TROUBLE WITH THE FOOD GODS

 Following up from the previous post, I’ve been thinking about mushrooms.  

I actually think about mushrooms pretty regularly.  Mushrooms are (very 

often) on the ground to begin with, so the five second rule obviously 

doesn’t apply there.  On the other hand, not all mushrooms are to be 

snatched up and eaten.

My friend Nick who used to be a hospital administrator, tells the story of a family – mother, father, two children - who came to the hospital complaining of stomach pains.  They’d been out foraging and had eaten some dodgy mushrooms. They were admitted to hospital – AND ALL FOUR OF THEM NEEDED LIVER TRANSPLANTS!!

 

This has made Nick, and me too, very wary about eating mushrooms in the wild.  I have a couple of books that supposedly help you identify them, and I’ve even played around with an app, but I remain unconfident about my identification abilities.  This, of course, has nothing to do with them being on the ground.

 

Above is one of the more melancholy photographs I’ve ever taken – at the seaside in Walton on the Naze.  This sad ice cream was just lying there on the stepped parapet at the seafront.  You know there must be a backstory, very possibly one involving some unhappy and disappointed child who dropped it.  Unless maybe the child was peevish and discarded the ice cream while having a tantrum. Also, I admit, the ice cream isn’t quite on the ground, but it’s definitely heading that way.

 

And just so you know that the food gods are there to punish you if you start feeling the slightest confident, yesterday afternoon, I knocked a tub of cream out of the fridge and onto the floor.

 

I know there’s no use crying over split milk, but couldn’t an exception possibly be made for split cream?

THE FIVE SECOND RULE (NOT)

If you walk about ten minutes due south from where I live you come to a 

small public orchard, or anyway a small group of apple trees, planted I 

suppose in the interests of saving the planet. And there, at this time of 

year, on the ground are hundreds of apples that have fallen off the trees.  

I’ve been known to gather up a few of these wormy old fruits to put in my 

compost bin, and I’ve picked a fair number of apples off the trees and 

eaten them.  They’re crisp and a bit sour, and just the kind I like, though I 

couldn’t tell you the breed.

This reminded me of a recent walk I did, I did not very far from home, around some potato fields, where a good many discarded or rejected potatoes by the potato harvester machine, and could be snatched up from the ground, and they were, by me and my walking companions. Not the potatoes in this picture, obviously.

 

And OK, you may say, ‘Well of course there are edible things on the ground where you live, in a very slightly rural bit of Essex.’

 

And this is true enough, but a couple of weeks ago I was in London, in Spitalfields.some and there were ‘windfall’ potatoes to be had right there on the ground.  I imagine they’d fallen off the back of a lorry but they looked perfectly edible (apart from the odd one that had been run over) though I admit I didn’t swoop down on them.

And then, because I go around taking pictures of these things,  I remembered this perfectly good looking piece of bread, close to the rear tyre of a pickup truck in Los  Angeles. They have everything in that city!  But again I didn’t forage it.

STEW

Want to see what my stew and Yorkshire pudding looks like?

Well, what harm could it do?

JARDIN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS, AND BARGAINS

 No doubt, like me, you’ve been reading about the efforts to get young people in Japan to drink more alcohol.  And no, I have no idea what the guys the picture below are drinking. Milk?  Ouzo?

 

Well ere’s my plan – reduce the price!

 

My local supermarket had a couple of bottles of Adnams Jardín Mexicano Gin on sale, ‘reduced to clear,’ down from £32.95 to £17.79. Of course I would never have bought it at 33 quid but at £17.95 I thought it was worth a punt.

 

The label says, inscrutably, that it’s an ‘Avocado and botanical gin’ and that singular through me for a while. Just the one botanical?  But the Adnams website explains that it’s made with juniper and angelica, so far much as expected, but then, ‘There are also warming notes of cinnamon from Cassia Bark, a punchy woodiness from the Mexican herb, Epazote and a smoky hint of Chipotle Chilli in the background. The addition of Coriander leaf and Mexican Oregano (which is related to Verbena) and Lime Peel created the underlying citrus freshness, much like that found in Mexican salsa.’ 

 

A first taste test suggest they may be exaggerating its specialness - though I think I detected some hotness - but it tastes fine and hey, it’s alcohol and it’s cheap (ish).

THE SANDWICH COLLECTOR

I’ve often mocked the idea of the ‘sandwich recipe.’  I mean, you take some food that you like and you put it between slices of bread and that’s really the only recipe you need.

 

And yet and yet … this hasn’t stopped me forming (even curating) a small collection of sandwich books – many of them American, so there’s a lot of recipes for BLTs, Reubens, Po’boys and so on. And to be fair there is the occasional recipe in these books that I couldn’t imagine inventing, let alone eating, such as, in Sandwich Exotica, ‘the peanut butter-sardine and potato salad-lettuce on rye.”

 

So when I saw in the local charity shop the Encyclopedia of Sandwichesby Susan Russo, photography by Matt Armendariz, how could I resist buying it?

 

It’s American again – and contains such gems as how to make a ham sandwich – bread, ham, mustard or mayonnaise. Yes, really.

 

But hold your horses - there’s a recipe in there for a potato chip sandwich (that’s potato crisps to the British) which the author describes as ‘a crunchy salty guilty pleasure.’  I don’t generally do guilt when it comes to food, but in fact the potato crisp sandwich does strike me as slightly shameful.

 

But here Susan Russo comes up with a variation I again would never have dreamed of – ‘creamy peanut butter, 2 slices of white bread, 4 to 6 dill pickle chips, a layer of your favorite plain potato chips.’

 

Well that sounded kind of dubious, so of course I had to make one.  I wasn’t sure I’d ever had a dill pickle chip so I used sliced pickle gherkins.  And I would probably have used crunchy peanut butter but the recipe called for creamy, so I went with smooth.  And I didn't have any acceptable white bread.

 

How was it?  It tasted just fine.  But I do wish I’d used white bread, and I think it would have been better if I’d used twice as much of all the contents.  All my own fault. We never stop learning about the sandwich. 

 

WOULD YOU LIKE US TO ASSIGN SOMEONE TO MAKE YOUR MARTINI?

 You know how you could sell more booze round here?

 

Fill the bloody glasses!

 

This was at 5^th View which is on the top floor of Waterstone’s bookshop in Piccadilly, an  improbable little watering hole that I’ve been going to for a few years.  Books and martinis go together (obviously) and the martinis used to be better than anybody has a right to expect in a bookshop, especially since they do a ‘two for one’ deal.

 

But last week there was something not right.  The staff seemed harassed and sullen. I said I wanted the 2 for 1 but could I have one now and one later, so the second one wouldn’t get warm?

 

Nope.  I had to have 'em both at the same time because of ‘staff shortages.’

 

Since there were 2 of us drinking this wasn’t a great problem, but really - sullen and harassed is no way to serve a martini.  And if you ask for olives you don’t want lemon peel – but I just didn’t need the angst – and I’m sure the staff didn’t either.

THE OUT OF SCALE SANDWICH

 I like Sarah Lucas’s art, and I like the idea of Sarah Lucas.  

I was once eating lunch in St Johns restaurant and I noticed this incredibly charismatic woman sitting a few tables away.  There seemed to be nothing very remarkable about her and yet she was incredibly compelling. I suppose that’s how it is with charisma.  It was, of course Sarah Lucas.  This was long before she was nearly as famous as she is now.

 

So last weekend off we went to see her piece Sandwich, one of 20 works around the City of London, part of the annual ‘Sculpture in the City’ programme.

 

On the train to London I read Private Eye and Sarah Lucas had made into Pseud’s Corner (tis a consummation devotedly to be wished) with this description of the work in question:

“Sarah Lucas’s recent large-scale sculpture, Sandwich, 2011-2020, stands in opposition to traditional public sculpture. Its horizontal configuration opposes veneration and pomposity through its prosaic absurdity and functional accessibility. Mining at themes of British culture, Lucas ambiguously transposes the humble sandwich on a monumental scale with a metaphoric and literal sense of hyperbole; simultaneously satirizing and celebrating the commonplace foodstuff as a proletariat symbol. The material austerity of the work in concrete, elevates and inverts the object’s ordinariness with irreverent humour.”

 

The Sculpture in the City website says “© Sarah Lucas, Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London” but I don’t know if Sarah Lucas actually wrote that. I hope not unless the pretentious art-speak nonsense is also part of the joke.

 

Anyway, Sandwich is indeed austere – which I liked – just a plain concrete thing and you couldn’t guess what was the filling was.  And of course I thought about the recently late Claes Oldenburg’s Giant BLT, 1963, which which looks like this: 

 

It’s colourful and overstuffed, with the filling spilling out.  And maybe that’s Sarah Lucas’s point.  The American sandwich is an exuberant and extravert thing, while the English sandwich is plain and muted. 

 

And the great thing about Oldenburg’s Giant BLT is that it’s made up of various components (just like a BLT in the real world) and these components have to be put together again whenever the sculpture’s moved and reinstalled.  Isn’t that kind of wonderful?

 

And it so happened that later in the weekend I was passing an Aldi supermarket, and I went in and they were selling pre-packed BLTs, so in honour of dear departed Claes, and partly in honour of Sarah Lucas, I bought one.  It looked like this (not a work of art):

But it really didn’t taste bad at all.

 

SOME LAME PUN ABOUT HEAD, HEADY AND HEDY

 That's all I need to hear

FOREWARNED

 If you find yourself in the caff at the Cambridge Botanic Garden and you're allergic to gluten, sesame, dairy, nuts and pork, then you'd probably be better off not ordering the Parma ham, pesto, cheddar and rocket focaccio sandwich.  Just sayin'.

The one in the back is feta and spinach - slightly safer.  If you're looking for safety in your meals.

PLUM SANDWICH

 You recall me banging on a few posts back about Raymond Chandler and 

sandwiches.

 

I can’t think of Chandler without also thinking of PG Wodehouse – two men who performed miracles with the English language while remaining not quite English and not quite American. Hell, they even went to the same school – Dulwich College - though not quite at the same time.

 

And therefore it will come as no surprise that Wodehouse thought and wrote about sandwiches, as in this passage from ‘Jeeves and the Old School Chum,’ the ‘old chum’ being Bingo Little:

 

‘If young Bingo has a fault, it is that, when in the society of a sandwich he is apt to get a bit rough. I’ve picnicked with him before, many a time and oft, and his method of approach to the ordinary tongue or ham sandwich rather resembles that of the lion, the king of beasts, tucking into an antelope.'

 

Predictably I can’t find a picture of PG tucking into a sandwich, but there’s this:

And, of course, there's always this:

EATING THINGS

 I’ve been reading Georges Perec’s, ‘Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four,’ first published in 1976.

And a fine French inventory it is, containing, among many others, Coquilles St-Jacques, two chateaubriands, one jellied daube, 22 dishes involving rabbit, and he scores 75 cheeses, though he doesn’t list them all.  He also has ‘two stewed rhubarb and quetsch.’  I’d never heard of quetsch but apparently it’s either a kind of plum and/or a kind of Alsatian plum brandy.  

 

Did I have food and drink envy while reading?  You bet.

 

In the days of social media many of us, one way or another, make inventories of our lives. My plan in this case was to count up how many different things Perec ate in 1974, then I could calculate how many of those things I’d ever eaten in my entire life.

 

But arriving at a number for Perec is hard.  Some of the language, and of course I’m reading in translation, is strangely ambiguous.

 

For instance he states ‘eight pâtés’ but then he makes a list of pâtés – ‘one duck pâté, one pâté de foie with truffles, one pâté en croute, one pâté grand mere, six pâtés des Landes.  Now this adds up either to 5 or 10, possibly to a grand total of 18.  But if it’s 5, then are these included in the original eight?  And if that’s the case then what were the other two?  Why leave them unnamed?

 

It doesn’t get any simpler with sandwiches which he lists as ‘six sandwiches, one ham sandwich, one rillettes sandwich, three Cantal sandwiches.’  Again – you do the maths.  Is this 6 or 9, or possibly 11?  He is a literary tease.  And who knows if any of this inventory is actually true?

 

My own yearly inventory would include hundreds of sandwiches.  I have one for lunch pretty much every day because it’s easy.  Of course I miss one or two but there are sometimes breakfast sandwiches and even the occasional sandwich for dinner.  I don’t think Georges Perec would have envied me one bit.

 

This is the closest I’ve come to a picture of Perec ingurgitating:

"ALL THAT ENDURES IS CHARACTER"

 Look, I don’t know much about marketing or branding or indeed Belgium, but it seems to me that if I were trying to come up with a name for a premium strong Belgian beer I wouldn’t have chosen ‘OJ.’

 

Because either it makes you think of orange juice which is not very beer-positive, or it makes you think of OJ Simpson, the man acquitted of murder. Possibly it makes you think of both.

A little light research (i.e. my faithful reader Joel Turner tells me) OJ actually stands for Odo Joost 'one of the world's strongest men' but so far I haven't been able to find any reference to him that doesn't also related to the beer.  Further sleuthing may be required.

TOUGH GUYS DON’T EAT SANDWICHES. OR DO THEY?

I was doing one of my periodic rereads of Raymond Chandler, and inevitably new things leap out at you every time.  (Of course the sexual weirdness just seems weirder and weirder.)

This is the only picture I've ever seen of Chandler with a drink in his hand:

I’m well familiar with the martinis, the gimlets, the (surprising) Yorkshire pudding, but this time I was struck by the sandwiches.

 

In the High Window Marlowe says to some poor counter hand, ‘’Give me a cup of coffee, weak, and a very thin ham sandwich on stale bread.  No, I better not eat yet either.  Good-by.’

 

Earlier the book he goes to the Tigertail Lounge, orders ‘a martini and a sandwich’ and sits in ‘a shallow booth.’  What kind of sandwich goes best with a martini? 

 

And then, The Long Goodbye he goes into overdrive

‘I went to the drugstore and ate a chicken salad sandwich and drank some coffee. The coffee was over-strained and the sandwich was as full of rich flavor as a piece torn off an old shirt.  Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out at the sides, preferably a little wilted.’

 

This seems extremely harsh on Americans and the American sandwich, and also (if you ask me) inaccurate. 

 

Many of us have done a lot of pondering about which actor would be the perfect Marlowe.  Bogart’s OK by me, but I still think Mitchum is the MAN.

 

I can’t imagine Bogart’s Marlowe sitting down to a sandwich, much less making one.

 

But here’s Mitchum in the Michael Winner version of The Big Sleep, doing some sandwich construction.  Hard to tell if tooth picks are involved, but he is in England. I'm guessing not.

 

LONDON - NO PLACE FOR FOOD RUBES

The other weekend my very distinguished movie-world pal was in town from Berlin (not chiefly for my benefit) but we met on Sunday afternoon along with the lady friend, and after a walk in Regent’s Park we felt the need for cheesecake.

 

After much searching we ended up in EL&N, Market Place, just north east of Oxford Circus, very possibly in Fitrovia. They’re all over the place – one at least in Dubai.

 

It was, I think you’d have to say, a gendered space, all pink, and full of girls with low cut flowery dresses and spray on tan.  But I’m the kind of dude who can cope with that. 

The shoutline of EL&N according to its website, is ‘Most Instagrammable café in the world.’  

So obviously I didn’t put the above pic on Instagram, not least because frankly it didn’t look all that fabulous.

 

It tasted fine but since it cost 8 quid I did feel mildly ripped off, like I was some rube who’d fallen into a hideous tourist trap.  Which I suppose I was.

 

It was that kind of day.

 

Later four of us went to possibly the least authentic Japanese restaurant I’ve ever been to, Tonkotsu on Dean Street, Soho:

 

There was not a Japanese person in sight either as staff or customer, though the food was perfectly OK. The 'seasoned egg' tasted much better than it looked.

 

But our waiter – name of Fernando (I know because it said so on the bill) - charged us for a course we sent back because we hadn’t ordered it.  We only realized this after we’d paid up and left.  Of course we were fools not to have scrutinized the bill for waiterly malfeasance at the time, but sometimes you don’t want to have to do that. Call me a rube.  Perhaps you already did.