WHERE IS YOUR LUSTRE NOW?

I was thumbing through an old copy of Gastronomica magazine and came across this staggeringly fine ad for Tryphosa jelly dessert.  

I had never heard of Tryphosa which apparently is also the name of a woman in the Bible, but the spelling is alarmingly close to Typhosa, which is a form of salmonella.  I suppose people worried less about salmonella back then.

The Tryphosa ad is in fact so great, shining with the light of Liberty, that it’s hard to imagine the taste could possibly live up to it.  Compare and contrast with the aesthetic aspirations of the current Jell-O pack.  Not so much to live up to there.

And I did find ads for a jelly dessert named Bromangelon (which sounds like a bromance between cro-magnons). Their use of imagery was more modest still. 

The fact is, when it comes to jelly, presentation means a lot.  When I was growing up, we had jelly all the time, although my mother only approved of strawberry flavor, and she made it in a Pyrex mold much like the one used in the Bromangelon ad and as seen below.  She never tried to unmold it, and present it freestanding. I assume she’d tried at some point, possibly before I was born, and she’d had more than enough failures.

         Of course the Pyrex was the problem, glass being a poor conductor of heat, so the classic move of dipping the mold in hot water to free the jelly inside wasn’t going to do much good.

I’ve been sniffing around looking for exotic and eccentric jelly molds.  Bompas and Barr are the bosses of this kind of thing, but theirs are bespoke, and in the “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” category.

I did find the one below, which has its appeal, but it might offend more people than it amuses, even if you could say it’s an allusion to La Grand Bouffe.

I guess the real problem with jelly molds, as with my brain version below, is that they're amusing once, but only once.

But I did find one (I mean I found pictures of it online, it seems you’re unlikely to find one in the real world outside of a museum) that might be entertaining for quite a while

It’s a Wedgewood jelly mold in the shape of an obelisk.  What you’re seeing there is an an outer form and an inner core.  The latter sits inside the former, and you fill the mold with clear jelly – it has to be clear to show the pattern.  I think it might take quite a while to get bored with that.

GEOFF DREAMS OF SODOM

One of the things I was doing in London was presenting (possibly even curating) a couple of movies as part of the Bompas and Parr Food Film Festival, 2018.  One of the movies was La Grande Bouffe, directed by Marco Ferreri; the other Jiro Dreams of Sushi, directed by David Gelb.

Films were shown in the Curzon Cinema in the basement of the Mondrian Hotel, and the bartender of the hotel’s Dandelyan bar - Ryan Chetiyawardana aka Mr. Lyan - had invented a couple of special cocktails to accompany the screenings: Double Pop and Oranges & Death.

There was also a small exhibition in the bar, with that title Oranges & Death.  It seems that terrible things happen to people in movies after they’ve bought or peeled or eaten an orange, although bad things don't necessarily happen to people who've drunk a cocktail of the same name.  Here is the Double Pop with a death or, more likely life, mask in the background:

Photo by Caroline Gannon

I first saw La Grande Bouffe in the 1970s, a few years after its 1973 release.   It had stayed with me but I hadn’t seen it for forty years or so, and then I watched it twice in a week, once as research, and once at the festival along with an audience.

La Grande Bouffe was, and possibly still is, a controversial movie, known by far more people than have ever seen it.  The exact plot only reveals itself gradually but it’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that it’s the story of four middle aged men who gather in a villa with the intention of eating themselves to death.  It’s a kind of pastiche of de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (written in the Bastille) – but de Sade’s men had 4 months to get the job done – eating yourself to death in a weekend takes some doing.

As a method of suicide it’s not the most efficient, but it comes with some compelling metaphors.  Food is the thing you need in order to live, but here it’s the things that kills you.  And, of course, there may be an argument that in the West most of us are eating ourselves to death quite literally.

The four men are all upper bourgeoisie, though not exact equals in the class structure: a chef, a judge, an airline pilot, a TV producer.  They’re played by Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi, and the characters share first names with the actors.

When I first saw it all those years ago, I remember they seemed a bunch of charmless old farts, but I guess I’ve mellowed.  As we get older we find charm in some unexpected places.  And as time goes by, men in their 40s and early 50s really don’t seem so old after all. 

The characters are monstrous in some ways, infantile in others - Philippe the judge still lives with his wet-nurse. There’s also an overarching and subversive critique of masculinity.  There’s something not very sexy about men eating together, and I think there may be the suggestion that it’s rather effete to care too much about food.

In this universe women are an after thought.  Three prostitutes belatedly join the feast, but they’re a disappointment.  They’ll do certain things for money but not everything, and their enthusiasm is at best patchy.

And then Andrea appears – played by Andrea Ferreol – a schoolteacher who gets involved because of her own needs and obsessions, who does what she does for free. 


Forty years ago I really didn’t get the appeal of Andrea, a fleshy, warm, wild but unglamorous woman, whereas today she seems an absolute wonder.  She’s her own woman, and in many ways the story is hers.  She doesn’t appear to consciously exploit the men, and yet in the end she gets pretty much everything she wants.

La Grande Bouffe has a reputation as a gross out movie – but it’s not just a prolonged wallow in disgust.  Parts of it are genuinely tender and sensual, and there’s comedy as well as horror.  And I think that if the movie weren’t a comedy it would be much harder to take the movie seriously, an idea that never occurred to de Sade.

I’ve read reviews saying that after you’ve seen La Grande Bouffe you won’t ever want to eat again, but I suspect that readers of Psychogourmet, and fans of Bompas and Parr, have stronger stomachs than that.

        Further cocktail adventures were had when my pal, and top photographer, Jason Oddy took me along to a place named Hakkasan, a place that seems to be designed so that high-ranking Triad members will feel at home there.  The drink on the left is a Hakkatini, the one on the right a Rhubarb Margarita. The Hakkatini did contain orange vodka, but only the slightest hint of death.

 

Photo by Jason Oddy