REAL FAKE FOOD

And so to Japan House in Kensington to see ‘Looks Delicious’ an exhibition of replica food, the kind of thing you see in the windows of certain Japanese, and indeed Korean, restaurants, clueing you in about what the food you get inside is going to look like. The Japanese terms is shokuhin sanpuru, I understand.

Of course these replicas don’t convey what it’s going to taste like but then as is often said, we all to a greater or lesser extent eat with our eyes.

 

To be fair, most of us would be rather alarmed if real world examples of some of this food was brought to our table but that’s all part of the fun.  The more extreme examples on display are, as I understand it, winners of various competitions held by The Iwasaki Group.

 

This not quite earthquake-proof tower of burger:

 

         A horsehair crab with two glasses of beer.

 

But others looked completely convincing.  These sandowichis:

These oysters look good enough to eat:

 

This octopus looks pretty much like the real thing.

 

Though in fact the last octopus I ate was at the Zuzu Bistro Bar in Stratford looked like this:  which is rather different, and arguably not looking quite as good.

photo by Caroline Gannon

Now, it just so happens that as I was wandering the paths of my neighborhood I happened to come across a small rock that looked, to me anyway, very much indeed like a lamb’s kidney.  Here it is with the real thing for comparison

 

The cooked kidney looked like this:

 

The rock has remained raw. The world is full of simulacra, but you wouldn’t want to eat all of ‘em.

 

 

 

HALF MAN, QUARTER SANDWICH

Sometimes the man eats the sandwich.

First two pics by Caroline 'Flashgun' Gannon.

Sometimes the sandwich eats the man.

And sometimes a headline is more exciting than the article underneath it, e.g. ‘Beckett and Guggenheim’s four days in bed, with a break for sandwiches.'

 

It’s a cracking headline if not exactly a great surprise.  According to the article, Peggy Guggenheim made the sandwich/Beckett remark in a ‘documentary about her life,’ though it doesn’t give chapter and verse.  In any case, it won’t come as a complete surprise to anybody who’s read her memoir Out Of This Century, Confessions of an Art Addict.

 

She depicts Sam Beckett as the kind of lad who’d happily spend four days in bed whether there was a woman in there with him or not. He was nicknamed Oblomov after the lead character in the novel by Goncharov. ‘I made him read the book and he immediately saw the resemblance between himself and the strange inactive hero who finally did not even have the will power to get out of bed.’

 

On the other hand she writes in Out of This Century that after she and Beckett first got together, after a dinner at James Joyce’s pad, they stayed in bed overnight and all the next day until dinner time that evening.  ‘We might be there still, but I had to go to dine with Arp, who unfortunately had no telephone.  I don’t know why, but I mentioned champagne, and Becket rushed out and bought several bottles which we drank in bed.’

 

I have a few questions.  How many bottles is ‘several’?  And did she drink her share of the several before going out to dinner, in which case she must surely have arrived three sheets to the wind? Or did she just stand up Arp?

 

In any case, no mention of sandwiches. Which I think is a shame.

Arp's the one in the middle below, supported by Hans Richter and Tristan Tzara.

 

 

THE TASTEBUDS OF THE BEHOLDER

 Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this before, but many years ago when I worked Mondays at the Bath Hotel in Cambridge as ‘relief chef’ (a massive exaggeration of my capabilities), the manager said to me, ‘If they’ve got a full plate and it looks good you can get away with murder.’ I wasn’t trying to get away with murder, and his idea of a good looking plate was one strewn with handfuls of cress, which even then I thought was a bad idea, but even so I could see the guy sort of had a point.

 

Now, for one reason or another I have lately eaten sandwiches in a couple of Costas. (I had my reasons). The presentation, let’s call it that, is varied, sometimes on a plate, sometimes on a paper bag, which is not exactly stylish, but even so I thought the sandwiches themselves looked pretty decent, mostly because of the melted cheese on top.

 

But what was inside tasted pretty awful. Yes, we eat with our eyes, but we don’t completely eat with our eyes. Once the food gets into your mouth a quite different sense takes over.

 

Which brings me to toad in the hole. Now, I like to think I make a fairly decent Yorkshire pudding.  I learned how by watching my mother make them at least twice a week.  She never actually taught me how to do it, that would have been far too metrosexual: I just watched and absorbed.

 

My mother never made toad in the hole, but since I like both sausages and Yorkshire pudding I thought I was on reasonably safe ground making it.  And I more or less was.  The sausages were from the local butcher, my batter was up to my usual standard but when it was cooked it didn’t look pretty, even if it tasted just fine.

 

I had a couple more attempts without any great visual improvement

 

And then I started hunting around online and you know, ALL the toad in the hole looked fairly ugly, whether it was the BBC:

Tesco: 

 

or even dear Jamie Oliver:

 

I don’t hold this against any of them, and of course I understand there’s more to food than it being photogenic.  Thanks to Instagram everybody and their uncle thinks they’re a food photographer but I recall an occasion when I was being a ‘real’ food journalist and I went up to Yorkshire for the Daily Telegraph to interview some people who made soup (the company name long forgotten), and I was there with a real food photographer, whose name, I’m sorry, also escapes me. The day went well, the soup people were very hospitable, the interview went well, and by the end of the afternoon I’d got everything I needed and went off to my hotel (yes, the Telegraph was paying).  But the photographer and his assistant toiled on,adjusting the composition, changing lighting, rearranging props and garnishes, photographing soup from all angles and showing no sign of letting up.  They looked like they might be there for the rest of the night.

I can’t immediately lay hands on a copy of the article but I do have a Polaroid that I was allowed to take away as a souvenir.  This:

 

 

 

THE ACCEPTABLE VEGAN SANDWICH

I was in the café at the Photographers’ Gallery in Soho, on my own, and it was more or less brunch time and without giving it too much thought I picked a sandwich from the display case.  The sandwich contained – I made a note -  humus, tomato, pickled onion, raddish and mixed leaves.  Conceivably there might have been something else in there too, but if so I didn’t spot it.

 

And as I was eating it I realized this was a vegan sandwich and I wondered if this was the first entirely vegan sandwich I’d ever eaten.  I really haven’t eaten many sandwiches that didn’t contain butter or mayonnaise, and this one didn’t have either.

 

The sandwich was fine, a bit too much bread for the amount of filling and I could have used about ten times more humus, but hey, I had no objection to it being vegan.

 

SOMETIMES THE MAN EATS THE SANDWICH, SOMETIMES THE SANDWICH EATS THE MAN

PHOTO: CAROLINE GANNON

It's not easy to take a good and informative photograph of a sandwich. I think this is largely because it’s hard to glean much about the inside of a sandwich from seeing the outside.  Of course you can open up the sandwich to disaply the ingredients but at that point it no longer looks properly like a sandwich.  I suppose the problem is solved if you only eat and photograph open sandwiches but that seriously limits your scope.

 

And then (see above and the two below) I was looking at the Instagram feed of Sandwich magazine, a publication which according to its website ‘takes an iconic sandwich and uses it as a lens for cultural essays, features, photo stories and more.’  Well, why not?

They solve the above aesthetic problem by stuffing their sandwiches with such massive amounts of filling you might identify it from across the street.  They’re great photographs, though the sandwiches don’t look at all easy to eat.

 

The problem was further driven home to me t’other day when I made a sandwich of sliced pork, cream cheese and pickled carrot on olive bread. But you probably wouldn’t know that unless I told you.

 

And then yesterday I was in the Gardeners Rest Restaurant (do you think there should there be an apostrophe in there?) at Hyde Hall, a place that I think aspires to being a proper restaurant (I mean they have 4 kinds of Sunday roast). The inamorata and I shared a couple of sandwiches  ‘Double egg and watercress on thick sliced granary bread’ and a ‘Pastrami with dill pickles, mustard mayonnaise, rocket and Leerdammer cheese,’ again on thick sliced granary bread.’

 

They were pretty decent sandwiches but they didn’t make for wonders of photographic sandwich art.  The tomato and basil soup was much more photogenic.  But you know, being photogenic isn't everything, as the first picture in this blog goes to prove.

 

JULIAN WASSER

 Sad to hear that Julian Wasser has died, although he was 89, and I hope somebody somewhere is doing medical research into why so many photographers live so long.

 

Like everybody else I’m mostly familiar with Wasser’s wonderful, we might even say ‘iconic,’ photographs of Didion, Duchamp, King, et al (seen surrounding him in the picture above); but in fact he seems to have photographed just about every celebrity who lived in or passed through the L.A. area.

 

He was a very long way from being a ‘food photographer’ and yet food imagery does crop up here and there in his work.  As in these pictures of Canter’s Deli, and the Tail o'the Pup:

But looking through his photographs now I found one I’d never seen before, this one of Mick Jagger eating a sandwich.  It takes a bold rock star to be seen eating a sandwich, but then that’s Mick all over, isn't it?

 

And here is a photograph of Wasser himself, in a photograph taken by Diana Mara Henry.  Sure you got enough food there, Julian?

 

 

THE SECRET SOUND OF THE SANDWICH

I think you know about my sandwich obsession, and there in the Book of St. John (not the biblical one) on page 259 are these words ‘creating a sandwich is like jazz, you must find your unique sound.’

 

Well this raises a lot of interesting and no doubt ironic questions.

 

I tried to imagine some of my favourite jazzers eating sandwiches: Miles Davis, John and Alice Coltrane, Derek Bailey, John Zorn.  I don’t doubt that these people ate sandwiches at some point in their lives, but they were far too cool ever to be photographed doing ir.  Eric Dolphy of course recorded ‘Out to Lunch’ but history doesn’t tell us what he ate while he was out.

Charlie Parker is definitely eating something below.  I don’t know what it is, but it’s pretty definitely not a sandwich

 

The Book of St John reveals that ‘Fergus will always order the Egg Mayonnaise sandwich from the chalkboard bar menu and request the addition of brown shrimp or anchovy; or langouistines which he asks for on the side to shell and apply himself.’

 

Well, my access to brown shrimp and langoustines is limited but I do usually add an anchovy or two to my egg mayonnaise sandwich, as seen in the photograph at the top of this post.

Here's a picture of Fergus Henderson with a sandwich, but I believe it's got bacon in it.

 

THE SANDWICH COLLECTOR

I’ve often mocked the idea of the ‘sandwich recipe.’  I mean, you take some food that you like and you put it between slices of bread and that’s really the only recipe you need.

 

And yet and yet … this hasn’t stopped me forming (even curating) a small collection of sandwich books – many of them American, so there’s a lot of recipes for BLTs, Reubens, Po’boys and so on. And to be fair there is the occasional recipe in these books that I couldn’t imagine inventing, let alone eating, such as, in Sandwich Exotica, ‘the peanut butter-sardine and potato salad-lettuce on rye.”

 

So when I saw in the local charity shop the Encyclopedia of Sandwichesby Susan Russo, photography by Matt Armendariz, how could I resist buying it?

 

It’s American again – and contains such gems as how to make a ham sandwich – bread, ham, mustard or mayonnaise. Yes, really.

 

But hold your horses - there’s a recipe in there for a potato chip sandwich (that’s potato crisps to the British) which the author describes as ‘a crunchy salty guilty pleasure.’  I don’t generally do guilt when it comes to food, but in fact the potato crisp sandwich does strike me as slightly shameful.

 

But here Susan Russo comes up with a variation I again would never have dreamed of – ‘creamy peanut butter, 2 slices of white bread, 4 to 6 dill pickle chips, a layer of your favorite plain potato chips.’

 

Well that sounded kind of dubious, so of course I had to make one.  I wasn’t sure I’d ever had a dill pickle chip so I used sliced pickle gherkins.  And I would probably have used crunchy peanut butter but the recipe called for creamy, so I went with smooth.  And I didn't have any acceptable white bread.

 

How was it?  It tasted just fine.  But I do wish I’d used white bread, and I think it would have been better if I’d used twice as much of all the contents.  All my own fault. We never stop learning about the sandwich.