CHIMPS WITH EVERYTHING

Even the most jaded, sensation-seeking omnivore (that would be me) has to draw the line somewhere, and I think the eating of our fellow primates is as good a place to draw it as any.

And so I was vaguely alarmed, if not really all that surprised, to learn that The Beatrice Hotel, in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo had been offering on its menu ‘bébé chimpanzé fumé.”  24 hours notice required and about £27, a pop.

This is apparently illegal because the chimpanzee is a protected species in the DRC.  In fact it’s illegal ‘to hunt, injure, kill, sell or buy, gift or detain’ a protected species of animal or plant, and a criminal complaint has been lodged against the hotel by a local conservation group.

The hotel management blamed it all on a cook who’d made a ‘mistake’ and the generally expressed sentiment is that it’s those darned Asians who are driving the trade, but this isn’t 100% convincing. 

Adams Cassinga of the group Conserv Congo was quoted as saying that at any given time in Kinshasa there are at least ten great apes for sale; though I think these may not all get eaten.  But he also says that red-tailed monkeys are butchered in hundreds every day as ‘bush meat.’

 Although I have no intention of eating chimp, or any other kind of bush meat, I did start to wonder what it tasted like.  Presumably the smoking changes the flavour a lot, but I did find on Quora, a man who goes by the moniker Jonny Shortcake (possibly not his real name) who says he had monkey meat when he was Marine Corps in the Philippines undergoing jungle survival training.  He doesn’t say what kind of monkey he ate, but having captured one they boiled it he concludes ‘all I can say is it’s tough and chewy it’s not unlike squirrel.’  Which, of course, begs another question.

In any case, I’m somehow glad to know that it doesn’t just taste like chicken.

Above is a chimp smoking as opposed to being smoked.

SNACKALICIOUS (NO, NOT REALLY)

Man, you know the party’s over when it’s past twelfth night and all you have in the house by way of snacks are ‘Pigs in Blankets’ flavoured crisps and special festively packaged mini twiglets.  Though admittedly there are times when you want the party to be over.

THE QUEEN AND IT

There was a lot of stuff in the media over Xmas about the Queen being a martini drinker. This seemed somehow cheering, though it was all a bit of an echo chamber; the information bouncing around between English tabloids, Vanity Fair, Food And Drink, and  Business Insider and others. 

‘Royal expert’ Ingrid Seward was quoted as saying said: 'I think the Queen likes a martini,’ though I’d have expert a royal expert to be less tentative. So I tried to find a picture of her majesty sipping a silver bullet.  I haven't found one yet. There are a zillion pictures of her drinking champagne but not a martini in sight.  (Gosh, the queen does have big, manly hands).

She apparently has the martini with dinner, which may possibly be the reason we’re not allowed to see it.  Let me explain. 

My contacts with the royal family, surprisingly, are not quite zero: I was once introduced to the Duke of Edinburgh at a reception and dinner for the Greenwich Festival.  He seemed a man of some charm.  I assume he was gritting his teeth throughout the episode, but he hid it perfectly.

I can’t remember whether or not I saw him with a drink in his hand, but I do know that when it came time to eat he and the other VIPs (though I suppose nobody was more ‘I’ than him), went to a table on a dais and screens were drawn around them.  The word was that royals were not allowed to be seen eating.  I have never heard this from any other source but on that night it certainly applied.  And if the queen has her martini while eating dinner that may explain why we’re not allowed to see it..

Still, keeping up family traditions here’s Charles drinking a martini in a gin distillery in Northumberland at11 o’clock in the morning.  That’s the royal spirit.

HOGGING THE PASTY

Like I said, I went to Cornwall, and had a Cornish Pasty in St. Ives.  This one:

The ‘L’ in the pastry stands for lamb, and I know that lamb is not an authentic filling for a real Cornish Pasty. The shop where I bought this one also sold steak and stilton pasties, which I thought sounded OK, but would have been even less authentic.

But this was the least of it – other shops were selling unthinkable variations: Red Thai Chicken Curry!  Chicken, Bacon, Chirizo!!

Later that same weekend, eating at the Seven Stars pub in Stithians I was hoping a Cornish pasty would be on the menu, so I could order one for compare and contrast purposes.  I was disappointed but settled for the turkey and ham pie, which was no less of a pasty than some of those others.

Still I think the real culinary adventure I had in Cornwall was buying a Cornish Hogs Pudding from RJ Trevarthan, Wholesale Butcher and Livestock Hauliers.  And for those who like to know about local sourcing and provenance, the label even had details of where the hog was slaughtered – at the Roskrow Abattoir, Roskrow, Penryn.

When it was cooked, the hogs pudding looked like this:

WHAT'S THE BEEF?

Hands across the religious divide, in Premier Halal Butchers in Walthanstow.

A DRINK WITH MANY THINGS IN IT

If you’re like me, by which I mean (among other things) not Canadian, you may not be familiar with the taste, the look or even the name of Labrador Tea, Nordic Juniper, Crowberry, or Cloudberry. These are Canadian Botanicals, and now, to a strictly limited extent, I’m familiar with all of them.  These along with some other things – Wild Rose Hips and something called Artic Blend - are ingredients in Ungava Canadian Premium Gin.

There was a little cardboard sleeve around the neck of the bottle I bought, telling me about those botanicals, along with some tiny black and white images.  Here they are in colour: see if you can tell which is which. 

Ungava is, apparently, an Inukitut word meaning ‘towards the open water’ and Ungava was a district in the Northwest Territories subject to changing boundaries and administrative status.  It no longer exists as far as I can tell, though there’s still an Ungava Bay.

The gin is incredibly yellow – hence a prime candidate for ‘a yellow, a mellow martini’ (per Ogden Nash) even without vermouth.

Though, just in case, Ungava also make a Vermouth called Kayak.  It contains, you guessed, Canadian botanicals.

EYES AS BIG AS YOUR BELLY

In the post-Warholian universe, a large part of the artist’s job involves pointing at things.  Another large part involves framing.  Of course, pointing is easier than framing and here I am in the Photographers’ Galley in London pointing at a 1992 photograph by Hannah Collins titled Sex 2, Plural/Wet.  

The wall text, which I’m standing in front of, has things to say about oysters’ similarity to female genitalia, which struck me as a tiny bit old hat.

The exhibition is rather good and is titled Feast for the Eyes – The Story of Food in Photography largely based on the book of the same name (or maybe it’s the other way round) which I reviewed for the Los Angeles Review of Books: here:

https://psycho-gourmet.blogspot.com/2017/07/lunch-and-other-distractions.html

It’s strange, given my love of oysters, that the Hannah Collins image didn’t leap out at me from the book.  On the wall it’s amazing.  And let’s face it, it’s hard to photograph oysters well.

But this is something I go back and forth with.  Sometimes books seem the best way to look at and appreciate photographs, sometimes it seems you have to see them on a wall. 

Still, the one part of the exhibition that really needs to be seen in the flesh, or at least in glossy laminate, are these Weight Watchers cards:

 Over the years I’ve known quite a few people who’ve had success with Weight Watchers, and the system does apparently work for some people, including my own former GP.

Even so I can’t imagine anybody I know tackling the majority of the recipes on these cards, though I certainly do wish someone would tackle the Aspic-Glazed Lamb Loaf and invite me round.

ONE MORE AVO

Just for the sake of completeness, here's Angie Dickinson with a (rather small) slice of avocado.

MORE AVO

Well, I tracked down some avocados at the Tesco Metro, (I mean it wasn't exactly an expedition) and a can of lump crab (i.e the white stuff) at the Co-op – a squirt of mayo, some lemon juice, a bit of seasoning and I was ready to go all Sylvia Plath:

It tasted fine and there was no food poisoning: so win, win.

And I did a bit more avocado research. It seems they were a tough sell in Britain partly because of the name ‘avocado pear.’  People assumed that since it was called a pear you could just bite into it, like a pear.  Some education was required and provided.  This is Australian:

I also discovered from Alan Davidson’s Oxford Book of Food that one of the first Europeans to eat an avocado was Fernandez de Oviedo (spellings differ) 

who ate it with cheese, as though it was an apple.  Other Spaniards added sugar, which I suppose made it more like a pear in certain respects.

THE NOT SO DUD AVOCADO

I remember my first avocado very clearly.  At my college you were assigned a tutor who was responsible for your moral and emotional welfare.  This included, and was pretty much limited to, inviting you round to his house for dinner with him and his wife, once in the entire three years.

And we had an avocado salad starter. At least I was pretty sure it was. I’d heard of avocados, might even have seen a picture of one, but I’d certainly never tasted one.  Obviously I didn’t want to humiliate myself by asking what I was eating, and in retrospect I do know that it was avocado.  It tasted good, even if it wasn’t quite the exotic sensation I’d been expecting.

These days I don’t eat avocados as much as I used to – and I’ve never eaten one on toast - but right now I’m in the middle of reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar – published in 1963 but set in New York in 1953, a time when I’d have thought that very, very few people in Britain were eating avocados.  Of course everybody else already knows how great The Bell Jaris, but I was especially taken by a scene in which the heroine goes to a fancy lunch and has an avocado filled with crab meat.  Something like this, I imagine (thanks LoveofCooking):

I was reading the book in bed last night and it sounded so good that I thought, first thing tomorrow I’ll be off down the shops buying an avocado and some crab meat (the latter in a can, no doubt).

But then I read on and it turns out that the crab gives ptomaine poisoning to everybody at the lunch. Plath is also great at describing the strangely mixed pleasures of throwing up.

To be honest this did blunt my appetite a bit as I fell alseep, but by the afternoon of the next day I was feeling strong enough to go down to the Co-op and buy an avocado or two.  I arrived there  - and they didn’t have any.  Is it possible that the avocado in England has become SEASONAL? 

THREE LITTLE BIRDS TOLD ME

Yeah well, some say the glass is slightly full, I say it’s nearly empty.  See top left:

And it only got emptier. See even further left

 And what is, or was, in the glass?  It’s a “Caliente” – “Scotch Bonnet Tequila, Agave and Lime” – it was very fine.

We were in Three Little Birds in Brixton, “Jamaican Inspired Tapas and Rum Cocktails.”  The shrewd observer might note that there’s no rum in a Caliente, but we can live with that.  The cocktail was grand. as was the food, especially the goat stew. You can see it foregrounded in the pics above.

All pics by Luna Woodyear Smiff.

CHEERING FOR CHRISTMAS

Yes, Christmas comes but once a year, though it comes and stays for a very long time.  Mince pies started appearing in supermarkets in these parts in late September – and of course I bought some.  Why do mince pies have a star on them?  Is it the star of Bethlehem?  Did the wise men come bearing mince pies?  There seems to be no biblical authority for this.

 And t’other day - November 7th to be precise - I was getting on a train at Liverpool Street, and in need of a sandwich I bought a Turkey Feast baguette from an Upper Crust shop.  

I ate it on the train.  I had one of those little fold down tables in front of me, and if I’d been at home I’d have dissected the contents to see exactly what was inside, but that didn’t seem quite right on a crowded train.  So I looked and I tasted and I made my best guesses.  Actually in other circumstances it might have been hard to guess that the sliced meat was turkey, it could have been chicken or even ham.

There was certainly lots of stuffing and I think those flakey bits you see on top are onion but I wouldn’t swear to it.  There were also some leaves.  Working out what else was in the depths was harder.  There was sliced sausage – chipolatas I suppose - and I could taste cranberry sauce. And then I realized there was cheese in there, brie I think, though if they’re going all Xmas I don’t know why they didn’t use stilton.  In fact I don’t know why they didn’t go the whole hog and shove a slice of Christmas pudding in there too.   

I’m not really complaining, or at least only a bit – it went down perfectly well and it all gets mixed up in your stomach anyhow.

Was it festive?  No, not exactly.  Did it seem a bit early in the year for a Christmas sandwich?  I’d say yes, but what do I know?  I tell myself I can eat mince pies any day of the year and when they appeared in the shops in late September I fell upon them eagerly. Now, as we approach mid-November I feel I’ve already had enough to last me a while, possibly to the end of the year – although maybe I’ll get a second wind nearer to Christmas Day. I hope so, though the turkey I could probably do without.

On the other hand, I did just tuck into a Christmas pudding.  Nice packaging 

and a product that looked like an Xmas jelly.

SWEET AND SOUR

What’s the point of having friends if they don’t give you stuff?  And what’s the point of having friends who go to exotic places if they don’t come back bearing food treats?

My pal Mariette returned from Sao Paolo with a box of Banana Passa:

which I imagined would be insanely sweet but they aren’t – they’re justvery sweet, but also very chewy, and somehow the effort of chewing means that you don’t get the sweetness all in one burst, which suited me fine.

And then my pal Jason showed up, back from Normandy with a bag of apples, mostly cider apples I think – and they’re great – not all the same variety – some very sour indeed some only semi-sour.

He also produced a bottle of Normandy cider – demi-sec it says on the label, which he says is the main reason he decided to move to Normandy.  It was very fine, but I wouldn’t have complained if it had been a little sourer.