TRUFFLING

You know, until a few weeks back I could have said I was a truffle oil virgin.  Maybe a dribble had snuck in here and there in some restaurant or other without my knowledge, but I’d certainly never undergone the full ravishment.  And really all I knew (and to a large extent all I still know) about truffle oil I learned from the TV cooking show Chopped.  Whenever a contestant uses it in a dish the judges howl and pull faces as if they’ve been served turds on toast.

But as fate would have it I recently stumbled into the London Cocktail Club, in Shaftesbury Avenue, a place where this kind of thing goes on:

It was late-ish, and I was feeling devil may care, and frankly the place was so dark you could barely read the cocktail menu, and so I ordered a “Dirty Truffle Martini.”  

When it came it looked like this:

I couldn’t really taste the truffle oil, but that might be because I don’t really know what truffle oil tastes like, and in fact the drink just tasted like a salty vodka martini, which is perfectly fine, if a bit steep at ten quid, and I felt perfectly fine, but can't say I felt a "bit posh."

Still, if you really want to push the boat out there’s always the “Fountain of Truth” for 200 quid – serves 28 supposedly:

I suppose that works out at less than a tenner a head and might therefore (conceivably) be considered a bargain, although I haven’t been able to find a picture of it.  I hope it comes looking like this, but I suspect it doesn’t.

BROWN AND STAINED

 There was a piece in last Sunday’s New York Times in which Norman Podhoretz reminisced about the days when passions ran high at serious literary parties.  Fists were known to fly.  That’s Podhoretz below:

He once gave Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March a bad review.  That’s Bellow, below:

Podhoretz says in the New York Times piece, “Bellow wouldn’t speak to me for years. It was only when he decided he couldn’t stand Alfred Kazin anymore that we became sort of friendly. We were sitting together in a meeting, Saul and I, and Kazin was over there, and he said, ‘Look at him, he looks like he just ate a pastrami sandwich out of a stained brown piece of paper’ …”  That’s Kazin below:

Now, I suspect I’m not alive to all the ethnic and social ramifications at play here because I don’t see what’s so wrong with looking like you just ate a pastrami sandwich.  I mean I’m not sure there’s only one way a person might look having just eaten a pastrami sandwich; but I imagine contented would be one of them.  And what's wrong with that?  So maybe the problem’s with the stained brown piece of paper.  Is that a class thing?  Maybe.  But surely a good pastrami sandwich is always likely to be wet and runny, and to stain whatever it’s wrapped in, isn’t it?  Anybody got any views?

THE PIE AND I

I thought you might enjoy seeing some more pie imagery.  The two below were served at Hardwick Hall a few years back.

The received wisdom is that British pies are chiefly savory, American pies chiefly sweet – after all, the lad in the movie does not insert his business in among the steak and kidney.

But the rules are blurred.  Of course the British eat sweet pies, apple pies, mince pies, and here’s a rhubarb pie I made earlier (it isn’t the greatest looking pie in the world but it tasted just fine, trust me:

Meanwhile in the USA, you can get a chicken pot pie just about anywhere, and even apparently turkey pies, though I can’t say I’ve ever eaten one.

In any case it seems that this sweet/savory dichotomy is a comparatively recent development.  Modern British and modern American food have evolved from a common ancestor.   American food has become ever less like its old fashioned British counterpart, which it once resembled.  This may be because of jingoism but I think it’s more likely to be because a very different set of immigrants has settled in each country.  I think you’ll have to go a very way in the States to find a curry pie.

But back in the day there was far more of this kind of thing in America:

Interesting too to see that this one is made with canned stew – that was how my mother made her pies back in Yorkshire.

And digging around online I found this extraordinary ad – pizza in the shape of a "real" pie.  

It also once raises the question of whether pineapple belongs with pizza.  You and I, of course, think it doesn’t.  Some, evidently, take a different view.

Meanwhile the British pie continues to mutate.  I suspect the pork pie party may be gone forever, alas:

But Wall’s are – or were – offering, the pepperoni pizza slice which seems to be some kind of missing link between pies and pizzas, without resembling (or improving on) either.  An evolutionary dead end, I'd say.  And I’m not sure whether to be comforted or not by the fact that it’s a "limited edition,"  I mean, please, really.

And finally here’s The Fairy’s Pie or “All the Goodies in One Bite,” an advertising postcard for T. E. Dougherty’s New England Condensed Mince Meat Company, circa 1894.  A sweet pie, no doubt, but one containing beef and suet.  Fusion, yeah?

PIES

Who ate all the pies? Well it wasn’t me, not all of them, but I did my best when I was in England.  At the Founder’s Arms on the Thames, within site of St Paul’s and the Tate Modern, I went for Founder's Ploughman's Board.  It looked like this.

“Cropwell stilton, mature cheddar cheese, ham hock terrine, caramelized onions, gammon ham, hand raised pork pie, branston pickle, sourdough, gherkins,” it said on the menu, and it was all true.

Then I went to the Puckeridge Point to Point at Horseheath in Essex (yes, really),

where I had a couple of pies from the stall belonging to The Cheese and Pie Man.  They have a motto: “A pie is for Christmas not for life and a pie a day makes the day go quicker.”

The one on the left is duck and orange, and the one on the right is – wait for it - pork and black pudding.  Have mercy, Mr. Pie Man.

Pies have been on my mind partly because I’ve been reading Alexander Theroux’s forthcoming book Einstein’s Beets: An Examination of Food Phobias – 800 or so pages, exploding with the curiosities of gastronomy and it contains this description of Dr. Johnson’s eating style,

“Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled and the moisture broke out on his forehead.” No sign of this below:

Theroux quotes this from the Encyclopedia Britannica.  I think it’s originally from Macaulay’s Life of Johnson, but I don’t know where he got the information, not by observation, since he wasn’t born until some years after Johnson’s death.

Boswell doesn’t appear to be the source, though he does report Johnson as saying,  “I generally have a meat pie on Sunday: it is baked at a public oven, which is very properly allowed, because one man can attend it; and thus the advantage is obtained of not keeping servants from church to dress dinners,”

And then, in Manningtree, at a restaurant named Lucca, in fact on a Sunday, I had this calzone:

 I think a calzone is a pie by any other name. True it’s made with pizza dough rather than pastry, but then again pizzas are sometimes called pies which has always seemed misleading to me, and in any case the end result is still an edible container for whatever filling the chef decides on.  This was a Calzone di Mare:

         “Tomato, fior di latte mozzarella, calamari, clams, prawns, mussels, garlic, chill,” it says on the menu.

Boswell tells us that Johnson always ate fish with his fingers, “because I am short-sighted and afraid of bones.”I think he’d have been OK with the boneless Calzone de Mare.  I think his veins would have been standing right out, I think the moisture would have been on his forehead.