A TONIC FOR THE TROUPE

Sometimes I wonder when the gin bubble will burst and it’ll stop being cool.  Not any time soon I expect since, as my pal Jonathan and I were discussing, gin is essentially so very easy to make.  You take some neutral spirits (which are more or less vodka), add various flavors, historically juniper but these days take your pick – hyssop, frankincense, strawberries, whatever - mix ‘em up and there you have an artisanal uniquely flavored gin.  The possibilities are endless.  Exhaustingly so.

I was having this conversation in the Port House House on the Strand in London, a Spanish wine and tapas bar where they have a gin and tonic menu (of course they do).

What you see above on the left is made with Aviation Gin, which I thought was a basic  gin that I bought in California in supermarkets, but I guess I may have been wrong about that. There’s some lavender in there too. I forget the name of the gin in the one on the right (which is the same as the one at the top of this post) but there’s orange peel in the glass and it tasted vaguely of marmalade. 

And these were just fine but they weren’t the real reason I was there.  When I’d been there before I’d had the morcilla con heuvos cordones, black pudding from Burgos with a fried quail egg on top, which was spectacular - the morcilla rather than the egg - so I had to go back and have it again – and I did – and it was every bit as good as I remembered it, though now I’m thinking I could do it myself if I found a source for the right morcilla.

Also on the menu were Papas Arrugadas, Canarian wrinkled potatoes with a mojo sauce, which seemed irresistible but they were a disappointment – a bit soggy I’d have said, but maybe they were meant to be that way.  

Here’s something similar I made earlier, in fact years back. 

And as if my gin ruminations had come back to haunt me today I got some targeted advertising (yeah right) for non-alcoholic gin and tonic.  I mean, really, why would you? Really.

THE PLUCK THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

In the run up to Burns Night I overbought haggis.  At first I couldn’t find a big one so I bought two small ones and then I did find a big one so I bought that as well, and that was the one I cooked.  

The packaging said it served ten, and since there were only four of us at my humble Burns Night shindgig, I had some leftover.   As with so many things, not least Christmas turkey, and quite a few roasts, the leftovers sometimes seem better than the thing itself.

 So I made a haggis shepherds’ pie, and it was a blast

And then last week, stuck for something for dinner, I defrosted one of the small haggis’s which had been lurking in the freezer,  That was fine but again I had some leftovers and made a haggis breakfast scramble, which was ok but not fantastic.

Anyway as I was doing all this kept thinking about the great Calvin Trillin’s fantastically surreal line: “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.” 

Growing up in the Nicholson household we only ever had leftovers on Mondays, which were the remains of the Sunday roast.  My mother wasn’t good at roasting meat - she kind of boiled it in the oven.  She’d probably have done better with a haggis.

THE MERCURY SANDWICH

I've said it before so it must be true: there is no end to what can be done with a sandwich:

The attempted murderer, identified only as Klaus O., had a basic chemistry lab in his basement, which the Judge Georg Zimmermann described as "more dangerous than all combat agents used in World War II." I'm not sure I exactly know what that means, or what exactly a "combat agent" is in this context, but it does sound like a bit of unnecessary exaggeration.  Maybe it lost something in translation

Klaus O didn’t speak at his trial but prosecutors said they believed he wanted to see his colleagues’ physical decline.  Really?  You think?

DANDY IN ASPIC

And speaking of hippo foot jelly, as we were, this image just surfaced from the depths of the interwebs:

It’s lamb rather than hippo, but as I often say, I think that losing our taste for aspic has been a huge detriment to western civilization.  But who listens to me?  Of course when you think of jelly you think of Bompas and Parr, who used to be known as jellymongers, but are now described as “the leading expert in multi-sensory experience design.”

I read this on a leaflet accompanying an exhibition in the crypt of St Johns, Bethnal Green, titled The Scent of Other Worlds, sculptures by Lucy Hardcastle, smells by Design in Scent, and the whole thing sponsored by Virgin, designed to give you a sniff of what other planets in the universe might smell like. Mars was my favorite:

There was no jelly at the opening party but there were cosmopolitans that came in plastic pouches, like space cocktails, I suppose.  And when I got back home, I found that his image had surfaced too.  

There’s more that one way to jelly your lamb.

THE PIGS AND I

If you find yourself in, let’s say, South Woodford and you see a shop called Transylvanian House, well obviously you’re going to go in there, poke around and probably you’re going to buy something, aren’t you?

Yes, you are.  I bought a pack of smoked pigs' trotters- aka Picioruse Afumate:

And call me a fool but I thought, well they’re smoked so they’re already cooked, so all I need to do is warm them up and serve them with some sauerkraut and Bob (or perhaps Vladimir) is my uncle.

Turns out that neither Bob nor Vlad is my uncle.

The trotters may have been cooked hut they were hard, low on flesh, boney of course, and in the final analysis inedible.  Disaster: and all my own flair.

Poking around on the interwebs the correct method seems to be to stick ‘em in water in a pot and boil them for four hours and eat ‘em with beans.  I’ll know better next time, if there is a next time.

PARTY TIME

May and Merkel and a bunch of men in matching suits having breakfast at the League of Arab States-EU Summit, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.  

Is it just me or does that table somehow look as though it’s been set for a children’s party?  It's the bright blues and yellows I think.  Very grown up, comfy looking chairs though.

THE CHERRY ON THE HIPPO

Sometimes you know you have to buy a book even if you don’t know why. I was walking past a secondhand bookshop that had a couple of tables of books outside, and one of them just sang to me: Photographing Wild Life Across the World  by Cherry Kearton.  I’m interested in photography, not so much in wild life, but I’d never heard of Cherry Kearton, but something told me I needed this book.  The price was cheap enough and I snapped it up.  Alas, mine does not have this wonderful book jacket.

The book is over 300 pages long and contains just 84 photographs, some very small, and not very well reproduced, but then the book was published in 1923, an updated of a 1913 edition, so much can be forgiven.  This is one of the better pictures (though my scan is pretty shoddy):

It turns out that Cherry Keaton and his brother Richard, a couple of Yorkshiremen, more of less invented wild life photography and cinematography.  They took the first photograph of birds nests with eggs in them, in 1892.  I assume Cherry didn’t eat the eggs, though I could be wrong:

And now that I’ve been started reading it, I understand why this book was singing to me – it’s right there on the pages 116: “As a rule the only part of the hippo which a white man eats is the foot.  Personally, I think that hippo foot ranks with ortolans, caviar, and one of two other things which make you glad that you have to eat.  You boil it steadily for twelve hours – it looks like a lump of sinew at the outset – then let it set into a jelly.  It is impossible to describe the delicacy of its flavour.  You must have tried it in order to understand.”   Well yes, I suppose so.

He’s also very keen on hippo fat, “It is excellent for frying purposes and it makes the best pastry in the world. Hippo-fat shortbread would be impossible to beat.”  I would love the chance to find out.

BRACING

Which reminds me that when I was in Poundbury a couple of weeks back, I went to a shop called Brace of Butchers. They had some good looking meat and we were served by a  butcher named Ben Black, that's him below reaching for his meat.

But he did seem quite knowledgeable and when I bought a brace of faggots he said to roll them around in a hot trying pan to seal them, then put them in the oven, which I did.  Before:

And after:

And after that:

The Brace of Butchers website says they offer 64 different cuts of meat over the counter.  I was always a big fan of David Letterman’s Know Your Cuts of Meet – “America’s fastest growing quiz sensation” but I’m sure I couldn’t name 64 cuts of meat.

Also in Poundbury I went to a pub called the Poet Laureate and had a boar sausage sandwich with chips.  It was good.

There was no John Betjeman memorabilia, despite the pub name, but there was a collection of empty booze bottles lining the window sills, including two featuring porn personality Ron Jeremy.  

I have twice been in the same room as Ron Jeremy, once in New York, once in Los Angeles, and both times it felt that breathing the same air as him was a kind of violation.  On the other hand I’m told some people find him droll and charming, enough of them anyway for somebody to think that putting his mug on a bottle of booze might sell some units.

LOCAL EATING

A long time ago I used to live in Eynsford, in Kent; a very picturesque spot, with a bridge and a ford, and over the other side of the river a pub called the Plough which served shockingly bad food, and which I had more or less forgotten about.

I went there again yesterday, more or less by chance, and the memories came flooding back.  The years have gone by, the décor and the layout of the Plough have changed, and no doubt the ownership too, but the food has remained consistent.  You want an expensive steak sandwich with lots of bread and not much steak?  Then this is the place for you.  Actually the chips were OK.

However, naturally, they do have a fancy cocktail menu - that's the thing in the back with  a hummingbird on the cover - that you look at while waiting a very long time for the bad sandwich to arrive.  Now, you and I may wonder whether a place what can’t make a decent steak sandwich is really up to making Royal Negroni, but I didn’t find out: the Asahi Dry was good enough for me.

Eynsford had when I lived there, and still has, a decent butcher – which I’m sure mist also have changed hands over the years.  It’s now Norman’s:

I really wasn’t in the market for a pack of pork chipolatas, but I bought one, just so I could post this picture:

Local sourcing is everything.

TART AND CLOUDY

Funny thing about variety – the more you get, the more you want, although I think I might be about to contradict myself here.  Let me explain.

It being a slightly gloomy Saturday afternoon and the William Morris Gallery being closed (it’s always closed when I want to go there) we ended up in the Trap - “Walthamstow’s first cider taproom” they say, and I’m wondering how long it’ll be before the second one opens.  Possibly not long, the place seemed very popular.

 Ordering a flight of ciders seemed to be the way to go, and you tell the man behind the bar your preferences and I’m sure he does his best to oblige.  And he tells you what’s in the flight but of course by the time you’ve got to the table you don’t really remember what he said.

So I can’t absolutely tell you what we drank. I think there was Farmhouse Dry from Ross and Wye, and Willy Gun Cloudy Cider from Herefordhire.  There was certainly one that tasted of plums (and I think actually contained plums), and one that had been stored in rum barrels, which I thought tasted like homebrewed wine, which was OK in its way but not quite what you want from a cider.

And at the end of it I was left wondering whether I should just have had a pint of something tart and cloudy and settled for a lack of variety.  Next time.

     Incidentally, the furniture in the Trap was fabulously stylish and clever; also fabulously uncomfortable.

So the next day, being the mildly obsessive fellow I am, I went to Waitrose and bought 3 different ciders –two bottles and a can – as below.  A flight of one’s own.  You want tasting notes?  No, I thought not.

I liked the Truffler best, but oh dear the fine print.  Is it wrong to expect booze manufacturers to know proper English usage?  Yeah, probably.

SLOVENIAN SOCIAL SANDWICH EXPERIMENT

High crimes and misdemeanors, indeed

A member of the Slovenian parliament has stepped down after stealing a sandwich from a shop in Ljubljana where he says he was ignored by staff.

Darij Krajcic told local media he was annoyed at being "treated like air" and decided to test the supermarket's security by walking out.

The theft went unnoticed but the ruling Marjan Sarec List (LMS) party member insisted he later returned to pay.

Mr Krajcic has apologised, saying he regretted his "social experiment". 

His initial admission became public when he shared the anecdote with parliamentary colleagues in a committee meeting on Wednesday.

• Slovenia country profile 

"I must have stood some three minutes by the counter," the 54-year-old later explained to private TV channel POP. 

Three supermarket employees reportedly failed to notice him as they talked among themselves, resulting in the former professor to test their attention.

"Nobody came after me, nobody yelled," he said, suggesting an over-reliance on video surveillance meant staff sometimes "overlook something".

Fellow MPs initially laughed at the story, but on Thursday, the head of LMS' parliamentary faction, Brane Golubovic, condemned Mr Krajcic's actions as "unacceptable".

"He took responsibility for it and resigned of his own accord," Mr Golubovic told the press, "in line with LMS' high ethical standards."

Mr Krajcic was elected to parliament last September, when the centre-left LMS party of Prime Minister Marjan Sarec became the senior partner in the ruling coalition.

From the BBC website

LAFFS WITH THE LAUREATE

A funny thing. I happened to be near St. Pancras last Sunday.  I was looking for somewhere to eat and have a pint, and there was The Betjeman Arms, inside the station itself.  Pubs on railway stations are always potentially dodgy but invoking the name of the good, late, Sir John seemed somehow promising.

Of course St Pancras is a wonderful structure and the pub, within the old hotel  was wonderfully labyrinthine.  The Betjeman Arms has some (not wholly unreasonable),  aspirations to being a good restaurant: “Wayne, our Head Chef, has cooked up a delicious mix of traditional British favourites and modern classics to tempt you with, all made with the freshest ingredients.”  What could go wrong with ordering a plate of fish and chips.

Once the order had been placed at the bar, I looked for somewhere to sit down, and I spotted a couple of seats next to a wiry, and indeed wired, middle-aged, stubbly-faced bloke in a Sheffield Wednesday sweatshirt.

I make no boasts, but I like to think I can spot trouble at a distance, and this guy looked like trouble.  I found a seat some distance way and waited for the fish and chips to arrive.  And while I was waiting a fight broke out between Mr. Sheffield Wednesday and a big Irish bloke with a hipster beard.  Raised voices, hideous threats and lots of “strong language” ensued, and a guy from behind the bar stepped in and told them to take it outside which they did. Punches were thrown in an uncoordinated way and the Irishman seemed to “win,” at least to the extent that the Sheffield Wednesday bloke slipped away into the tube station.

A few minutes later two police women arrived and took statements from the bar staff and the Irishman who’d returned to the bar after vanquishing his antagonist.  It all seemed strangely amicable but I couldn’t help thinking that Mr. Sheffield Wednesday might have gone elsewhere and started another fight.

But by then the fish and chips had arrived and they were not bad at all.  The mushy peas really weren't very mushy, which seemed a good thing.

Betjeman, of course, is regarded as the savior of St Pancras station and the adjacent Midland Grand Hotel, built in 1868; architect George Gilbert Scott. The building I was sitting in was first a hotel, then the offices of British Rail who wanted to close and demolish the site, until Betjeman led a very successful campaign to keep it.

At the current Betjeman Arms they even serve Betjeman Ale:

And so this Sunday I found myself in the Blackfriar, a Nicholson’s Pub in Blackfriars: “Set in a historic, Art Nouveau Grade II masterpiece of a building, The Blackfriar was built in 1875 on the site of a Dominican friary. The building was designed by architect H. Fuller-Clark and artist Henry Poole, who were both committed to the free-thinking arts and crafts movement."

I thought freely, and ate a perfectly good plate of fish and chips, perhaps not as good as the ones at The Betjeman Arms though somewhat larger, 

And, no fight having broken out, I went downstairs to the loo and found the staircase was lined with photographs of John Betjeman.  Wouldn’t you know it?  He saved this place too!

         Betjeman seems not to have gone in for fist fights though he certainly liked a good public argument, and he certainly liked a good bottle of Burgundy.  He’s also a source,(though surely not the origin) of this kind of funny but also kind of predictable story:

“I expect you know that story of the ancient and reverend head of an Oxford college, a man of few words and those remarkable. Someone had brought a guest to the high table who was a confirmed teetotaler. At the end of dinner he was offered a glass of port, and proclaimed in a loud voice ‘I would rather commit adultery than drink a glass of port.’ Then, that ancient and reverend head of the house broke the silence by saying ‘And who wouldn’t?’”

But still, have a drink while you’re waiting.