KNOW WHAT YOU DRINK

Maybe this is very slightly off topic; more drinking than eating, and also about writing, but I know you Psycho-Gourmet readers are literate types. It appeared last week in the New York Times Book Review, under the title DRINK WHAT YOU KNOW.


There are only two cocktails: “a slug of whiskey” and a martini. This isn’t my opinion, but the law as laid down by Bernard DeVoto in his book “The Hour,” first published in 1948 and recently reissued. It so happens that I’ve owned a copy of this book for a long time and often wondered if anyone would ever bring it back into print and whether the world would find it as engaging and infuriating as I do.


The hour referred to is the cocktail hour, naturally, and the book is essentially a celebration of booze, but only the kind DeVoto approves of, and as we see, he doesn’t approve of much. “Hot drinks are for people who have had skiing accidents,” he declares. And “one tribe of our enemies drink something they call a Gibson. They are not drinking a cocktail, they are drinking gin with an onion in it.”


Now, I happen to think he has a couple of good points there, but then he banishes even the olive from the martini, which strikes me as downright foolish. This, of course, is the problem with offering advice of any kind: people think you’re talking sense only when your prejudices coincide with theirs. Dissenters tend to raise the question “Who asked you anyway?”
You might imagine that Christopher Hitchens (may there be many more martinis in his future) would be far too wised up about human folly to lay down rules about drinking, and yet there he is in his recent memoir, “Hitch-22,” delivering wisdom like “Drink when you are in a good mood,” “It’s not true that you shouldn’t drink alone,” “Cheap booze is a false economy” and so on.


This last opinion would seem to put him in direct opposition to Kingsley Amis. In “Everyday Drinking,” a collection of his booze-related writings just issued in paperback, Amis gives the recipe for the Lucky Jim, essentially a vodka martini with cucumber juice in it. And wait, it gets worse when he writes in a footnote, “Use a British vodka, the cheapest you can find.” As Hitchens himself notes in his introduction to “Everyday Drinking,” Amis eventually became “a very slight cocktail bore,” though Hitchens insists this was only in print. Maybe, but Amis’s insistence that a basic dry martini should contain cocktail onions (note the plural) would irk many souls far less touchy than Bernard DeVoto.


Reading all this, I find myself wondering why on earth writers would bother setting down rules for other people’s drinking. People telling you how to drink is every bit as tedious and annoying as people telling you not to drink at all. It seems to me that writers are much more useful in these matters when their advice is dispensed casually in their fiction — when they are showing rather than telling. After all, “Lucky Jim” contains some of the greatest booze-related scenes in all fiction, from which you might learn, for instance, that if, in a drunken stupor, you burn a hole in your hostess’s sheets, cutting around the edges with a razor is unlikely to convince her that the cause was “dry rot or the ravages of a colony of moths.” It may be reductive to think of literature as an etiquette manual for the young and/or naïve drinker, but when I had my first hangover, very shortly after I’d first read “Othello,” I was much consoled by the line “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!” It told me I wasn’t the first idiot ever to feel so remorseful the morning after.


Equally, I knew from reading Dorothy Parker that three martinis would put me under the table, and four under my host, long before I’d had even one martini. And I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have so much affection for the gimlet if I hadn’t discovered it in Raymond Chandler’s “Long Goodbye” as a symbol of loss, melancholy and tarnished ideals. I also know, thanks to Hunter S. Thompson, that if I ever make a savage journey to the heart of the American dream, I should load up the trunk of my car with a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, and a pint of raw ether, among many other substances.


Of course, you could argue that if the lives of Parker, Chandler and Thompson prove anything, it’s that writers might be better off not drinking at all, but that’s one piece of advice that’s never going to fly. In some cases it would leave them with nothing to write about.


That unredeemed drinker Jack Kerouac did offer one excellent piece of advice, “Try never get drunk outside yr own house,” a clear case of do what I say, not what I do. However, this wasn’t a rule for drinking: it was a rule for writing, attached to his list of “essentials of spontaneous prose.”

When you think about it, rules for drinking are not so different from rules for writing. Many of these are so familiar they’ve become truisms: Write what you know. Write every day. Never use a strange, fancy word when a simple one will do. Always finish the day’s writing when you could still do more. With a little adaptation these rules apply just as well for drinking. Drink what you know, drink regularly rather than in binges, avoid needlessly exotic booze, and leave the table while you can still stand.

You could also substitute “drink” for “write” in these well-known examples of writerly wisdom. “An author ought to write for the youth of his generation” (Fitzgerald). “Write, damn you! What else are you good for?” (Joyce). “Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail” (Sontag).


Other writers prefer to offer lengthier, more complex pieces of advice. On her Web site, Erica Jong suggests that when writing you should “forget intellect,” “forget ego,” “accept change” and “let sex in,” which is pretty much what happens to most of us when we drink. I’m also fond of one of Richard Ford’s rules: “Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.” This transfers very nicely indeed to drink. Nothing could be worse for a drinker than to marry someone who thinks drinking is a bad idea.

However, the biggest problem with trying to establish rules about things as personal as drinking or writing is that however good the advice, the person on the receiving end is never going to be able to take somebody else’s word for it. You have to find out about these things for yourself, usually the hard way. You write and drink as you see fit, partly out of choice, often out of need, and if you wake up next morning, look back on what you’ve done and feel mortified and shaken — well, maybe you’ve learned something. But this lesson is never transferable. Somebody tells you not to mix Zima with Drambuie, somebody says that rewriting Icelandic myths in the style of Candace Bushnell is a really bad idea, but you may feel compelled to go ahead and do it anyway.


The best you can hope for is to arrive, by whatever means, at the same conclusions as those who are older and wiser. Another piece of advice from Richard Ford runs, “Don’t drink and write at the same time,” a rule I follow scrupulously. But a more nuanced version of the same rule comes from Keith Waterhouse, the author of “Billy Liar.” He said you should never drink while you’re writing, but it’s O.K. to write while you’re drinking, a nice distinction.


And finally there is one gem of wisdom to be found amid all the prejudice and humbug of “The Hour.” DeVoto writes, “For God’s sake, develop a little skill and then do the job unostentatiously.” Great advice that applies equally to both drinking and writing, if you ask me, although I am, of course, well aware that you didn’t.

THE BEEF EATERS

I’ve been reading the unimproveably titled “Memorials of Gourmandising,” an article written in 1841 by William Makepeace Thackeray. That’s him above, with wife and son. In the article he asserts that not only are the English superior to the French, morally and martially, but also physically. He’d got it into his head that the English were a big brawny race, wheras the French were a bunch of weeds. He writes thus, addressing his fellow Englishmen:

“I say to you that you are better than a Frenchman. I would lay even money that you who are reading this are more than five feet seven in height, and weigh eleven stone; while a Frenchman is five feet four and does not weigh nine. The Frenchman has after his soup a dish of vegetables, where you have one of meat. You are a different and superior animal — a French-beating animal (the history of hundreds of years has shown you to be so); you must have, to keep up that superior weight and sinew … simpler, stronger, more succulent food.”

Thackeray’s opinion may have had something, though surely not everything, to do with his being 6 feet 3 inches tall, an exceptional height for a man of the mid nineteenth century. But conflating nationality and nutrition in this way seems just plain dumb, and I wonder in fact whether he’s actually objecting to the French love of salad. Elsewhere in the piece he seems to be reasonably pro-vegetable.


I was reminded of something in “Eating in America” by Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont, that runs, “A significant passage in Frederick Law Olmsted’s ‘Seaboard Slave States,’ a product of his travels of the 1850s, suggests that slaves may have enjoyed a better balanced diet than that of many whites … Some owners encouraged the Negroes to grow vegetables for themselves … because they discovered ‘negroes fed on three-quarters of a pound of bread and bacon are more prone to disease than if with less meat but with vegetables.’ It did not occur to the masters to draw any conclusion from this empirical observation for their own benefit.”

I’ve recounted this “fact” from time to time as a prime example of people knowing what’s good for others while not knowing what’s good for themselves, but only now did I decide to actually look up Olmsted’s own account. That's him below.


The full title of the book is “A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States; 
With Remarks on Their Economy.” Olmsted traveled through the American South and Texas between 1852 and 1857 and sent back reports to the New York Daily Times (which would become the New York Times). The reports were later collected and published in book form. Olmstead was against slavery, though he was a long way from being what we’d currently recognize as a liberal.

It turns out the person speaking in the above quotation is not Olmstead but one Mr. M. W. Phillips, who Olmsted describes, unironically as far as I can tell, as “an ardent and constant writer on agricultural economy, in connection with Slavery, and a most philanthropic man, writing to the New York Tribune, for the very purpose of proving that the condition of the slaves is better than that of free-laborers.” Phillips was a slave owner, in other words, though he claimed to run a “model plantation” and what he said, in full, is as follows:

“We might make more money by a different treatment, and we might spend more money on our negroes, if we would listen to questionable friends ... I have examined much into the treatment of slaves, having, some twenty years ago, practiced medicine, with an opportunity to see how different diet and treatment affected health. Half pound of sound bacon, with vegetables and bread in plenty, and cistern-water, is, in my opinion, a certain preventive of disease; but the cook must be watched, and water carriers noticed. Negroes fed on three-quarters of a pound of bacon and bread are more prone to disease than if with less meat, but with vegetables.”

Yes, yes we get it: he could spend more money on his slaves’ diets if he chose to, but it’s simply better for everybody if he doesn’t. Saving money coincides perfectly, and conveniently, with the health of his slaves. Everybody wins. Olmstead certainly does nothing to challenge this opinion. Perhaps he’s giving Phillips enough rope to hang himself, but I don’t think so.


In Louisiana, Olmstead also interviewed an unnamed slave. The man says he has been sold twice so far in his life, and if he has to be sold again, he’d rather it was to an American than to a Frenchman. Why? Because the French, he says, didn’t feed their slaves well. Olmsted’s passage runs like this: " ‘Why, sometimes, massa, dey only gives 'em dry corn--don't give out no meat at all.’ I told him this could not be so, for the law required that every master should serve out meat to his negroes. ‘Oh, but some on 'em don't mind Law, if he does say so, massa. Law never here; don't know anything about him.’”

Thackeray wouldn’t have been at all surprised at the meatless feeding habits of the French. But actually, Thackeray wasn’t always as humorless as his remarks about the French might suggest. Having traveled to America for the first time and eaten his first American oyster he wrote, “I thought I'd swallowed a small child." Who wouldn’t enjoy that?

WORLD’S SADDEST SANDWICHES

In "The Uncommercial Traveller" Charles Dickens describes his melancholy arrival in London, as a boy. (Incidentally, my spell check offers “infomercial” for “uncommercial.”) He left home in Kent and traveled by stagecoach to the big smoke. “Through all the years that have since passed, have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed – like game – and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood-street, Cheapside, London? There were no other inside passengers, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it.”

It’s hard not to make a connection and think that the sandwiches were sloppy too, or perhaps soggy because of the rain. You could probably argue that Dickens never really got over it, and that his depictions of London always have elements of solitude and dreariness, though he didn’t have to spend the rest of his life in Cheapside.

In 1908 Royal Doulton, the company that makes tableware and collectables, devised something called Dickens Ware, a line that existed for over 40 years. Plates, jugs, teapots, trays and so on were decorated with characters and scenes from Dickens’ novels. The one depicted below is the “York Sandwich plate” and the character on it is Alfred Jingle from The Pickwick Papers.


Jingle makes his first appearance, accompanying members of the Pickwick Club on a coach journey. He warns them about the dangers of decapitation from low archways and bridges. Thus:
"Heads, heads - take care of your heads", cried the loquacious stranger as they came out under the low archway which in those days formed the entrance to the coachyard. "Terrible place - dangerous work - other day - five children - mother - tall lady, eating sandwiches - forgot the arch - crash - knock - children look round - mother's head off - sandwich in her hand - no mouth to put it in.”

SANDWICHES IN SPACE

I’ve been reading Mary Roach’s new book Packing For Mars, which she describes as being

about “the small comedies and everyday victories” of space travel. So it’s not concerned 

with the great adventure of space, more with poop and pee and the dangers of vomiting 

into your space helmet (actually not as risky as you might imagine). But the two chapters 

that really rock are called “Discomfort Food” and “Eating Your Pants,” which are about 

eating in space.


You might think astronauts on a mission might have more to think about than food, but it 

seems to be a subject they get very excited and worked up about. My guess is that being 

an astronaut, although sometimes thrilling and sometimes terrifying, is more often actually 

pretty boring, and so they spend a lot of time looking forward to the next meal, like when 

you’re in hospital or on a plane. When the next meal arrives and turns out to be apple puree 

in a tube you can see where problems might arise.


Most space food, it seems, is pretty bad, and of course the astronauts know this better than 

anybody, which is why in 1965 John Young smuggled a Wolfie’s corned beef sandwich 

onto Gemini III to surprise his crewmate Gus Grissom. It was only a 5 hour flight so it must 

have been done for laughs rather than to whet a jaded appetite, and after two hours Young 

duly produced his sandwich. That's John Young, below. We even have the dialogue.


GRISSOM: Where did that come from?
YOUNG: I brought it with me. Let’s see how it tastes. Smells, doesn’t it?
GRISSOM: Yes, it’s breaking up. I’m going to stick it in my pocket.
YOUNG: It was a thought, anyway.
GRISSOM: Yep.
YOUNG: Not a very good one.

Not very dramatic, and not really very many laughs, though apparently there was hell to pay 

when they got down to earth. It showed that astronauts weren’t necessarily sober rule 

followers. But it could surely have been much worse. What if he’d smuggled nachos and 

dip and a couple of Coors on board? Mary Roach tells us that beer in space is a disaster: it 

simply turns to foam.


Roach also refers to something called The Astronaut’s Cookbook. I acquired a copy. It’s by 

Charles T. Bourland, who spent 30 years working on food for spaceflight, and Gregory L. 

Vogt, a science writer. It’s a very singular book.


Partly it’s about science and history, describing the kinds of food that do and don’t work ins 

space. “Irradiated meat ... cooked, packaged in flexible foil-laminated retort pouches, and 

sterilized by zapping it with ionizing radiation” works just fine, apparently.


There are some fun pictures in the Astronaut’s Cookbook of people eating in space. 

Sometimes we see that the meal tray has to be strapped to the astronaut’s leg to stop it 

floating away, and there’s a photograph of Japanese astronaut Mamoru Mohri with a 

floating Japanese apple, which the book tells us is “banned in the US, so NASA had to get 

special permission from the USDA to import them and follow a strict protocol to insure all 

seeds were destroyed.” You just know that “strict protocol” probably involved doing 

something weird with the guy’s poop.


There are some fairly ordinary recipes for pea soup, meatloaf and apricot cobbler, which 

have to be thermo-processed before going into space. And then there are some celebrity 

recipes: Emeril’s Mardi Gras Jambalaya and Rachel Ray’s 5 vegetable fried rice with 5-

spice pork: these have to be freeze dried.


And then, incredibly it seemed to me, there’s a recipe for a Frozen Space Sandwich: “place 

meat and cheese on bread … slice diagonally … place in bag and freeze.” It’s not exactly 

rocket science.


However, one of the most fascinating parts of the book shows a sample menu for the food 

eaten on the International Space Station Expedition Five, from 2005. The crew was partly 

Russian, and partly American and so the food alternated on a daily basis; Russian food one 

day, American food the next. On the Russian days it would be borsch, sturgeon and jellied 

pike. On the American days it would be tuna noodle casserole, tortillas and shrimp 

cocktails.


Above is a shot taken on Expedition Five. The official caption reads, “View of Astronaut 

Peggy Whitson, flight engineer (left) and Cosmonaut Valery Korzun, commander (right), 

eating a meal in the Service Module (SM)/Zvezda. Tomato and hamburger are floating.” It 

was evidently taken on one of the American days.



Whether this helped foster international understanding I don’t know; it seems unlikely. I 

can’t quite imagine those all-American astronauts smacking their lips at jellied pike, but 

then again maybe it wasn’t very good jellied pike and the Russians didn’t enjoy it either. 

Perhaps there was a shared agony. There’s nothing quite like really bad food for bringing 

people together.

PROOF

Photo credit: Thrillist Los Angeles

A newish Hollywood restauran, called District, is causing a bit of a stir with one of its starters, actually what’s referred to on the menu as one of its “breads.” They’re serving “duck fat Yorkshire pudding w/ thyme (allow 15 minutes).” Obviously this had to be checked out. There were other menu items to be checked out as well: fried head cheese, venison stuffed relleno, corn agnolotti. But obviously it was the Yorkshire pudding that was most in need of scrutiny.

We went, we ate, and they were terrific; served sizzling hot in black cloth a basket, oily but not too oily, and soft and dense but not too dense. The Loved One said she’d have preferred more crunch but that didn’t bother me. I’ve probably eaten too many dried out, English institutional Yorkshire puddings in my life.


If you think it seems a little strange to be eating Yorkshire puddings in Los Angeles, I’d tend to agree with you, but the fact is they’re less of a rarity here than you might think. You can certainly get them at Lawry’s on La Cienaga (cited, in an earlier incarnation, in “The Long Goodbye” and discussed elsewhere in this blog), which is a sort of copy of the London restaurant, Simpson’s in the Strand, and it’s one of those copies that’s an improvement on the original. That's their dinner cart above.


You can also get them at the Tam O’Shanter in Los Feliz, also owned by Lawry’s, and not a copy of anything as far as I can tell. It’s vaguely Scottish themed and the serving staff wear a kind of all-purpose traditional dress, and they do serve haggis around Burns night, but its thoroughly Californian, and pretty much a self-invention. I’ve heard that the Grill on the Alley also does Yorkshire pudding, but it's a bit further into Beverly Hills than I like to go.

I think a true Yorkshireman would have complained that the Yorkshire puddings at District were a bit small – about the size of a meatball - but that’s what true Yorkshiremen are like. I am a Yorkshireman, though I suspect not a very true any more. You can see why a restaurant might want you not to fill up too much on cheap starters: they want you to have plenty of room for the expensive main courses. But Yorkshire pudding was invented to do precisely the opposite. In working class Yorkshire homes the pudding was served before the main Sunday roast, so you’d want less roast beef.


And at some point in the 1980s when I was living in Yorkshire, many of the local pubs came up with the idea of serving “filled” Yorkshire puddings. They made plate-size puddings, crusty round the edges with a deep well in the center, cooked beforehand and reheated to order I’m pretty sure, and these were then filled with something or other: beef stew or fish stew or in some cases, I swear, curried chicken. As fusion cooking goes, it’s hard to get much more fused than that.


Filled Yorkshire puddings can now be found at manay an English supermarket, often frozen, and of course they’re terrible. Yorkshire puddings have to be fresh, as the ones at District prove..

Incidentally, as I’ve just discovered, calling your restaurant District makes it all but impossible to find on Google. Typing in variations of the words District, Restaurant, Hollywood and Yorkshire Pudding gets you nowhere at all, and brings up restaurants in theatre districts or business development districts all over the place. Arguably I did once live in the Yorkshire pudding district, and to an extent I still do, but these days it’s a territory of the mind rather than of geography.

Oh yeah, and by the way, there is no need whatsoever for anybody ever to buy Yorkshire pudding mix.

BIG BEER

And talking (re Dennis Hopper) of alcohol as a source of calories, I used to be at college with a man called Dave Lamb, and when he went out at night to get drunk he’d say he was going out for a “feed of drink.” which sounds somehow Irish, though he was a Somerset man. I certainly don’t recall him eating much, but perhaps he didn’t need to.

Dave wasn’t a large man – neither was Hopper - but they drank “above their weight,” as it were. But when it comes to truly heroic, self-destructive drinking, size is always going to be an advantage.


André the Giant (1946-1993) weighed in at between 450 and 500 pounds, and carried his bulk on a 7 foot 4 inch frame. It’s reckoned that he took in about 7000 calories a day, simply from alcohol, though he ate plenty too, sometimes going into a restaurant and ordering every item on the menu. I have to say I'd like to do that some day before I die.

He was also a person that myths grew up around. On the Internet and elsewhere you’ll find plenty of people who say he holds the “record” for alcohol intake, 119 beers, 12 ounces each, in a six hour session, (some accounts say 118, or 113, but they’re all well over 100.) Equally you’ll find plenty of people who say this is literally impossible, that death would occur from that amount of fluid intake, even if the fluid were only water. When you add alcohol to the equation, they reckon there’s no way he could have done it and survived. Maybe he just looked like a guy who could drink 119 beers in six hours.



A more nuanced account of André’s drinking comes from Terry Todd who wrote about him in a Sports Illustrated article in 1971. They spent some time together while Todd was writing the article and he reported that André drank “like a Frenchman,” steadily and constantly without ever getting obviously drunk.


Todd writes, “During the week or so I was with him, his average daily consumption was a case or so of beer; a total of two bottles of wine, generally French, with his meals; six or eight shots of brandy, usually Courvoisier or Napoleon, though sometimes Calvados; half a dozen standard mixed drinks, such as Bloody Marys or Screwdrivers; and the odd glass of Pernod.” And when, like Dennis Hopper, he simply wanted to get drunk he’d move on to straight hard liquor: a few fifths of vodka in André’s case.


All of which set me thinking about the Jivaro Indians from the headwaters of the Amazon: that's one of them above. In “Consuming Passions: the anthropology of eating” by Peter Farb and George Armelagos, it’s reported that the Jivaros consider beer a far greater necessity than food. The book was published in 1980 and things may well have changed since then, thanks to the benefits of civilization, but at the time of the the book, adult Jivaro males drank 3 to 4 gallons of beer a day, adult females 1 to 2 gallons, and a 9 year old child (sex not specified) would drink about half a gallon. And there's evidence (below) that they started younger than that.


Almost all the protein in their diet had to be obtained by hunting, nevertheless the Jivaro hunters would often abandon the pursuit of prey and go home when it looked like they might run out of beer.

The Jivaro’s beer is made from manioc root, also known as cassava, and the mystery ingredient, the one that causes fermentation, is ptyalin – from human saliva: young women of the tribe chew the root to break it down as part of the brewing process. Michael Uzendoski in his book “The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador” writes, “Manioc brew has a nice balance of fruity sweetness, acidity, alcohol and texture … I have never witnessed or heard of a bad batch.”

THE MORE THE MERRIER

In interviews, the late, much lamented Dennis Hopper used to tell how when he was at his nadir in Taos, New Mexico, in the 1970s, his daily intake of alcohol consisted of half a gallon of rum, plus a fifth of rum on the side in case he ran out, plus 28 beers. With this and 3 grams of cocaine a day he could stay more or less “sober,” and if he wanted to get drunk he’d do shots of tequila.

I don’t doubt that this is true, but it seems a very specific sort of drunk who keeps track of exactly how much he drinks. A very specific one too, who drinks exactly the same amount every day. Was it always 28 beers? Never 27? Never 29? Didn’t he ever feel the urge to drink vodka rather than rum?

I don’t know what, if anything, Hopper ate during this period but I guess his calorific intake was high enough to keep him fed, if not exactly well-nourished. Those 28 beers alone must have contained a good 4000 calories.

I was reminded of Hopper, while reading Barbara Holland’s book The Joy Of Drinking. She says that in 1787, two days before they drew up the American Constitution, the 55 delegates at the Constitutional Convention took a break and went to the tavern next door, where they drank “54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 of whiskey, 22 of port, 8 of hard cider and 7 bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them. Then they went back to work and finished founding the new Republic.” This is Barbara Holland, below.


I’m not sure if any of the delegates kept track of what they drank, but we know this chapter and verse because the bill has been preserved. I can’t help wondering if there were a few hangers on who drank at the delegates’ expense, or if the tavern padded the bill a little, but even if so the guys must certainly have put it away. We know for sure that several of the signatories of the Constitution were gout sufferers – John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton among them - and I imagine quite a few others too.


The Guinness Book of World Records long ago stopped keeping records on the quantity of alcohol people drink, but a recently published first edition facsimile lists two champion drinkers: Auguste Maffrey of France - 24 pints of beer in 52 minutes, and Dionsio Sanchez “a Spaniard” – 40 pints of wine in 59 minutes. This is Auguste, below.


I’ve been wondering if these people count as “binge drinkers” a term that comes with various definitions. By some standards 5 drinks “in a row” for men, 4 drinks in a row for women, counts as a binge. By other definitions binge drinking requires drinking a lot of alcohol rapidly with the deliberate intention of getting drunk. Clearly Hopper, the founding fathers, Auguste and Dionsio must have had far more than five drinks in a row, but none of them seems to have done it with the deliberate, and certainly not the sole, intention of getting drunk. They were just drinking what they always drank.

Incidentally my friend Hugh reckoned it was time to cut back on drinking not when he had too much to drink and woke up in the gutter in a pool of sweat and remorse, but on the occasion that he had fifteen pints of beer, then quietly got on the bus and went home and got up in time for a lecture the next morning.


Now, nobody in their right mind is going to suggest that binge drinking is a “good idea” but according to some new research done at Brown University, the next day effects of binge drinking aren’t nearly as bad as you might think. Science Daily reports, “The study found that intoxication in the evening did not affect students' next day scores on academic tests requiring long-term memory, or on tests of recently learned material. Binge drinking did, however, slow participants' attention/reaction times and worsen mood states.”

In other words, the constitutional delegates would still have been perfectly able to draw up a constitution, they just might have been a bit grumpy while doing it. Dennis Hopper, of course, would probably have reached for his gun.

REGIONAL VARIATIONS

When I first went to San Francisco in the 1970s I went along to Fisherman’s Wharf and looked at all the seafood and felt baffled and overwhelmed by it all.

I was especially confused by the hollowed out loaf of sourdough bread filled with clam chowder. I’d never encountered a clam or a chowder and the concept of sour dough was completely unknown to me. I was drawn to it, but it seemed too strange and exotic. I wouldn’t have known how to order it or how to eat it or how it was supposed to taste Sour bread sounded strange though somehow attractive, and eating the “vessel” you’d eaten from seemed so decadent. I bought some bread and cheese and felt on much safer ground.

These days I eat soudough pretty much every day – it’s the basic bread we buy at the supermarket, and I certainly know what clam chowder is, though it’s not something I ever crave.


Even so it seems impossible to visit San Francisco without going to Fisherman’s Wharf and having clam chowder in a hollowed out sour dough loaf, usually at the Boudin Bakery. I was there a couple of weeks back and that’s exactly what I did. These days it not only seems unexotic it seems downright dull, and I was left wondering how this dish has become such an attraction to me and everyone else. Maybe it’s like eating fish and chips at the English seaside or eating Nathan’s hotdogs at Coney, you’re not sure you’re really enjoying them but you think you should.

My San Francisco visit wasn’t especially food-related but, to my surprise, I did find a kind of potato I’d never eaten before. It was in a French restaurant on Grant Avenue called Café de La Presse, I ordered the the Confit de Canard Maison and it came with “potatoes salardaise.” I didn’t take a picture, because the restaurant seemed too classy and I didn't want to seem like a rube. It looked like this:


I wasn’t completely sure how they were cooked, though garlic and duck fat were certainly involved, and when I got home I couldn’t find a recipe in any of my cookbooks, least of all Julia Childs. I figure it must be in Larousse Gastronomique but my copy has (not so mysteriously) disappeared. Online recipes are of course wildly various, not least in the spelling of the word itself, which sometimes appears as “sarladaise.” They seem to be a speciality of the Dordogne.

But the basics are simple enough, essentially you fry slices of potato in duck (or goose) fat along with garlic, onion and parsley. It’s the cooking time that gets really interesting. Some recipes suggest twenty minutes, some suggest two hours, by which time you’re pretty much making a confit of the potatoes themselves, which is OK by me. And the fact is, it’s hard to go wrong with those ingredients, as my own humble efforts (below) prove.

THAT BOURDAIN REVIEW

My review of Medium Raw, as it appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.



In the interests of full disclosure I should say that, about a decade ago, Anthony Bourdain gave one of my novels a snippy review. He described it as “always clever, seldom fun.” The wound has healed, but as you see, I still remember the line, because let’s face it, it’s a damn good one. Today I can also console myself with that knowledge that by Bourdain’s standards, I got off very lightly.

His new book Medium Raw, is subtitled “a bloody valentine to the world of food and the people who cook,” and much of it reads more like a poison pen letter than a love note. Sandra Lee is the “hellspawn of Betty Crocker and Charles Manson.” The movie No Reservations makes him want to “vomit blood.” Rocco DiSpirito’s TV series is a “reality-show driven abomination.” (p106) Alan Richman starts out as a douchebag, but then Bourdain upgrades him to the c-word. Even the saintly Alice Waters is dissed for her “crude and obvious blend of self-aggrandizement and genuine good intentions.”


Elsewhere, Gael Greene, Alain Ducasse, Wolfgang Puck, and many more, come in for varying degrees of evisceration. This, of course, is all great fun, even if some of it’s the shooting fish in a barrel variety. But just in case you’re wondering whether Bourdain can take it as well as he can dish it out, he turns his verbal knife skills on himself. “A loud, egotistical, one-note asshole who’s been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long,” “the angry, cynical, snarky guy who says mean things on Top Chef”, “the very picture of the jaded, overpriviledged ‘foodie’.” Well, he makes some good points.

He also approves of many people too: Thomas Keller, Ferran Adria, Jamie Oliver and Jonathan Gold among them; but it’s probably inevitable that the compliments tend to be rather less memorable than the blazing though finely-honed putdowns.


But actually, Bourdain’s at his best when he isn’t playing the part of gastronomic insult comic. He writes, “I like making things. And I like telling stories,” and this shouldn’t come as news. His breakthrough book Kitchen Confidential wasn’t a success only because of its revelations about bad behavior on the countertops. It was an engaging and skillful narrative that beckoned and seduced you into the world of the professional chef.

Medium Raw is being marketed as a “follow-up” to that first book, though to me it reads more like a collection of magazine articles and opinion pieces. So we have lip-smacking descriptions of eating pastrami at a deli on Houston Street in New York, waiting for the first batch of pain raisin at a bakery in Paris, consuming freshly made blood sausage in a village outside Prague. These are fine as far as they go, but the book is better when Bourdain goes further.

The prologue describing an illegal ortolan feast involving some of America’s greatest chefs could be the first chapter in a suspense novel. Who are these people (Bourdain doesn’t name names), why exactly do they wear “shrouds” while eating, and what kind of man enjoys the taste of “figs, Armagnac, dark flesh slightly infused with the salty taste of my own blood”?

A memoir about being on St Barts with a crazy, cokehead girlfriend is comic, vicious about the girlfriend, the island and its food, but ultimately it’s strangely compassionate and moving: at least about the girlfriend, not so much about the food on St Bart.


But for my money the stand out chapter in the book is “My Aim is True” which describes the work and life of Justo Thomas, who cuts and portions at least seven hundred pounds of fish every day at Le Bernardin, the New York seafood restaurant. The man is a brilliant craftsman and a force of nature, and when he goes on vacation, three people have to be employed to do his work. Bourdain observes and describes Thomas in wonderfully fine detail. We “see” the way he employs different methods for different fish, how he uses his knives, the way he removes skin and bones, how he’s able to cut absolutely identically sized pieces. Then we learn about his background in the Dominican Republic, and the role he still plays in his family there. And finally, in a masterful flourish, Bourdain takes Thomas to eat at Le Bernardin. It’s generally unthinkable for kitchen staff to eat in their own restaurant, but for Justo people make exceptions. By the end of the piece I felt I knew Justo Thomas better than I know most of my own friends. You have to hand it to Bourdain; this is really good writing, not just really good food writing.

Bourdain says he spent twenty-eight years as a professional cook and chef. By my reckoning he’s spent fifteen years as a professional writer. Will it surprise you that he doesn’t think much of writers? He says, “hanging out with more than one of them at a time is about as much fun as being thrown in a cage full of hungry but toothless civet cats.” (p48) Just once in a while, even Mr. B overcooks his similes.

HUBBA BUBBA

An old friend from England was in town; author, anthropologist and all round style tribe guru Ted Polhemus. He was here to lecture on the semiotics of denim (don’t ask).

When I say “in town,” he was actually in Santa Monica, a place I don’t know all that well, and so when we set off to find somewhere for lunch, for one reason or another we ended up on Santa Monica pier at theme restaurant called Bubba Gump’s. It’s a chain, and maybe you’ve heard of it, but I hadn’t. It was evidently inspired by the movie Forrest Gump, and although I’ve seen the movie, it was a long time ago, and I’d more or less forgotten about the shrimp boat part.

Of course the food snob in me hesitated at the prospect of a heaving, theme restaurant, a tourist place, full of large family groups with howling children and a lot of dropped shrimp on the floor. But you know, food snobbery is unattractive in anybody, and especially in a food blogger. So I decided to go with it.


And you know, really, the food wasn’t bad. Ted (see above) had the Shrimper's Net Catch “Our best Peel'n'Eat Shrimp steamed in Beer - You and your crew will be begging for more!" I had the Dixie Fishwich “Forrest and Lt. Dan had one everyday!”

And the ambiance? Well yes, it was loud and hectic, but if you got the right table, which we did, i.e. one by the window, you can see all the way north along the coast of Santa Monica Bay, with the mountains in the background, so you get a million dollar view to go with your ten dollar fish sandwich. That’s really not such a bad deal.

The waiting staff was efficient and efficient, and seemed supernaturally happy, which can’t be easy. But the best feature of all was a thing on the table that looked like a car’s license plate. When you sit down it’s in this position,



That means you don’t need anything from the waiting staff and they can run right by you. But then other times you can flip the plate up and reveal this one underneath.


This means that any waiter who happens to be passing – not just yours – will stop and ask what you need. “Another Hefenweizen, please.”

I think this is the most wonderful dining innovation: no more trying to catch the eye of some distracted waiter. The sign, the signifier if you will, is right there on the table. Of course, given some of the restaurants I’ve been in, a license plate might be too subtle. How about a light, like on the roof of a taxi, and maybe it should be flashing, or the could be flag you could raise, or a small distress flair you could launch, that could return to earth by parachute, with the message, “Actually, make that two Hefenweizens.”

BENT

I’ve been reading Anthony Bourdain’s new book “Medium Raw” to review it for the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s a lot of fun, and especially if you have negative feelings about Alain Ducasse, Rocco DiSpirito and Wolfgang Puck, among many others. They all get a lashing from Mr B.

Among the many provocative statements in the book is this one: “The care and feeding of the Fourth Estate – and their bastard offspring, food bloggers – has become an important skill set for any chef looking to hit the Big Time ... ‘turning’ a journo is usually a pretty simple matter. Just feed them for free. You’ll never have to remind them about it later. Believe me. They’ll remember. It’s like giving a bent cop a Christmas turkey.”

Now, I'm an odd kind of journalist, an especially odd kind of food journalist, though I think my bastardly blogging credentials are real enough. Even so, nobody has ever tried to ‘turn’ me. The nearest I came was having a chat (rather than an interview) with Fergus Henderson, when I was writing about his restaurant St John for Bon Appetit magazine. (The piece got spiked, but I got paid – a triumph). Fergus insisted that he never gave free meals to journalists, and I certainly wasn’t asking for one, but he did give me a glass of Poire William liqueur to go with my espresso.


For what it’s worth, St John is my favorite restaurant in the world, and I think I can look into my heart and safely say that it wasn’t a single glass of Poire William that made me feel that way. It takes more than a single shot of liqueur to corrupt me. How much more, I don’t know. Perhaps somebody would like to try a few experiments.