THE SILVER BULLET

A couple of people have drawn my attention to a blog titled “Tom Pynchon’s Liquor Cabinet: Every drink in every Pynchon novel” which strikes me as a great idea that hasn’t been fully realized in its current form, not as yet anyhow.  

The blogger (apparently male and in Australia) tries some chianti in honor of a mention in V, “The Chianti is tasty stuff.” He writes, “Sweet but pretty tannin-ey on the tongue. Basically tastes like wine.” Which seems less than helpful.  Maybe it’ll get into its stride later.

Me and the other members of my own old sick crew decided that Raymond Chandler’s Liquor Cabinet might be a more intriguing prospect.  Within the first few pages of our introduction to Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, he’s knocking back slugs of brandy which he likes “any way at all.”  His client, General Sternwood, can no longer drink but recalls that he used to like his brandy with Champagne “as cold as valley forge.”  Sounds good to me.

Self- referential you think?

Anyway, for quite different reasons, I’ve been re-reading Chandler’s The High Window and there’s a scene where Marlowe thinks he’s being followed and goes into the Tigertail Lounge (Chandler’s invention), where he sits in a “shallow booth” and orders a martini and a sandwich.  There’s no mention of what kind of sandwich, which is perhaps not all that odd: Marlowe is more interested in drink than food.

But I do find myself wondering what kind of sandwich goes with a martini.  None that I can think of.  The Loved One suggested maybe a pastrami sandwich because the intensity of the alcohol would cut through the greasiness of the meat, and that may be true, but I always find I need plenty of liquid with a pastrami sandwich – like a pint of beer.  A martini’s going to run out far too soon.  Maybe something more delicate would be better.  Smoked salmon?  Cucumber?  Not very hardboiled, I realize.

And then yesterday in the New York Time magazine, there were (some rather heated) extracts from Warren Harding’s letters to his mistress Carrie Fulton Phillips, written in the ten years before he became president in 1920. On January 2^nd 1913 he wrote, “I stopped play to have sandwiches and crack a bottle of wine, so I could dwell with my thoughts. You can guess where they centered — on the New Year’s beginning a year before, when the bell rang the chorus while our hearts sang the rapture without words and we greeted the New Year from the hallowed heights of heaven. . . .”  It goes on.

Again, no mention of what kind of sandwich he “stopped play” to have, but at least he thought he needed a bottle of wine to go with it. 

Warren Harding gets a bad rap in political circles, and hasn’t left us with many quotable lines.  But he did once say, “Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.”  That could have been written by Chandler about Marlowe, though I don’t think Marlowe actually had any friends at all.

OLD NEWS

Maybe not the greatest headline in the history of the Daily Telegraph, but not 

too shabby.

THE HEATHEN POTATO

Just how funny does this sound anyway?  

But you can read the whole thing here, if you'd like.  The metaphor pretty much works for any vegetable or fruit, actually.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/101064023/The-Potato-That-Wasnt-a-Christian-Well_-you-see-it-happened-this

IN OTHER SANDWICH NEWS

I’ve speculated elsewhere about the eating habits of the divine Tilda Swinton, having rather assumed that she lived on air, or orchids.  Certainly not on tomato soup.  

But now, here she is being interviewed by punters on Reddit AMA  (Ask Me Anything).  One of them, named DemJukes asks, “What is your favorite sandwich?”

        

And Tilda replies, “Today, I have to say avocado and goat's cheese.”

        

And then some wag with the handle UnbeatableUsername asks, quite reasonably it seems to me, “What was it yesterday?”

And he gets no reply!

COOKING WITH DEVICES

As you may have seen in a comment below from Jonathan Gold, somebody has already come up with an acetylene torch-like cooking device: the Searzall by Booker and Dax.  As yet it seems to be just a Kickstarter project, but they’ve already raised $226,425.

The Searzall, they say “Turns a blowtorch into a hand-held supercharged instant-power broiler. Sears fish, sous-vide, pizza, cheese, foie, and everything else.  The Searzall is a revolutionary hand-held cooking tool for the professional and home cook. It gives you the power of raw fire but also the ability to moderate and control that power. It's a carefully engineered attachment that fastens onto a common blowtorch and shapes and moderates the torch flame to make it far more cooking and flavor-friendly. The Searzall puts the power of a bed of hot coals in the palm of your hand – instantly.”  One could go on.  And they do.

Anyway, this got me thinking about toasting forks.  Back in the day at university, we used to stick a fork in a piece of bread then hold it in front of the flames of a gas fire until it made toast.  This, I suppose, in many ways is the reverse of the Searzall, and in any case it probably wouldn’t have worked so well with foie gras.

Of course we used ordinary domestic forks, but there are some very elegant toasting forks out there, both antique and modern.  And I must say that in the rooms of Tree Court we never got as far as toasting crumpets.  But I think we should have.

And now I just got an email from Sam Bompas, of Bompas and Parr fame, and wouldn’t you know it, as is their way, they’ve been taking things too far.  They’ve been cooking with lava. Yep, you heard right.

Sam writes, “Here's Harry cooking with lava last week at Syracuse University. Prof Robert Wysocki has over-clocked a copper smelter and we're working with him on a larger public gustatory event. The team there are brilliant. As the rock is heated to 2100F it cooks pretty quickly. They've done 100 pours but this was the first time the heat has been used to cook. Totally the funnest thing we've done all year.”

And the year is scarcely half over.  All of which makes smoking a duck in my “Masterbuilt electric smokehouse” (as I did over the weekend) seem a very modest enterprise indeed.  But believe me, that’s one heck of a good duck.

WELL, IF YOU HAD AN ACETYLENE TORCH AND A SANDWICH ....

... then why wouldn't you?

The artist is Arthur Sarnoff, and here it is in another manifestation:

and here, in "life."  You see see that the model is having some (understandable) trouble 

holding those slices of bread together:

EATING AND BLUFFING

These days the late broadcaster Robert Robinson is regarded as a figure of fun, if he’s regarded at all.  Partly it was the comb over, partly it’s having been thoroughly mocked by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie doing a parody of “Call my Bluff.”

Robinson used to present a radio show called “Stop the Week” which was referred to by people I knew as “Clever Dicks”.   The show was broadcast on Saturday afternoons, but they evidently recorded it on Fridays, and after the show, Robinson and his fellow broadcasters would go drinking in a famous pub just down from the BBC, called the George. 

I was working in a bookshop in the same area and some of us would also go into the same pub after work.  We never quite got over the fact that Robinson usually wore a rakish hat.

Anyway, these days find myself having quite fond memories of Robinson.  And I’m particularly fond of a slim volume he wrote, titled The Dog Chairman – a collection of very short prose pieces and the occasional longer essay (hey, he interviewed Borges!).  The title refers to an offer he had to make a commercial where he would have been chairman leading a discussion of dogs talking about dog food.  He declined.

There’s another piece in the collection titled “How Not To Write Books” in which he discusses his attempts to write a memoir of his days at Oxford.  He says he could never come up with the sort of stuff his publisher wanted.  He writes, “I kept conjuring up terribly literal tableaux, like the time a man called Young tipped up a plate of sausage, beans and chips into his lap at the Lyons in Cornmarket Street.  He leant on it with his elbow and it turned right over.    He just sat looking down at the beans running into his turn ups and I think he was on the verge of tears.  We were all very interested in food in those days – that’s to say we liked it copious and cheap – and Young had actually paid for an extra portion of the beans.  ‘I’ll always be one __ing  dinner down,’ he said quietly, when he’d got control of himself, ‘and, as you all know, I was proud of the trousers.’”

There’s also a short piece, not quite a review, of the British Good Food Guide, always an easy publication to mock (and now published by Waitrose I understand), and I don’t know what edition he’s writing about but obviously pre-1982 since that’s when his collection was published. 

He describes a restaurant near Oxford Street, which would therefore be close to the BBC and the George and the bookshop where I used to work, “run by a family called the Wees, and specializing in marinated bracken shoots, and another not far away where they not only don’t have a licence, you mustn’t bring your own drink either because says the Guide, ‘they disapprove’.”  He swears he’s not making this up.