SUBURBAN NOODLING

It’ll come as no surprise to you that I take Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of my role models.  And this being so, and taking into account the above image, I thought I might shelter from the pandemic by making a not especially in-depth study of ramen, or as we more often call it in England, pot noodles.

For a while, every time I went in a supermarket I bought a different variety with the result you see below.  Eleven pots - enough for eleven nights.

Did I expect to find culinary delights in these pots? Well no, not really, and I started with the one I thought would be the least enjoyable, so that I could get it out of the way.  This was the Naked Noodle Thai sweet chilli – described as ‘egg noodles in a sweet, tangy garlic and chilli sauce.’

Man, I had no idea how bad it could be.  Imagine you’ve just dissolved some sweet miscellaneous-flavoured jelly cubes in hot water and then tossed in some noodles and then added more sugar. Even with the addition of soy sauce and lemon juice to make it less sweet, it was truly revolting.  In fact it was so bad I haven’t dared taste any of the others as yet, but when I do you’ll be among the first to hear.

And then, I just so happened (on the recommendation of my psychogeographic pal, Mr Anthony Miller) to be reading the JG Ballard short story titled ‘The Enormous Space.’  In fact I think I was probably re-reading it, but it’s so archetypally Ballardian I couldn’t be absolutely sure.  Either way, it’s a great story for a lockdown.  A man living in Croydon, is having a mid-life crisis following a car crash and being abandoned by his wife for ‘a tedious sales manager,’ and decides to stay in his suburban house, never leave, and sever all connections with the outside world.  Rather touchingly, and I’d say improbably, his estranged wife, before leaving, ‘has stocked the freezer and refrigerator with a fortnight’s supply of eggs, ham and other bachelor staples.’  Whether bachelor staples includes pot noodles, I can’t say.  Inevitably the food soon runs out and our hero turns to that old Ballardian standby and staple - the dog.  ‘I returned to my lunch of poodle pie.’ It’s not clear where he gets the pastry, not that it matters much - before long he’s eating the man who’s come to take down the TV aerial.  Of course, this story was written in the days before Ocado.

SOME LITERARY KIDNEYS

Even if you know next to nothing about Joyce’s Ulysses there’s a chance you may know the lines, “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

To which a reader might ask, “Yes, but what about the external organs?”  Although I suppose (unless we’re discussing testicles) there’s only really one seriously edible external organ and that’s the skin.

Given the flexibility of Bloom’s Jewishness, chances are he wouldn’t have objected too much to eating pork skin.  And even, perhaps especially, observant Jews  are fans of gribenes, chicken or goose skin cracklings.

Anyway, this Joycean literary allusion was in my mind as I made devilled (not grilled) kidneys for Sunday breakfast, loosely following a Fergus Henderson recipe, substituting sherry for chicken stock.  Came out pretty well, I thought.

Had I been cooking them for dinner I would almost certainly have added brandy and made kidneys flambé, but that always brings up another literary allusion: Peter Handke’s The Ride Across Lake Constance.   

I had certainly tasted kidneys before I saw a production of the play, though I’d never had them flambéed.  And now I can never even think of them without summoning up these lines:

Oh and I just found this.  It’s from the Observer, April 2009, and appears in Tom Adams’ interview with Claire Walsh, JG Ballard’s very longtime girlfriend, conducted “just days after his death.”  Was there a rush?

Anyway, Adams writes, “Up until recently, in weeks when his appetite was buoyed by steroid, he (Ballard) would take her up the road to Kristof’s, a regular haunt, and insist she had oysters while he had his favorite devilled kidneys.”  This makes me like Ballard even more than I did already.

DOG DRINK DOG

Only obsessing slightly over the movie High-Rise. Of course, famously we know about eating the dog and the “bottle of sparkling wine” smashing onto his balcony from above.

Above is Charlotte Melville in the movie, the dropper of the bottle, I think, played by Sienna Miller.  I guess she’s drinking a martini, though I’d have thought that was pretty unusual in London in 1975, even at swanky parties in Brutalist tower blocks.

Meanwhile, up on the top floor of the building Ann Royal, played by Keeley Hawes, the wife of the building’s architect, finds a more convincingly seventies drinking vessel.

And here is the best JG Ballard booze image I’ve ever seen.  I found it floating around on Pinterest – it says “saved by Kim Heybourne” but I don’t know if he or she devised the image.  I want one.  Now.