GEOFF DAYDREAMS OF SUSHI

I was walking in the afternoon, more or less in the neighborhood, trying to keep the Black Dog at bay, when I suddenly felt an urgent need for some supermarket sushi.  I don’t suppose it absolutely had to be from a supermarket. If there’d been a perfect ten-seater sushi restaurant nearby I’d probably have gone there, but I knew a Gelson’s supermarket was nearby, and that was my only reasonable hope.  

In fact I’ve been eating some pretty reasonable sushi of late.  This plate was at Kombu Sushi in Silverlake, and yes, some of it’s sashimi.

That’s definitely saba (Japanese mackerel) at the back – there was also Spanish mackerel on the menu and I wanted to do a compare and contrast, but they’d run out of the Spanish.  I wouldn’t want to swear what the other two were – presumably yellowtail on the left, and I suppose octopus on the right - but I wouldn't put money on it.  It was all pretty good though.

The last supermarket sushi I ate, put on as a treat by my hostess when I did a reading/event at Glendale Community College, a little while ago now, was actually not bad at all - note the veggies:

It appears to have come from the Nijaya market, a pretty reliable Japanese chain.

And so this afternoon, while out walking, I strolled into Gelson’s and bought a box of “Nigri assorted sushi” (not as assorted as all that, as you can see) and took it home with me.  It was good enough – yellowtail and salmon, I think, though the label was very confusing.  And there’s a ton of rice lurking under the fish.  Obviously you don’t have to eat if all, but just as obviously you always do.

-      And the Black Dog? Oh, he's never far away, sometimes it’s the walking that helps, sometimes it’s the sushi.  And maybe the Sapporo helped a little too, but only a little.

MARCEL AND MOI

Proust had his madeleine – I have English Cheshire cheese.  A great English Cheshire cheese is very great indeed, but even a less than great one still resonates because it was so much a part of my growing up, and I still love it more than is sensible of even quite comprehensible.

And now my local Gelson’s supermarket is selling it:  Somerdale Golden Cheshire. Somerdale is a British Company, based in Somerset, “one of the leading exporters of cheese and dairy products in the UK” according to the website.  They also say they export to over “50 countries around the world, supplying over 250 cheeses.”

250 Cheeses!!?? Isn’t that a few too many?  Didn’t there used to be just 9 “real” British cheese.  Somerdale make up the numbers with oddities like, Wensleydale with Fig and honey, white Stilton with mango and ginger, Cheddar with whisky.  I find this all pretty redundant.  If I want whisky with my Cheddar I’m quite capable of arranging it myself, but no doubt others feel differently.

Golden 
Cheshire, Somerdale tell us, “is a hard-pressed, open textured, crumbly cheese with a clean sharp flavor. It is defined by its moist crumbly texture and mildly salty taste. Made both white and colored, it is one of the oldest recorded cheeses in history.” Well, yes but … my Encyclopedia of Cheese by Juliet Harbutt, published in 1999, says, “fewer than a handful of cheese makers still make the traditional clothbound Cheshire using raw milk.  Most of the cheeses are factory-made and lack any real depth of character.”  I don’t doubt that this is true but oddly enough the lack of depth and character is precisely what connects it with my youth.

Anyway, for better or worse, I have been buying and eating Somerdale Golden Cheshire  a little bit obsessively – the store has been having a low introductory price, and I want them to continue selling it – and I fear it may not be to most American tastes.

My local supermarket, Gelson’s, used to be Mayfair Market – I have a mug somewhere celebrating the change, or perhaps celebrating the death of Mayfair.  Now those of you with eidetic memories may recall a great photograph by Philip-Lorca diCorcia:

It’s one of a series of photographs in which he approached street hustlers, asked them what their rate was for sex, and then paid them that rate as their modeling fee.  You may pick the morality/exploitation out of that one until the cows come.

DiCorcia also took the remarkable picture below, from the series A Storybook Life.

 You will notice in the background the magic words Continental Cheese Co. Inc.  How it all comes together.  And then in the New York Post I just found the headline, “Say cheese for good teeth.”    According to a study in the journal General Dentistry people who eat cheese develop a high pH in their mouth – the higher the pH, the lower the chance of cavities.  Like you would need a reason to eat cheese.