MORE SANDWICH MADNESS

 Heston Blumenthal is back, apparently.

 

Personally I hadn’t noticed that he’d been away but it seems he has.  And in his absence he’s been working on himself and he is, as he told us repeatedly in an interview in the Times last weekend, much improved.

 

 ‘I am more energized, more imaginative.  I have more clarity in my belief, a richer more fulfilled life.’

 

It doesn’t end there.  He continues, ‘I can’t think of a better therapist on the planet than me because I ask questions.’

 

And finally he goes all Donald Trump. ‘My body heals and repairs itself at an unusually high rate. I have broken so many bones, but the rate at which they fix is unbelievable.’

 

And the end result of all this hard work and self-knowledge?  Heston has come up with a Prawn Cocktail Salad Sandwich.  I won't insult you by giving the recipe.  It looks like this:

 

Is there no end to the man’s talent? Simple answer: yes.

SOME RECENT SAUSAGES

Last week I went to Orochon Ramen, a somewhat famous (I mean it’s appeared on some foodie TV) show, a Japanese restaurant in Little Tokyo, and I had a big bowl of ramen with salt broth, as you would.  But there on the appetizer menu was “spicy sausage,” and that obviously couldn’t be passed up, since it seems to me that the Japanese know a thing or two about sausage.  It came like this:

 Looking and in fact tasting very much like a hotdog but not exactly, having more texture, being far less homogenized than a standard issue hotdog, and it was in some kind of sauce, which I guess is probably where the spiciness came from, though not a whole lot of it.  It wasn’t exactly a highpoint of the sausage maker’s art, but I’m glad I had it.

Anyway this got me back on the sausage trail.  A year or two ago I was in a little supermarket in Nowheresville, Nevada, and found they were selling Tennessee Pride sausage, which I’d had recommended to me by both real and adopted southerners, so obviously I had to buy some.  It looked like this as it was cooking.  Mmm – sagey.

But then a couple of weeks back, a visitor from Alabama, passing through and seeking to ingratiate herself, brought this version of Tennessee pride with her:

Less than five dollars a pack, 18 patties per back – we’re talking affordable! All else being equal, I probably wouldn’t have chosen the mild – but this is not a pony to be looked in the mouth.

And then to round off the week, in the local “ethnic” supermarket, they had morcilla; as near as you’re likely to get to black pudding in this town.  I like morcilla a lot but they proved tricky to cook.  

I tried to cook them whole in a frying pan which was probably a mistake.  The chances of getting them good and hot before they collapse and wriggle out of the skins is pretty low. 

In fact, I miscalculated and mine were still semi lukewarm when I put them on the plate – so then I had to go back stick them in the microwave.  They didn’t completely explode but the inside of the microwave did need cleaning afterwards.   Still …  see that pork fat?  Well of course you do?

And naturally this morcilla brought back thoughts of the black puddings of yesteryear, including the one I had not that long ago in Heathrow Terminal One, at Heston Blumenthal’s Perfectionist’s Café – a name that’s really asking for trouble.  It came looking like this with scrambled egg.

This black pudding (“from Stornoway!” says the menu) didn’t have as many bells and whistles as you’d expect from young Heston.  As you see above, it didn’t have nearly enough fat, either.

        One of those little known facts that all foodies know is that quotes is that blood sausage is mention on the Odyssey.  It’s in Book 20, he’s thinking about how he’s going to kill all of Penelope’s suitors. 

“Thus he chided with his heart, and checked it into endurance, but he tossed about as one who turns a paunch full of blood and fat in front of a hot fire, doing it first on one side and then on the other, that he may get it cooked as soon as possible, even so did he turn himself about from side to side, thinking all the time how, single handed as he was, he should contrive to kill so large a body of men as the wicked suitors.”

Yes – sausage can be metaphoric.  Or whatever the adjective is from simile.

THE PIKEY AND I

Lord knows I don’t seek out British food in Los Angeles, and yet I often seem to find it, or perhaps it finds me.  And so, a few days ago, I had lunch at the Pikey Café and Bar on Sunset Boulevard, actually more of a gastropub, that used to be just a plain old faux English pub called Ye Coach and Horses, the name of which was enough to keep me out.  But I do wonder where the neon sign is.

The Pikey, at least at lunchtime, is brighter and more welcoming than 95% of all the pubs in Britain, which in a sense makes it inauthentic.  A REAL British pub is incomplete without some tragic barman exuding surliness from behind the beer pumps.   Here there was polite, enthusiastic, waiter service, and a menu that included “Slow Roasted Pork Belly Sandwich with Horseradish Cream, Cornichons, Watercress & Chips.”  Why look further?  However, this dish was off the menu and perhaps had never been on.  We were there at 1 pm and the place was pretty empty: how many slow roasted pork belly sandwiches could they have sold by then?

Just as galling – there was a menu on a chalk board above our heads, and on it was “Crispy Pig’s Ear Salad with Young Kale & Mustard” – OK, I thought I’d have that, but no, that was only available in the evening.  Yes, OK, I understand the evening menu is always going to be longer and more complicated than the lunch one, but did it have to hang over our heads to taunt us?

So I had the fish and chips.  The Pikey offers “thrice cooked chips,” as in French fries, a concept recently popularized by Heston Blumenthal, though I think Joël Robuchon got there first. Of course, most chefs reckon that all French fries should be cooked twice, as in fried and then fried again, but Robuchon and Blumenthal blanch or parboil theirs before the first frying.

However, in The Man Who Ate Everything, Jeffrey Steingarten offers a recipe that purports to be the method Robuchon uses at home, and that involves cooking them just once.  You start the process with the oil at room temperature, put in the potatoes, then gradually raise the heat.  This in fact is how I cook French fries, and it works well enough for me, and Harold McGee says this is a method for producing “good fries,” though by implication not great ones.  Anyway, would it be churlish of me to say that the thrice cooked chips I had at the Pikey were a bit overdone? I’m sure it’s a matter of taste, but twice and a half would have been enough for me.

Actually the "Potted Chicken Liver with Clarified Butter" was the best thing we had.  Funnily enough there used to be a lot of potted meat in our house when I was growing up.  Back them I could never stand it.  Now it seems a glorious thing.  I’m pretty sure that my mum favored Shippam’s brand, though I can’t absolutely swear to it.  Now however I see that Shippam's seem to have got a bit grand and no longer make potted meat, but rather a product called Beef Spread.  I’m not sure that sounds any more gourmet, but presumably their marketing company thinks so.

Oh and as a final note, the Pikey cocktail menu offers something called a Ginger Minge. A real bit of British class.