar? Chutney? Well, there was no mint, but sugar was third on the list of ingredients, after potatoes and vegetable oil, and I think the thing that was mostly responsible for the taste was the dry mango powder.  I found the result sort of cloying and vaguely unpleasant.  We know that mango chutney is a staple of Indian cookery, and something that by and large I like with an Indian curry, but not so much as a coating for spuds. 

Still, they are no doubt made with local Indian tastes in mind, and if there seems to be something vaguely absurd about potato snacks that have had to travel 9000 miles (the locavores would be horrified) no doubt there are many Indian immigrants in LA who think these snacks are worth every bit of the effort.

In general I’m with the local lobby, nevertheless, having been down to the (somewhat) local branch of World Market I’ve just bought a six pack of exotic beers and ciders from around the world (sold for a pretty reasonable $1.99 each.  Consequently I’ve been enjoying some Einstock Olgero, Icelandic white ale, featuring “the complex flavors of a classic Witbier, including orange peel and coriander.”   I couldn’t detect the coriander but the orange was definitely there, and I was pretty happy with that.  The mavens over a RateBeer.com don’t seem to like it a whole lot but I thought it was pretty good, though that may have had something to do with the tequila chaser, made by Sauza, a company located in the municipality of Tequila, in the state of Jalisco in Mexico.  The tequila glass, incidentally, was bought in Jalisco, in Guadalajara.  How international can you get?