IN KOHL BLOOD (KOHL, OF COURSE, BEING GERMAN FOR CABBAGE)

I was leafing through my copy of Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food when out fell an ancient cutting I’d put in there from the Times (30 September 1995 in case you want to research it) headlined ‘Kohl Treating Chum Major to Blood Sausage Ritual.’  Keep a clean mind there at the back.

 

The story was that Kohl, a keen amateur chef, was going to serve Major a seven course dinner, including ‘potato ravioli filled with blood and liver sausage … quickly followed by a carpaccio of pig’s stomach and blood sausage.’

 

It would work for me.  And the Times said it had also worked for Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Brian Mulroney, the Canadian Prime Minister, who'd been served similar meals.  I haven't been able to find a picture of Kohl and Major at table, though there is this:

Anyway this led to me buying a copy of A Culinary Voyage Through Germany.  The attributed to Hennelore Kohl, General Editor, with Commentary by her husband Helmut Kohl, though the introduction says it is Hannelore’s ‘recipe book.’

This is Hannelore and Helmut at table:

The book contains sections titled ‘Hannelore Kohl in conversation with master chef Alfons Schuhbeck.’  This is Alfons.

         One of the conversations is about bread and walking.  Hannelore says, ‘My husband and I are enthusiastic hikers.  Hiking and sandwiches go together so well, don’t they?’

 

And Alfons replies, ‘Yes, because after an exhausting hike the body primarily needs the carbohydrates from starch, and it can obtain these most easily from bread and rolls.  If you were to eat a huge pork roast during your hike, you wouldn’t feel like walking anymore; instead you’d want a bench to sit down on to have forty winks. Big meals tend to make people lethargic, while bread on the other hand, makes them bright and lively.’

 

I wonder if this has lost something in the translation.  I also wonder how you would eat ‘a huge roast pork’ during a hike.  The logistics seem tricky.  It would be worth a try though, I think.

THE FIVE SECOND RULE (NOT)

If you walk about ten minutes due south from where I live you come to a 

small public orchard, or anyway a small group of apple trees, planted I 

suppose in the interests of saving the planet. And there, at this time of 

year, on the ground are hundreds of apples that have fallen off the trees.  

I’ve been known to gather up a few of these wormy old fruits to put in my 

compost bin, and I’ve picked a fair number of apples off the trees and 

eaten them.  They’re crisp and a bit sour, and just the kind I like, though I 

couldn’t tell you the breed.

This reminded me of a recent walk I did, I did not very far from home, around some potato fields, where a good many discarded or rejected potatoes by the potato harvester machine, and could be snatched up from the ground, and they were, by me and my walking companions. Not the potatoes in this picture, obviously.

 

And OK, you may say, ‘Well of course there are edible things on the ground where you live, in a very slightly rural bit of Essex.’

 

And this is true enough, but a couple of weeks ago I was in London, in Spitalfields.some and there were ‘windfall’ potatoes to be had right there on the ground.  I imagine they’d fallen off the back of a lorry but they looked perfectly edible (apart from the odd one that had been run over) though I admit I didn’t swoop down on them.

And then, because I go around taking pictures of these things,  I remembered this perfectly good looking piece of bread, close to the rear tyre of a pickup truck in Los  Angeles. They have everything in that city!  But again I didn’t forage it.