I GOT THE NEWS

So another good one’s gone – Walter Becker (1940- 2017).

He was one of those characters whose music I loved and about whose private life I knew exceptionally little.

I suppose I was vaguely aware that he’d had problems with addiction and I knew he’d lived in Hawaii – what I didn’t know till I read the obits and the appreciations was that he moved there to quit his addictions and become an avocado farmer.  As detox programs go it’s a very novel one.

Beyond that I can’t find anything about his food habits or preferences – I’d guess that being an avocado farmer would pretty much make you hate avocados.

Of course there are of plenty of boozy references in the Steely Dan canon, from scotch whisky to retsina, from pina coladas to Kirschwasser.   Food makes fewer and less memorable appearances – a mention of salad in “Only a Fool Would Say That” – a reference to Mr Chow’s Szechuan dumplings in “Glamor Professions” and there’s Pretzel Logic, naturally.

But while on the search I did find a quotation from Donald Fagen about why he liked going out on the road with a band of young musicans:  "It's great hanging around with twentysomethings, they know all the good places to eat in town. I've been eating a lot of exotic food -- for me, at least. I'm more of, like, a grilled cheese guy."

Seems surprising.  If I’d ever given it any thought I’d have had Becker down as the grilled cheese guy, but like I say, I knew next to nothing of his private life.

NEW YORK GASTRONOMIC QUESTIONS TO PONDER - NUMBER TWO:

Should you go to a restaurant just because you find the chef (sexually) hot?

THE ANSWER: Well, you know in your heart that you probably shouldn’t, that it’s likely to end in tears, nevertheless the heart has its reasons and so I went to the Empire Diner at 210 12^th Avenue, largely because the executive chef there is Amanda Freitag.

I first saw her on the TV show Chopped where she’s suitably stern and austere, but something told me she might have a soft, melty boozy center, like a liqueur chocolate, a notion not discouraged by seeing pictures of her looking disheveled in leather and/or with a beer in her hand.

Of course I’m not a fool.  I didn’t for a moment expect a celebrity chef, much less an executive chef, to be manning the grill on the brunch shift, and so it proved.  Opportunities to bask in the erotic culinary Freitag glow were as limited as expected.

The place was stylish, the service was friendly and the food was pretty darn dismal.  My grilled cheese sandwich looked like this.

I reckoned it wasn't quite dark enough to actually send back.  The Loved One even said that was how she liked her grilled cheese sandwich, but I sort of wish I had.  But surely nobody in their right mind would want to find this lump of dodgy-looking tomato in their grilled cheese sandwich, or anywhere else.

A LITTLE SANDWICH LORE BEFORE THE HOLIDAYS

 First it was reported (i.e. I’m not entirely sure I believe it – I’ve only found one source for it) that Flight Captain Noushad of Pakistan International Airlines delayed take off a flight from Lahore to New York for two hours, while he waited for a sandwich to be delivered to him from a five star hotel.

Noushad supposedly said he "needed sandwiches at any cost" (I know the feeling) after he learned that there were no “gourmet treats” on board, only peanuts, chips and cookies. He continued demanding the sandwich even when he was told it could take two hours to get one from the hotel.  And apparently it did.  The flight was due to take off at 6.45 and didn’t leave till 9.15.  (All this is “allegedly.”)  Food on Pakistani International Airlines sometimes looks like this:

Type “Pakistani sandwich” into google and you’ll find a surprising number of surprisingly unexotic sandwich recipes.  On the website pakistanifun.com you can find a recipe for a French Chicken sandwich, but at least it’s in Urdu.

Meanwhile the BBC reported that in Khartoum rising prices mean that people can no longer afford their traditional falafels, so they’re eating cheaper foods in their sandwiches and coming up with exotic names for them.  A banana in a roll is now a Gigabyte sandwich.  Another sandwich, the Sound System, contains cows' ears.  I find it surprising that bananas are cheaper than chickpeas even in Sudan, cow ears I’m not so sure. In any case they're lining up for it (below).

A company here in the US called Best Buy Bones specializes in selling cow ears  as dog treats, “A Grease Free Alternative to Pig Ears” they say.  They come in blueberry, cherry and vanilla flavor, which is obviously going to push the price up, and they sell for about $2 per ear, which still strikes me as extortionate,  but I imagine that price is based on what the market will tolerate, and that nothing’s too good for people’s effin dogs.

In other sandwich news Anne Fishbein a very fine photographer, not exclusively but not least of food (you can see her work on http://www.annefishbein.com), published this photo on her Facebook page showing that sometimes minimalism is good too:

Compare and contrast with the this bit of sandwich engineering:

I also came across this school detention slip on a website that collects such things.

It took me a while to realize that YOLO means “you only live once,” and I suppose different people have different ideas of what constitutes living, but you can’t help thinking that the “youth of today” might come up with something a bit more zesty than sandwich throwing.

Crossing my own sandwich threshold – I ate a Langer’s Number 19, which is by all accounts a very famous, not to say iconic, L.A. sandwich, and as you see above it contains pastrami, cheese, coleslaw.  It was terrific, not least the coleslaw, but it was a funny thing, as I ate it I was well aware that the Loved One would enjoy that coleslaw even more than I did.  Such is the nature of long-term relationships.

And then at the weekend we found ourselves in Sherman’s New York Style Deli and Bakery, in Palm Springs, where I had great food envy.  I ordered an open face corned beef and chicken liver sandwich, which was very good indeed and looked like this:

But I kept looking over covetously at what the Loved One had ordered, the grilled cheese sandwich with crinkle-cut fried potatoes.  She let me have a couple of potatoes.  Such also, fortunately, is the nature of long-term relationships.

CAN YOU PASS THE GRILLED CHEESE TEST?

The artist Richard Prince (that’s him above, the one who isn’t topless) once bought me a sandwich, for which I was, and remain, very grateful.  It was in the local diner in Rensselaerville, upstate New York, where he had a home at the time, and I think still does. I had a grilled cheese sandwich and I can safely say it was the greasiest grilled cheese sandwich I’ve ever eaten, not that I intend that as a criticism.

Maybe what I needed was a fizzy lemon drink to wash it down and cut through the fat.  Maybe, belatedly, Richard Prince has had the same idea.  At this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach he’s launching a drink called, Lemon Fizz, making it in collaboration with the AriZona tea people.  They say it’s “a slightly carbonated beverage that contains natural lemon flavor and is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, honey, and sucralose."  OK, so that sugary glop might not have cut through the grease so well after all.  And it would surely be improved by a giant slug of liquor.

The can, above, looks particularly fine, showing young Prince in the days when his hair was bleached a post-punk white.  Strangely enough he seems to have about as much hair now as he did back then.  The pic below is by Terry Richardson.

As with all things Prince, I’m never sure that his accounts of his own past are really to be believed, or whether it’s all some sort of art prank, but if you go to a piece of his prose titled “Tell Me Everything” you’ll read that his mother, a former spy, had a second career as one of those women who hands out food samples in supermarkets. 

Prince writes, “My mother ended up working … as a food demonstrator. She would dress up like June Cleaver and stand behind a little folding table and try to hand you a piece of beef jerky. She always kept kool-aid in small paper cups ... ‘doctor's’ cups ... just in case you didn't like the taste and flavors of what she was trying to demonstrate. She said the ‘refreshment’ was her contribution, her ‘brain child’ to the job.”

 As an Englishman, the deeper semiotics of Kool-Aid have always rather passed me by.  If it was available in England when I was going up it certainly never made it into our house.   I associate it far more with the Grateful Dead and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test than with any childhood beverage.  Above is the rather sober edition that I first read; modern editions look much more "psychedelic."  We do know that American spies were big fans of acid, and I also know that Richard Prince has a fine collection of acid-related books.  Coincidence?  You be the judge.

You can see more of the Richard Prince’s deeply wonderful book collection here:

http://www.richardprince.com/collection/