VERY SIMILAR FOOD

 

There was a great article by Fuchsia Dunlop in the Financial Times at the weekend, headlined ‘Stone Feasts: Verisimilar meat, fish and poultry carved from rocks are part of a long Chinese cultural tradition.’  I don’t believe I’ve ever seen ‘verisimilar’ used in a sentence before.

 

Now, Fuchsia Dunlop appears to know pretty much all there is to know about Chinese food and culture, but even she seemed to be taken aback by the practice of collecting and displaying, in some cases after carving and cutting, rocks that look like food. 

 

She describes a ‘stone banquet’ she visited at the Ningxia Museum in Yinchuan, assembled by ‘self-declared stone lover’ Xie Nin, and says it looked as though Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti had collaborated on dinner.

 

Inevitably, as you see from the pictures, some of the rocks look rather more convincingly like food than others - belly pork seems especially persuasive, but the general effect as shown in these pictures both from the newspaper and from Fuschia Dunlop’s Instagram feed is downright wonderful. Speaking as someone who loves both food and rocks, this is about as good as it gets.

 

I pick up a lot of rocks on my meanderings, but I’ve found very few that look like food, apart from the odd one that looks a bit like a potato.  But I’ve always been intrigued by restaurants or other establishments that display ‘verisimilar’ food. I found myself digging through my files looking for example of fake food I’ve photographed over the years.

 

Obviously a lot of restaurants don’t have the time or the staff to go hunting in the mountains looking for rocks that resemble their fare.  They have to rely on more mundane and easily available materials.  Some of these may be quite straightforward and literal like these replicas displayed outside a restaurant in Koreatown in LA, simply giving an impression of what the food served inside looks like.

 

But more often that not there’s some gigantism involved.  Ice cream is very good for this:

 

In Manchester you’ll find the Vimto monument. I think those are giant raspberries and grapes – I mean, those are the ingredients of Vimto - but those really are some funny looking grapes:

 

Hot dogs too are popular, and this may be more of an American thing.   This is, or anyway was, on Hollywood Boulevard:

 

This was, and I believe still is, Jimmy’s Hot Dog Company in Bisbee Arizona

 

And perhaps best of all – instead of finding a rock that looks like a hot dog (which I think is not entirely unlikely), or making one out of wood, you could build a motor vehicle that looks like one.  This is the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile:

 

There are plenty more where they came from.

Today while on my morning constitutional I picked up these three little rocky morsels – they look ‘almost’ but not quite good enough to eat.

 

And then I remembered, well I hadn’t really forgotten, that Dining on Stones  is the title of a novel by the esteemed Iain Sinclair.  

 

So … a cultural tradition with an international pedigree.

 

CARRY ON CARY

Want to see what my dining experience was like on the Southwest Chief?  Well of course you do.  Best to start by saying it was nothing like this, much as I wanted it to be:

It was more like this, a breakfast bagel:

Or this microwaved cheeseburger, which was actually pretty decent:

Or cheese and crackers, that's two kinds of cracker, three kinds of cheese, Vermont Sharp White Cheddar, Mini Baby Bell and Tillamook Cheddar (which is hidden under the Vermont Sharp).  Mmmm:

Or how about the turkey and bacon club with creamy Swiss? This definitely tasted better than it looked, though admittedly that may not be saying much.

By the time you get to Chicago you’re ready for some real Chicago fare.  A Chicago Dog at Tiny Tap on the river:

The Dogzilla at Byron’s:

It was terrific, though it looked even better on the sign:

And this which was probably the most enjoyable thing I ate in the Windy City; whitefish and shrimp ceviche with potato cakes, at the Berghoff Bar:

And then back on the train, heading for Los Angeles, and more of the very similar:

GOOD DOGS I HAVE EATEN

There are people in Los Angeles who’ll tell you that Pink's on La Brea sell the world’s best hotdogs.  I wouldn’t know.  As I get ever more curmudgeonly I find I’m ever less prepared to wait in line for things, and I’m particularly reluctant to stand in line for a hotdog.  At most hours of the day and night, certainly at any hour you might actually want to eat, Pink's has the longest lines of any restaurant I’ve ever seen.  I can understand that this might be a mark of the quality of their hotdogs, but you know, how great can a hotdog be?

I admit I have stood in line for hotdogs at Dodger Stadium in order to buy Dodger Dogs and beer, but that was only because I had no choice: a baseball game being incomplete without them, and in fact the line moved pretty quickly.  Here the objection was the price.  A man shouldn’t have to remortgage his home in order to be able to buy a hotdog and a beer.  At least the Dodger Dog is big, though not nearly as elegant as it appears in the image above.

The last hotdogs I ate at home were cheese dogs, which sounded like a good idea at the time, hot dogs with a vein of liquid cheese running through them – they don’t have those back in the homeland.  I thought they were genuinely foul, as though the dogs had developed some kind of disease that created hot yellow pus.  We still have them in the freezer and I want to throw them out, but the Loved One hates to waste food (as in general do I) and she insists a moment will come when cheese dogs are exactly what we want.  I continue to doubt this.

All this has made me doubt whether I even like hotdogs.  So when my pal Scott suggested going to the new Coney Dog on Sunset Strip for some Detroit-style hotdogs, I was game enough, but my hopes weren’t quite as high as they would have been if he’d said let’s go to Petrossian and sample some caviar.

Scott hails from Detroit and he assures me the Sunset Strip version is authentic enough.  A Coney Dog, I now know, consists of a beef hotdog covered in chilli, with some raw onion and a line of mustard.  As for why this is a Detroit-style Coney Dog, rather than say a Detroit Dog, well that’s because the inventor, George Todoroff, was a Greek immigrant who arrived in Michigan by way of Coney Island, and opened his restaurant, Todoroff's Original Coney Island, in 1914 actually in Jackson rather than Detroit.  Perhaps he thought the name Coney Island smacked of metropolitan fun.  In any case, imitators sprang up in the surrounding area, including Detroit, and I guess that Detroit just has better name-recognition than Jackson. Of course there are local variations, and local rivalries, but I gather that a truly authentic Detroit dog has to have beef heart in the chilli, and the dogs have to be Koegel Viennas.  I can’t swear that the Sunset Strip outpost reaches this level of authenticity.

There was no line and no wait, which was a very good thing and I’m happy to say I was served two of the very best hotdogs I’ve ever tasted.  You may think, given my prejudices this isn’t a very high hurdle, but they were genuinely good.  I had a Coney Dog, and for comparison an LA Street Dog, wrapped in bacon and scattered with jalapeno slices. Not least of the attractions was the bun, and the bun is so important.  It can easily taste like cotton wool, these actually tasted like bread.

To make it thoroughly authentic, Scott drank a Faygo Original Redpop but I contented myself with a “craft beer” (when did that stupid term gain currency?)  Incidentally, the menu describes the LA Street Dog as the “opposite” of a kosher hotdog, not by any means anti-Jewish, just wrapped in bacon.  I suppose it would be equally the "opposite" of an halal hotdog.  That's all right then.