THE FONDER HEART

            It was, I suppose, the kind of conversation that goes on in millions of American homes on a Sunday morning.

            “Honey,” I said, “have you seen my absinthe spoon?”

            The loved one, of course, said she hadn’t.

            I’ve bought exactly one bottle of absinthe in my life, and it came with a free spoon, which was why I had it.  Or had had it once.  The spoon itself was attractive enough, but in my admittedly very limited experience of “the Green Fairy” its mind-clouding powers had been much exaggerated.  One bottle seemed to be enough.  I’d never used the spoon again, which was why it had no doubt been pushed to the back of a drawer somewhere and lost.

            As regular readers of Psycho-Gourmet will know, we take a special interest in spoons and their variations - the spork, the spife, the knoon and what have you.  And I’d happened to come across these rather wonderful skull–shaped spoons designed by someone called Pinky Diablo. 

            My guess is that probably isn’t his real name.  He was probably born Bluey Diablo.  And of course you have to wonder exactly what you’d use these skull spoons for.  They’d be just fine for stirring, not so good for shoveling, and they’d be a complete disaster for, say, eating soup.  You’d get lobster bisque all down your front.

             But maybe they’d be good for absinthe.  The absinthe ritual is a pretty straightforward one.  The absinthe goes in the glass, the spoon rests across the top of the glass.  A sugar cube rests on the spoon and chilled water is poured onto the sugar cube and drips down into the absinthe through the holes in the spoon.

            Maybe the skull spoon could be used to accomplish that, although it didn’t necessary look like it would sit very easily on top of a glass, and real absinthe spoons have very regularly sized and distributed holes which I think may be considered essential to the task.  I had my doubts.

            Anyway, I found my absinthe spoon eventually.  That’s it above.  So I really have no reason whatsoever to buy myself a skull spoon.  It would only get lost.  On the other hand, I find myself thinking seriously about buying another bottle of absinthe.

EVERYTHING WITH CHIPS

Since I had those freshly made, hot potato chips at the LA County Fair, I’ve been eating other potato chips with a new, more intense interest. And I’m cobbling together some kind of a theory that potato chips reveal a society’s cultural identity, and its deepest, most profound assumptions.

The British of course like salt and vinegar, smoky bacon, lamb and mint, and (if they get them) Bovril. These are all sharp, aggressive, insistent flavors.

The Germans, by contrast, and to my surprise, really like paprika flavored chips, and my spy in Berlin tells me they also eat something called “Africa style,” though I wonder if the latter was done specially for the World Cup.

As yet I haven’t been able to sample those German flavors, nor for that matter Greek oregano or Russian caviar flavors, but I’m starting, in a modest way, to check out the international galaxy of potato chip flavors.

It seemed to me that the Indians, as in India rather than Native American, might have an interesting take on this. They seem to love potatoes, and curry spices and potatoes seem a match made in heaven. I went along to India Sweets and Spices here in LA and bought a bag of Anand brand potato chips, product of India, and described as Masala flavor.

Masala, I gather, just means “blended spices” and the list of ingredients on the pack says no more than “spices” so I suppose these chips might have tasted of anything. In fact the flavor was a single, back of the tongue hotness that might have been nothing more than chilli powder. It was OK, but I’d have liked more. The packs of Butter Chicken Masala seasoning sold in the store contain coriander, dry ginger, cassia, garlic, cloves, mace and star anise. I thought the good folks at Anand might have tried one or two of these

As an aside, I was pleased by the transparent cellophane those chips came in, and it made me wonder why so many chip packets are opaque and don’t allow you to see what’s inside. The most obvious answer is that most manufacturers don’t want you to see how pathetically few chips are actually in each bag. No such deception from Anand: good for them.

And then as luck would have it, I discovered that Marco, one of my wife’s colleagues, was on vacation in Japan. Maybe he could be persuaded to buy some local potato chips while he was there and bring them back. After an email or two, he duly did and my wife delivered me a bag that looked like this:

Reading no Japanese, and not having spoken to Marco, I had no idea what flavor was in the bag, but I ate them anyway, and I wasn’t much wiser. At first there was a very mild, low salt taste, and then there was a very slightly less mild, and growing, savory but inscrutable aftertaste. It was nothing as obvious as soy sauce, though you might have been able to call in umami. The chips tasted good but they were probably a little too subtle for my jaded western palate. Anyway, the linguistic research has been done. The flavor was “consommé punch,” beef flavor to you and me. There's a pretty wild commercial for them on Japanese TV featuring a little boy and a person in a dog suit.  Like this:

Much more research to be done here, as and when.

MEATY PARTS

The philosophical, moral and aesthetic connections between women and meat have been discussed elsewhere in this blog.

And now those fabulously creative, original and edgy people Lady Gaga and Terry Richardson have delved deep down into the collective maelstrom of their artistic souls ...


... and come up with a picture of a naked woman covered in meat.

Gimme a break.

DEEPER FRIED

On Sunday night I had dinner with some people and I was telling my county fair stories and someone said she’d had deep-fried butter at the San Diego County Fair. There was also talk, though nobody could absolutely confirm it, that these days some fairs featured deep-fried Coca Cola.


All this, it seems, is perfectly true. A bit of googling turns up endless examples of deep fried butter (that's one of them above), though of course it’s butter inside dough, and given dough’s insulating properties, it’s not really all that amazing. Whether you want a mouthful of butter and dough is up to you, but I know many do.

It isn’t a huge leap from deep-fried butter to deep-fried mayonnaise, though that isn’t some county fair curiosity, but rather the invention of molecular gastronomist Wylie Dufresne of the New York restaurant WD-50. His recipe requires both gelatin and a kind of gum called gellan, and it doesn’t use dough as such, though the mayo is encased in a coating of flour, egg and panko breadcrumbs, so it’s not a million miles away. This is it, the cube-shaped thing in the image below.


Dufresne usually serves it with pickled tongue and he says it’s an homage to his father who once owned sandwich shop. Dufresne says, “For a long time I have wanted to create a dish that would bring all the flavors of one of his sandwiches together in a new and interesting way. Ultimately, that’s what this dish is: a tongue sandwich with lettuce, tomato, onions, and mayonnaise.”

And to wash it down? Well, it turns out the deep-fried Coca Cola was a bit of a misnomer. It was invented by one Abel Gonzalez Junior for the 2006 Texas State Fair but in fact it’s actually deep-fried coca cola batter, served with coca cola syrup, whipped cream and what not. It looks like this:


Far more appealing, and truer to its name, is deep-fried beer, another Texas State Fair specialty, and it’s essentially ravioli with a beer filling, which sounds absolutely fine to me, the dough again acting as insulating material, keeping the beer and the fat apart.


But when you think about it, just how different is that conceptually from liquor chocolates? It must be at least as hard to fill a chocolate with liqueur as it does to fill a raviolo with beer.


When I was growing up, liqueur chocolates were things adults gave to us kids at Christmas to keep us quiet. Even the aunts weren’t keen on them, and the men wouldn’t touch them because they were too girly. I don’t believe the kids thought they were all that great either, but we ate them and that’s how some of us developed a very early taste for cointreau and cherry brandy. Though of course for certain other flavors it worked as a kind of aversion therapy. It would take a least a gun to my head to make me knock back Drambuie in any form.


Which inevitably brings us back to Thomas Pynchon and the fabulous scene in Gravity’s Rainbow where Tyrone Slothrop samples home made candies. I haven’t quite committed this to memory so imagine my surprise on finding these words, “He reaches in the candy bowl, comes up with a black, ribbed, licorice drop. It looks safe … at which point Slothrop is encountering this dribbling liquid center, which tastes like mayonnaise and orange peels.
‘You’ve taken the last of my Marmalade Surprises!’ cries Mrs. Quoad.”

WITH THE PIGS IN AMERICA

I was at the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona, sitting on metal bleachers watching the pig racing. If I’d been a betting man my money would have been on Mr. Jowl. There were two women sitting behind me and one of them was saying to the other, “Oh, I couldn’t. No way. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly put a thing like that in my mouth. I just couldn’t. I’d gag. I’d just die.” Her companion was doing her very best to persuade her to try some of the chocolate covered bacon that was on sale all over the fair. For all the drama, the woman did eventually try a piece. She didn’t gag, she didn’t die, and why would she? I knew, as I’d known all along, that she was protesting way too much. And frankly if you were worried about putting odd things in your mouth, there were far scarier items than chocolate covered bacon, such as the “frosting shots” and the fried dill pickles.

But the chocolate covered bacon was really, really good; pieces of bacon of varying lengths, coated with dark chocolate of varying thicknesses so that each piece had a slightly different ratio of bacon to chocolates. The pieces were served chilled to keep them crisp and crunchy. I had mine with a pint of ice cold beer, thereby simultaneously hitting three major food groups.

I’d decided my visit to the LA County fair would be all about the pig. I realized recently that I’d never seen a live pig in America. Back in England I saw them all the time as I drove up the A12 into Suffolk, hundreds of happy, odorless, free range porkers rooting in fields either side of the main road. But never in America, and given that there are about 60 million pigs alive in America at any given moment this didn’t seem right. It was a situation that needed to be corrected. I hoped the LA County Fair would get the job done, and it did.



I saw 29 pigs at the fair. The majority of them should more properly be called piglets; there were 19 of them along with three sows in a large pen in Thummer’s barn. There were also four fully-grown pigs lying singly in pens. You could reach right in and touch them, which I duly did. The flesh was far more solid and unyielding than it looked, and the pigs seemed to have no objection to being gently prodded and stroked. Then there were the racing pigs – three races with four pigs per race, along with a tiny little piglet thrown in for comic effect. That makes 29.

But I hadn’t gone to the fair just to view pigs; I’d gone there to eat them. The fair could provide pork in many forms, pulled pork sandwiches, barbecue, hickory smoked pork butts, sausages, carnitas. I’d also heard reports of the intriguing “pork chop on a stick” and I thought I needed one of those to extend my porcine education.


Certainly as a whole, the event seemed less about pork and more about dough. I knew, of course that county fairs are the home of deep-fried everything: Twinkies, Oreos, Krispy Kreme chicken sandwiches, White Castle cheeseburgers, all coated in dough and submerged in hot fat. But I was a little surprised to find it was also the home of deep fried frogs legs, deep fried avocadoes and deep fried cheese on a stick.

I only tasted some of these, but I was especially taken with the idea of the cheese. I could see them there at the counter, blocks of bright yellow cheese looking like cheese popsicles; how could that fail? Well, reasonably easily actually.



In my naivety I was imagining that the blocks were some good solid, flavorful, mature cheddar but they turned out to be Velveeta, or at least the bulk catering equivalent, and by the time one of them had been doughed and fried it turned to rather bland cheese sauce. It was OK as far as it went, but why couldn’t it have gone further with a lump of artisanal goat feta or some regional blue?

The problem with dough, or at least with the dough I ate at the fair, is that it overwhelms whatever’s inside it, so it becomes dough with cheese, or dough with avocado, and I dare say dough with frogs’ legs. The one thing that did work really well was the deep fried Klondike bar. Here dough tasted very much like a doughnut, and ice cream and chocolate are two things you can plausibly eat as topping on a doughnut, so this was absolutely fine. The melting ice cream and chocolate lubricated the dough and made a perfectly good dessert.


Given the presence of all that dough, I assumed the pork chop on a stick would get the same treatment, coated and deep-fried. That gave me some slight trepidation but by that point I was willing to go for it. I was wrong, however. There was no dough, no deep-frying, just a well cooked pork chop that somebody had pushed a stick into and cooked on a grill. It was very good, and I’m sure it tasted better than a doughy, deep-fried version would have, but I was still somehow disappointed. My appetite had coarsened, and I was wanting something grosser and more vulgar, something more like county fair food. I wondered if the fair would have had the same effect on Ferran Adrià.


Given the presence of livestock, not only pigs and cows, but also goats, sheep, chickens, rabbits, even yak, I thought the organizers might have made something out of rare breeds, heritage, sustainable agriculture, that kind of thing, but there was none of it. Cows were being milked, but the milk that came out of the cows couldn’t be sold, for health reasons. There was a display of cheeses, but they were in sealed glass-fronted cabinets and none of them were for sale either. This seemed a bit much. Surely even the most committed cheese fancier wants to do more than just LOOK at cheese.



So I tried to imagine a county fair in which the gourmets and the food obsessives were let loose to run the asylum. If absolutely anything could be doughed and deep fried, why not deep fried snail porridge or pig cheek? Wouldn’t visitors enjoy the new sous vide fad that’s sweeping the nation? Why not try hot dogs or S’mores that had been vacuum-sealed and cooked in a water bath for a few hours? Rather than smoothies and shaved ice how about pints of sea urchin foam or tomato water? Why not a deconstructed corn on the cob? Why not a molecular taco? How about a freeze-dried hotdog?

I was getting a bit fevered by now. I bought myself a basket of hot, freshly deep-fried potato chips. They calmed me down no end. It felt like coming home.

THE MAN WHO DIDN'T SWALLOW EVERYTHING

I’ve started reading Jeffrey Steingarten again. Like a lot of people I first discovered him through his book The Man Who Ate Everything, which I read cover and cover and enjoyed immensely. Then I read It Must've Been Something I Ate, which was probably just as good, but it was more of the same and therefore less enjoyable. And then I’d read him in Vogue once in a while, but he always seemed to be banging on about exotic coffee beans or what he fed his dog, and then I saw him as a judge on Iron Chef America, and it really didn’t seem that television was his medium. And so, with no great animosity, though no great regret, I stopped reading him.

But now a couple of recent issues of Vogue have found their way into the house and I’ve come to think that Steingarten is quite the waspish ironist and that I’ve been missing something.


First, in the August issue, there was an exquisite hatchet job on Gwyneth Paltrow, inspired by her forthcoming cookery book, due out in April 2011, My Father’s Daughter; “85 xeroxed pages” Steingarten blithely observes. He reckons the recipes aren’t too bad and so he and Gwyneth do some cooking together.

He suggests making the ten hour chicken but she can’t fit that into her schedule, so they settle for making chicken dumplings, and corn chowder. He’s arrives late for their cooking date, but once there he admires her knife skills. He tells us she has two outdoor pizza ovens, one in her backyard in London, another in Long Island. “I took her ownership of two of them as the mark of her seriousness as a cook,” he says. He’s not serious, surely.

Then she makes pizza, but with the wrong kind of flour according to Steingarten. And he tells us, with apparent admiration, that she makes her own stock. Personally I find this about as impressive as hearing she makes her own toast, and Steingarten can’t help adding, “But Gwyneth does have skilled kitchen helpers.” Sarcasm? I do hope so.

Things seem to be going along quite civilly between the pair of them, but obviously Steingarten’s had enough. He asks her if she hates any part of her own body, and that’s it, the end of a beautiful relationship. She doesn’t give an answer, and there’s no more cooking a deux. Reading not very closely between the lines, I think Steingarten couldn’t stand the arrangemnt a moment longer and sabotaged things to be rid of her.


Then in the September issue he visits “the best restaurant in the world,” Rene Redzepi’s Noma, in Copenhagen. Noma concentrates on “local ingredients,” which in this case (Steingarten helpfully tell us) means food from anywhere in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Greenland, Iceland and the Faeroe Islands, an area of about 1.2 million square miles by my reckoning: it’s Greenland that really bumps up the area.

Steingarten and Redzepi go foraging. They walk along the beach and sample five different kinds of sorrel. They go to a nearby farm where, says Steingarten, “I could not always tell whether it was a planted field or a vacant lot.”


Next day he eats lunch at the restaurant, and writes, “A white vase on the table was filled with various small evergreen branches: dip them into an oil infused with cepes ... then pop them into your mouth. There was a printed card nearby listing norman fir, black spruce, lodgepole pine, mountain elm, and four other trees. Soon the bulrushes arrived …”

All this is described deadpan and without comment: the most ludicrous food since the inventions in American Psycho. All of which leads me to believe that Steingarten is a master satirist who knows that all the best jokes are told with an absolutely straight face. He had me howling with laughter.

PEASANT FOOD

This is an edited verion of an article that appears in the current issue of Tin House.


Once a week, as I was growing up in the north of England, I watched my Irish grandfather eat a boiled pig’s trotter. I watched with fascination rather than envy, since my parents had assured me, with the certainty parents so often have, that I wouldn’t enjoy the taste of a pig’s trotter. Later in my life I learned this wasn’t true, but at the time I didn’t argue. There were, for sure, other, much bigger battles to be fought against my parents, but when I look back on it I wonder quite why they were so insistent that pigs’ trotters weren’t for me, and I think the answer is because they’d decided pig’s trotters weren’t for them. My parents were making a long, arduous journey from the working class to the middle class, and instinctively they’d decided that eating pig’s trotters would slow their social ascendancy. Trotters were peasant food, and my parents were no longer prepared to be peasants.

Today I live in Los Angeles, not entirely a bastion of social egalitarianism, though certainly a place where an Englishman can kick over the traces of his origins if he wants to, at least until he meets another Englishman. It’s also a place where it’s currently hard to find an upscale restaurant that doesn’t serve pigs’ trotters. Peasant food is now very hip indeed. Mario Batali’s Osteria Mozza serves trotters with cicoria and mustard: at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon they come with sauce gribiche. At Animal you’re likely to find not only trotters, but also pig’s ears, cheeks and tails.


These would have been even more unthinkable to my parents, though they were perfectly happy to eat any number of other “low” pork products: pork pies, black pudding, “scraps” which were a type of deep fried pork skin, and also pork “dripping”: this was regarded as a wholesome bedtime snack. Pork roasts themselves, of course, were regarded as rather superior fare, and bacon was eaten at every available opportunity.


I was born and grew up in Sheffield, specifically in the rough but striving, working class neighborhood of Hillsborough. At the time it seemed all too unremarkable, but looking back on it, two things stand out: that it had a large Catholic population (which included the majority of my own family), and that there were more pork butchers and “pork shops” than you’d think such a small suburb could possibly support.


A Sheffield pork shop was, and still is, a place where you buy hot pork sandwiches complete with crackling, apple sauce and stuffing. Los Angeles doesn’t have an exact equivalent as far as I’m aware, but having a large Latino population means there’s no shortage of places to buy and eat pork in myriad forms. Chorizos, longanizas, morangas, chicharróns, cuertos, quesos del puerco: we got ‘em.


And one day as I was wandering around Macarthur Park, at rough but striving, working class neighborhood toward downtown, admiring the carnecerias, the taquerias and the stores that sold plaster statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, it struck me that this area had a lot in common with the place I grew up. More than that, I began to suspect there must be some strange, deep connection between pork, class and Catholicism. Why, I wondered, do Catholics seem to like pork so much?
Apparently I’m not the first to have asked this question. An online resource called the Catholic Answers Forum tells me that god revealed to the apostles that the dietary laws of the Old Testament did not apply to Christians. It’s there in Acts 10: 9-16, where Peter is told that if god made an animal then by definition it can’t be unclean, and is therefore OK to eat, which I think has a nice logic to it. And again, in Colossians 2: 16-17 Paul says, “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink.” In other words, just because the Jews don’t eat bacon, that’s no reason for you not to eat bacon.


Of course you don’t have to be Catholic to love pork, any more than you need to be Latino or Irish, but coming from a working class culture that tries to stretch its money, and its food, to the limit seems to be a large part of the equation. And in rural society, it’s possible to imagine a poor family owning a pig, keeping it in their back yard and feeding it on household scraps and leftovers. Owning cows and sheep, even a goat, is a trickier proposition, requiring at the very least access to grazing land.


My own front garden contains a shady area, under an oak tree, where a pig could live very happily indeed, but frankly I think the chances of my successfully getting through L.A.’s zoning variance process are close to zero. It remains a warm, recurring fantasy however.

There’s a widespread belief in LA that some of the city’s best food is to be found not in five star, white table cloth establishments, but in hole in the wall joints located in mini-malls, places that favor Formica tables, fluorescent lighting and gruff non-English speaking waiters. Certainly there are moments in Los Angeles, when you find yourself in some grittily cheerful cantina alongside working stiffs, off duty security guards, groups of secretaries having a night out, guys who’d like you to think they’re gang members, and you’re all there together devouring carnitas, puerco asado or burrito Jalisco (and yes OK, there may be a few lightweights who aren’t eating pork) and you think to yourself, yes this is democracy and equality in action. Such classlessness is of course a one way street. As yet the security guards and would-be gangbangers aren’t regulars at the Ivy and Spago.

Somehow this all ties in with the current food trend sometimes called (not by me) the “nouveau truck scene.” Street food surely ought to be the most classless food of all, and once this was very straightforward. There’d be a taco truck parked outside your office building at lunchtime or outside a club after a gig and you’d buy a pretty good, grease bomb of a burrito, swallow it down and damn the cholesterol. If some of these trucks weren’t strictly legal, and were sometimes hassled by the cops, well that was all part of the fun.

But now the scene has mutated, and some would say got too fancy for its own good. Alerted by Twitter, hipster foodies now drive all over town chasing down the latest truck selling Guatamalan/Korean fusion tostadas (or whatever). At the same time, cutting edge restaurants, that have never had the slightest connection with the street, now operate their own trucks to make themselves appear authentic. If you think this is less like egalitarianism than highly self-conscious slumming, you’ll get no argument from me. Although I admit it’s hard to resist a food truck called the Flying Pig.


In fact, much as I hate to say it, there are times when mainstream fast food chains seem far more genuinely classless. You see the line of vehicles waiting at the drive thru window of a McDonald’s or a Taco Bell or a KFC, and there’ll be a dented old pickup truck waiting behind a minivan full of a mom and her kids, waiting behind some movie guy in his Porsche, and you think, yes this a version of the American dream; all classes and types sharing the same appetites, buying the same products, eating the same food. And if the food is uninspired and generic, constructed to satisfy the lowest, least interesting tastes, well, maybe that’s the price you have to pay for democracy. Not much point going up to people in the line and telling them they should eat pig’s trotters. No point whatsoever telling them they should eat more like peasants.

EATING MILITARY

After I’d read all that stuff about what astronauts eat in Mary Roach’s book, I went online to see if it’s possible to buy space food. As far as I can tell the answer is, not really. I mostly found something called Professor Retro’s Space Food Sampler, which describes itself as “Chock full of tasty freeze-dried treats including Neapolitan Astronaut Ice Cream, Chocolate with Chocolate Chips Astronaut Ice Cream, Mint Chocolate Astronaut Ice Cream, freeze-dried Astronaut Apples, freeze-dried Astronaut Bananas, Chocolate Space Food Sticks, Peanut Butter Space Food Sticks, and four Splashdown Flavor Stix for bottled water--Lunar Lemonade, Intergalactic Grape, Lemon-Lime Crater-Ade.”


That all seemed a bit frivolous to me, like the stuff you’d give out at a kids party. Is space ice cream really going to be any different from earth ice cream? Is there really anything very extraterrestrial about bottled water that tastes of grape? And just as a matter of historical interest, when did space flight become “retro”?

I wanted something more serious: dehydrated cubes of bacon, stew in a tube, that kind of thing. I didn’t find any on line but I did go to my local army surplus store, the Supply Sergeant on Hollywood Boulevard, and I found they stocked military rations, manufactured by the Military Ration Company of Gardena, California. This seemed as close as I was going to get to space food: not very close. I chose the Vegetable Stew with Beef, which came in a sober-looking cardboard pack, sealed inside a plastic bag, along with a cookie, a power bar an energy, instant coffee, matches and so on.


The bag also contained a kind of single use stove, which is either very low tech or very high, I’m not sure which. The instructions say, “heater and its byproducts are not intended for human consumption,” which seems an odd way of putting it. OK, they’re not intended for human consumption, but it doesn’t actually say you can’t eat ‘em, does it? You need a stove because the stew comes in one of those foil pouches. I confess I boiled mine in a saucepan in the kitchen. And the result looked like this.


The stew really wasn’t bad at all. There was more meat than I was expecting, given the name, and although the vegetables were a bit soft and formless, overall it was actually pretty tasty, and why not given that the list of ingredients included beef flavor, tomato paste and Worcester sauce? If there was any complaint it was that there really wasn’t very much of it, and it contained just 160 calories, which I‘d have thought was a bit skimpy if you were a hungry soldier. I guess you energize yourself with the power bar.

Now it so happened that a few days later I went to the local Indian supermarket, India Sweets and Spices, on Los Feliz Boulevard, a fantastic resource for bulk spices, chutney, pickles and dried fish. And I saw some packeted dishes, including this one; Mutter Panner, or Splendid Cheese Peas, as somebody at Kohinoor Foods of New Delhi has translated it.

I got it home, opened it, and there was a pouch, pretty much identical to the one used in the military ration. I boiled it up. Now nobody can really expect boil in the bag curry to be especially authentic, and this certainly wasn’t. Despite the cumin, fenugreek, black and green cardamom, the green and red chilli, it tasted pretty bland. It also, of course looked nothing like the image on the pack – a problem the Military Ration Company had wisely sidestepped.


Maybe it had something to do with lower expectations, but it seemed to me the military guys had made a much better job of their stew than the Indians had made of their mutter paneer. This seemed a sad thing. And I was actually made sadder because I’d just been to a really poor Indian restaurant in San Diego, and it wouldn’t have surprised me at all if their food hadn’t come out of boil in the bag pouches.

So then, just to round things off, I found myself in my local Jon’s supermarket, browsing among the unusual canned goods and I found this: Army Brand Officer’s Pork Loaf, a product of Poland. It was the camouflaged label that really attracted me.


Now I can’t guarantee that Polish army officers actually eat this stuff but I felt I had to know what it tastes like. And the answer is, again, surprisingly good. Ingredients include pork meat, pork skins, pimento, paprika and marjoram.


I admit it looked kind of unappetizing coming out of the can, but with a little dressing up of leaves, herbs and cornichons it looked a whole lot better. And it struck me that if you were an unscrupulous restaurateur, you might serve this up as an example of a little known and highly prized type of charcuterie. Hey, it wouldn't be the worst thing you've eaten in a restaurant.

OMNIBIBULARITY

After the “Drink What You Know” essay appeared, I got an email from a writer name of Bud Johns directing me to H.L. Mencken’s three rules for drinking. I was well aware that Mencken had described the martini as “the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet” but I’d never heard his rules.


They’re as follows: “First, never drink if you have any work to do. Never. Secondly, never drink alone. That's the way to become a drunkard. Thirdly, even if you haven't got any work to do, never drink while the sun is shining. Wait until it's dark.”

They strike me as pretty tough, and actually Bud Johns doubts whether Mencken stuck to them, and he would know, as the author of “The Ombibulous Mr. Mencken” a “humorous drinking biography” according to Amazon. It's published by Synergistic Press and is very reasonably priced.


The word ombibulous is Mencken’s invention, "I am ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all. I learned early in life how to handle alcohol and never had any trouble with it.”


Mencken suffered through, and drank throughout, Prohibition. Prohibition is one of those bizarre flowerings of American Puritanism, that is never quite incomprehensible to an Englishman. Given that we had riots in the streets of London in the 1990s when the Thatcher government tried to impose a poll tax, I can only guess how we’d have reacted if someone had tried to take away our booze.

One of the things “The Ombibulous Mr. Mencken” makes clear, and it was something I’d never really thought about before, is that Mencken, and no doubt many others too, knew that Prohibition was coming and so began stocking up for the impending drought. In his letters Mencken writes that he has enough booze to last him 18 months, then two years, and eventually 15 years, which of course is more or less how long Prohibition lasted, though later letters suggest he may have overestimated his supply


Mencken was a formidable eater as well as drinker. Bud Johns quotes from “H.L. Mencken - A Portrait from Memory” by Charles Angoff who recalled that Mencken would start his evenings with 4 or 5 beers and a large plate of sauerkraut. Then he’d have half a dozen blutwursts, or several slices of pot roast, or a dozen small sausages, with potatoes, vegetables and bread and butter. No disguising those German genes. Then there’d be more beer, or possibly or wine, along with one or two pieces of cheesecake. After that he’d begin the night’s serious drinking.

According to Angoff, Mencken said, “Food never hurt anyone, but only if it’s washed down with liquor. Most of the trouble from so-called overeating comes from under-drinking.” How very, very consoling, for him and for all of us.