MOLE AND TANDOOR

I had lunch last week at Loteria (6627 Hollywood Boulevard) – a place I like a lot, and it seems very successful, though I somehow feel it doesn’t quite get as much love as it deserves.  I ordered a couple of enchiladas, one cheese, one chicken, with mole poblano.  It looked like this:

It was so dark and intense it seemed to absorb the Los Angeles daylight - which has much to do with the chocolate it contains, of course – and the result is something Huysman might have approve of.  It was great, if frankly a bit intense for lunchtime.

And then as I was leaving, a fellow from the restaurant asked me casually if I’d enjoyed my lunch, since he’d seen me take the photograph of it.

It was the cheery fellow above, Jimmy Shaw, the begetter of Loteria – born in Mexico City, he renounced a career in advertising to become a chef.  He said he’d seen me in the restaurant before, and I said sure, I come fairly often, and it’s a great place to have in the neighborhood.  He obviously knew what I’d ordered, and he said, and this may not be an exact quotation but something very like, “Mole is to Mexico as curry is to Asia.”

It sounded fair enough but when I got home I realized I wasn’t sure I knew exactly what a mole was, so I did a little digging.  It some ways it seems to be just another word for a sauce, but that doesn’t really say much.   And I found this evocative, if faintly excessive, description in Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen.  “When it’s made from scratch, no matter what regional variation you’re tasting, the sauce will offer the fullness of a 20-piece dance band, the intricacies of a Persian rug and the intensity of a Siqueiros mural.”  Though frankly I’m not sure that any dish could be quite as intense as this  Siqueiros mural, especially not at lunchtime.

And then, life being what it is, I opened my Sunday New York Times Style Magazine yesterday and there's an article titled "Mole In Mexico" and I thought I probably ought to read that.  So I read the opening line, "The word 'mole' doesn't translate into 'infinity,' but it feels like it should."  Seems that mole plays havoc witha man's prose style.

Fortunately I also found a couple of online interviews with Jimmy Shaw.  In a piece on chefsinsight.com he said his mole has 27 ingredients, and then, “Mexican food is truly fusion food of centuries. If you think about today’s mole poblano, you think 'that’s truly a Mexican recipe.' But mole was made originally by Spanish nuns for a viceroy to showcase indigenous and Spanish cuisine together. We’re talking about 500, 600 years ago.”  This story is much repeated in the annals of mole – in some versions an angel is involved.

Well it so happened I went to another restaurant the next night – Animal (435 North Fairfax), which cooks the kind of food I love (sort of post-Fergus Henderson nose-to-tail) without necessarily always cooking it quite as well as I might wish.  With curry on my mind, I ordered the “tandoori octopus – tamarind, yoghurt, kumquat.”  It looked like this:

And when I got home I realized I wasn’t sure I knew exactly what a tandoori is.  I mean, I know it’s a clay oven, but not much more than that, and I’m not sure that Animal actually has one of these:

Still, looking it up in Alan Davidson, he tells us the tandoor is a bread oven originally found in the middle east.  But, and now be prepared to set your face to stunned, “Tandoor meat cookery has been popular since 1948 when a Kashmiri restaurant named Moti Mahal became a fashionable dining spot for politicians in New Delhi.  As a result Indian tandoori restaurants have sprung up all around the world.” 

Only since 1948?  So - tandoori cookery is quite the Johnny-come-lately of Indian cookery, and the man behind Moti Mahal was one Kundan Lal Gujral.  This is him, another cheery fellow, apparently:

Moti Mahal Delux is now a global chain with 120 franchises.  The picture below is from their website – uncaptioned so I can’t really tell you what’s going on, but I'll bet the dialogue was lively.

And I have no idea whatsoever of what's going on in this one:

FRY BOYS

And speaking of fried cheese (as I was, in the previous post about the sandwich at Cassell’s Hamburgers (that’s a close up of it above - the cheese is the flappy, wing-like things sticking out at the sides) – the other night I went to Loteria, a superior and not entirely inauthentic, Mexican restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, with top English photographer Jason Oddy, who’s in town for one thing and another.

I always think the best thing about Loteria is the chicharron de queso, “griddle toasted Oaxaca and Jack Cheese with with corn tortillas, guacamole and salsa verde cruda” though I must say I always refer to it as the “cheese hat.” Young Oddy seemed puzzled by it at first:

But soon saw the appealing side:

You could perhaps think this was a move from anticipation to acclamation, as in Fry’s Five Boys chocolate, but without the desperation and pacification, and certainly without the realization that it’s Fry’s:

I know I ate a fair amount of Five Boys chocolate as a kid, though I’m pretty sure I ever went through the five stages.   I also think the chocolate was pretty ordinary but the packaging and the form was unbeatable.

And I started wondering whether there was any connection between Five Boys chocolate and Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stage model of grief and bereavement.  It seems a little unlikely.  Five Boys was launched in 1902, and manufacturing ened in 1975. Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying wasn’t published till 1969. I haven’t the slightest evidence that Kübler-Ross ever ate or even knew about Fry’s Five Boys, and of course she was Swiss, so I imagine she wasn't a fan of English chocolate.

Still, I can’t help thinking there’s some curious convergence at work here.   And I’m pretty sure I’d buy a chocolate bar with five faces moulded into it labeled Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.  Sounds like a project for Bompas and Parr.

THE CHEESE AND I

I’ve been thinking a lot about cheese lately.  Perhaps too much.  In order to lower my cholesterol I’ve been eating a lot less cheese.  It’s worked very well, cholesterol down and I haven’t missed cheese nearly as much as I thought I would.  But it does mean that I’ve forced myself to avoid cheese plates, turn away from cheese counters, and certainly never dare to buy a copy of Culture magazine, “the word on cheese.”  And so I’ve missed articles with titles such as “Nigerian Dwarf Goat: The breed’s small stature belies big benefits for cheesemaking” and I very nearly missed “5 Cheese Questions for Jonathan Gold.” 

Actually, by my reckoning, only 4 of them are really about cheese.  The fifth one is “In all of your experiences as a food critic, what is the worst thing you have ever eaten?”  And the answer isn’t cheese.  Full article here:

http://culturecheesemag.com/cheese_talk/jonathan_gold_interview 

The hot news among LA foodies is that Mr Gold is moving from the LA Weekly to the LA Times, no doubt a big deal for the man himself and perhaps for the publications, but the common reader assumes it’ll be a change of venue rather than of form or content.  No doubt I'll be proved completely wrong.

The best thing about Gold is that he knows his stuff, is able to turn an exotic phrase, but remains essentially unpretentious, so that when Culture asks, “You're eating cheese, what are you drinking?”  He replies, “I would like to say an old Maury, because it is amazing with cheese, but it is usually a modest Alsatian Riesling with just a bit of sweetness - or really, whatever is left in my glass at the end of dinner.”  A fine descent into bathos.

T’other night the Loved One and I went to Loteria, a well-scrubbed, and occasionally chaotic Mexican restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, and I’m afraid I let my cheese urges got the better of me.  Perhaps they’d been repressed too long.  Certainly I’ve never found it easy to resist the Chicharron de Queso, thinly sliced cheese melted on a griddle until it resembles pigskin.  

And then I had the Queso Panela a la Plancha con Nopalitos which was a slab of seared panela cheese cowering under a heap of cactus paddle salad with salsa verde.  This sounded more fun than it actually was, and if I’d thought about it, I’d have realized it didn’t really sound all that much fun in the first place.  It’s said that queso panela is great for absorbing flavors but it is essentially a bland little number, and mine lay rather inertly under the cactus.  The Loved One had beef tongue with tomatillo sauce, and I had food envy.

We wondered if perhaps the Mexican heart isn’t really in cheese making. My copy of The World Encyclopedia of Cheese (Harbutt and Denny) devotes just one page to Mexican cheese, and says that cheese was unknown in Mexico until 1521, so I guess they managed just fine without it for a good long time.

I wonder how they’re managing in Afghanistan. This isn't quite as irrelevant as it might sound.  The World Encyclopedia of Cheese only mentions Afghanistan in passing in a less than one page entry on the cheeses of India, and they may have missed a trick.  I’ve been rereading Peter Levi’s The Light Garden of the Angel King: Journeys in Afghanistan, first published in 1972, with a revised version in 1984 (and some editions add With Bruce Chatwin to the title).  On page 182 Levi eats “a delicious crumbled cream cheese,” on page 188 he has lunch of “cheese and brandy,” and by page 194 he’s hooked: “we bought a solid round goat cheese about a foot across and two inches thick … it was one of the best country cheeses I have ever eaten.”  Not prepared to leave it there, he has a footnote about the cheese, “it would hold its head up even in Paris.  Considering all that is being done for less interesting communities in Afghanistan, it seems a pity no one has thought of marketing Nuristan cheese.” Well, yes.

A personal aside: about a decade ago when I occasionally wrote for the London Independent an offer came through, would I like to go to Afghanistan as a guest of the Afghan raisin industry to see the progress being made in raisin production?  I didn’t immediately turn it down.  “What’s the worst that could happen?”  Loved ones described exactly the worst that could happen, and then I did turn it down, not least because I suspected raisin production wasn’t inherently fascinating in Afghanistan or anywhere else.  Had the offer come from the Afghan cheese industry it might have been a different story.  I haven’t been able to find a picture of Nuristan cheese but here’s one of Afghani Kishmish Panir (cheese with raisins).  I imagine it tastes quite a lot like queso panela with raisins.