THE FALL OF CHEESE

I was following one of my other mild obessessions, Mark E. Smith of the Fall, and I came across this quotation from the great man, “Blue cheese contains natural amphetamines. Why are students not informed about this?”

I guess he thinks they should be told so they can run out and buy a couple of pounds of Gorgonzola, although frankly I’d have thought good blue cheese was more expensive than most amphetamines. Admittedly this isn’t really my area.



Obviously Mark E. Smith is a fine character and he certainly knows his way around pharmaceuticals, but I still wasn’t convinced that there’s speed in blue cheese. A bit of research was required.

Smith is not alone in his belief. In fact, according Dr Neil Barnard author of Breaking the Food Seduction, “Cheese holds … drug-like compounds … It contains an amphetamine-like chemical called phenylethylamine, or PEA, which is also found in chocolate and sausage.” (The spelling is more usually phenethylamine, apparently.)



That seems to be saying it occurs in all cheese, not just the blue varieties.

And further research does indeed leave little doubt that phenethylamine-like chemicals do indeed occur in cheese, and phenethylamine is part of the same happy family as methamphetamine and MDMA (aka Ecstasy). There are plenty of sources online that will sell you the stuff as a diet aid.

Other sources say that phenethylamine is usually inactive when it’s taken orally because the body quickly breaks it down, and significant amounts never reach the brain.

So, eating huge quantities of blue cheese, it turns out, is unlikely to speed up your metabolism and give you that lean hungry, meth-head look, but I suppose we might have guessed that.



The best food story about Mark E. Smith appears in Stuart Maconie’s book “Cider With Roadies.” Maconie is in Smith’s flat after a boozy night out and Smith asks if he wants something to eat and Maconie says sure, so Smith goes into the kitchen and bangs around for twenty minutes or so and then comes out carrying two plates of potato crisp sandwiches (that’s potato chips in American parlance).

And because Smith is a good host, he asks Maconie, “Do you want a pickled onion with that?” I know I would have.

PRETENTIOUS, EUX?

And just to prove that pretension comes in many forms, I happened to be in Oceanside, near San Diego and saw in the near distance a sign for a place called “Auto Bistro.”

Well, we know things can get eclectic in Southern California. “Bistro” suggested something French-inspired, where you might expect to get a plate of rillettes, some boudin noir and a glass of Chablis.


“Auto” partly suggested a kind of drive through or maybe something like Jack Rabbit Slim’s in Pulp Fiction where they eat in car-shaped booths, but also the old fashioned Automat where you put money in a slot and got a hot pie out of a machine.


As is always the way, I was hoping for too much.


Auto Bistro turned out to be a gas station, and yes you could buy food there, but it was strictly gas station food: hot dogs, potato chips, beef jerky, etc; not a boudin noir in sight, though they did have minute bottles of olive oil for sale.

It revived thoughts of the only TV show I’ve ever thought I could present: The Gas Station Gourmet.

The pitch: I’d go around America in a VW camper, complete with sink, fridge and cooker, go to some down-home, backwoodsy sort of town, visit the local gas station, talk to the folks, buy whatever food they had on sale, and then I’d take it back to the camper where I’d perform culinary miracles. Interested parties should talk to my agent, soonest.

PUBLIC DICKS

I’ve been reading Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel “Inherent Vice.” As mentioned in an earlier post, Pynchon has a fine eye, nose and vocabulary, for bad food.

Doc Sportello, the novel’s private eye hero, and his lawyer Sauncho Smilax, go to a fish restaurant called the Belaying Pin. The waitress, name of Chlorinda, asks what’ll it be.

“Ordinarily I’d go for the Admiral’s Luau,” Sauncho more diffident than Doc expected, “but today I guess I’ll just have the house anchovy loaf to start and, um, the devil-ray filet, can I get that deep-fried in beer batter?’

Doc orders the jellyfish teriyaki croquettes followed by eel Trovatore.

The waitress recommends they drink Tequila Zombies. “You’ll want to be good and fucked up by the time this arrives.”


One of the many lazy things reviewers have said about the book is that it’s “Chandleresque,” which suggests to me they haven’t read either Chandler OR Inherent Vice very closely.


I went back to The Long Goodbye in search of the passage where a melancholy Philip Marlowe goes to Lawry’s because he has a craving for roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Now the fact is I go to Lawry’s once in a while and they do serve not bad Yorkshire pudding, but as I look around the restaurant I never see anybody except me eating it. In the picture below it's that odd thing on the lefthand side, and I gotta say it doesn't look all that appetising.


It doesn’t surprise me that few Angelenos go for the Yorkshire pudding: it seems the least L.A. of all foods. I know Philip Marlowe was no ordinary detective, but somehow it feels like Chandler’s anglophile tastes showing through rather than Marlowe’s.

I also found this passage in the Long Goodbye about American sandwiches:

”I went down to the drugstore and ate a chicken salad sandwich and drank some coffee … 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 the side, preferably a little wilted.”

I’d say that last sentence was just a little overcooked. He might have stopped after the toothpicks: but I’m not going to argue with the great Raymond.


Incidentally, in Inherent Vice, Pynchon can't resist a bit of further food-related mirth - an English rock band called Spotted Dick. Why is it that Americans find spotted dick so hilarious, yet can take noir novels about private dicks effortlessly in their stride? That's a rhetorical question, incidentally.

SCARY MUNCHIES

There are people here in America, and I’m sure elsewhere too, who like to think that England is quaint. Admittedly most of these people have not spent very much, if any time, in England. That’s why they imagine it’s a theme park of mock-Tudor tea rooms and roast beef restaurants, pubs serving hearty fare and good honest fish and chip shops. And these are the people who think they LIKE English food.


There’s also a home-grown fantasy about the classic English caff – there are websites devoted to these. The idea is that these places may be a bit rough, the crockery will be chipped, the cook will be surly, but the fry up will be fantastic. Well, only up to a point. It seems to me, as with George Orwell’s pub The Moon Under Water, that these great cafes are mostly fictional.


For some time while now, as an antidote to the idea that English eateries have charm, I’ve been photographing ones that scare the hell out of me. Maybe the food’s good, maybe it’s not, but in every case they’re a very, very long way from any notion of what a typical English restaurant is, or should be, like. And I guess that's not a bad thing. But who would have thought of, and who wouldn't love, an eaterie combined with a minicab office?


And I realize I said, a couple of posts back, that I thought English food was becoming a mite pretentious. Well not always, obviously.


I loved these “novelty doughnuts,” proof, if proof were needed, that the English don’t always take their food too seriously, and also that the spirit of Martin Parr still exists in the old country.

EATING FOR TWAIN

Safe to say that the otherwise reliable Mark Twain had, at best, conflicted feelings about English pie. A Tramp Abroad from 1880 is admittedly a satire, but when he makes a list of the foods he’s missing this doesn’t sound very satirical. He, or his narrator, misses apple pie, peach pie, American mince pie, pumpkin pie, and squash pie. Most of these, I’d have thought the English would have done reasonably well, though probably not the pumpkin.

He also gives a recipe for “New English Pie”: “To make this excellent breakfast dish, proceed as follows: 
Take a sufficiency of water and a sufficiency of flour, and construct a bullet-proof dough. Work this into the form of a disk, with the edges turned up some three-fourths of an inch. Toughen and kiln-dry in a couple days in a mild but unvarying temperature. Construct a cover for this redoubt in the same way and of the same material. Fill with stewed dried apples; aggravate with cloves, lemon-peel, and 
slabs of citron; add two portions of New Orleans sugars, then solder on the lid and set in a safe place till it petrifies. Serve cold at breakfast and invite your enemy.”

I can’t help thinking he may have gone to the wrong restaurants.

UNAMERICAN PIE

The last time I was in England I was writing a piece for Bon Appetit: I got paid, it didn’t get published – not the worst result. So I went to Simpson’s in the Strand, Fergus Henderson’s St John, Gordon Ramsey’s Maze and Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen – all pretty great except the last – although if you want to pay $200 dollars for a so-so Italian meal, you’ll absolutely love it.


This time I was paying for myself, so I ate a lot of pies. What is it with the English and pies? Why do they do them so well, why do they (I) like them so much? Interesting fact: the first English pies were called coffins.

Well obviously comfort is involved, but why do the Brits find comfort in something the rest of the world views with suspicion?

When I first moved to LA, I became aware of the House of Pies “a slice of heaven on earth” – corner of Franklin and Vermont – frequented by Kirstie Allie among others - and I thought great, I’ll be able to get a Cornish pasty or a cottage pie of a steak and kidney pudding. Yeah, right.


House of Pies is a burger joint – the pies are the desserts – Banana cream, French Blackbottom, Bayou Goo - perfectly good pies if you like that sort of thing but a very long way from the English tradition.


So, once back in England, I tucked into the Cornish pasty seen above, Melton Mowbray pork pies, a home made cottage pie, and this (tastes better than it looks) steak and oyster pie at O’Neill’s Irish pub in Southend on Sea.


However, if you go to Southend what you really want is not pies but seafood: whelks, cockles, jellied eels.

I hadn’t been to Southend in a long while but my memory was that you couldn’t walk ten yards without running into a jellied eel stall. Now the place seems to have been oddly gentrified. The cockle stalls are to be found huddled together within a shell’s throw of each other at Leigh on Sea.


But, and it’s a big but, and I don’t know if my palate has become more sophisticated or less, whether the local cooking methods have changed or improved, but these cockles and whelks, were some of the best I’d ever tasted – subtle, delicate, briny but not salty, and the jellied eels were absolutely, no doubt about it the very best I’d ever had.


I think it would be an odd person who went to England solely for the food; but a man who went there and couldn’t respond favourably to steak, kidney, oysters. eels, whelks and so on: well he’s no person at all in my book. whether Kirstie Allie fits into this category, I'm not sure, (fact is I still think she's pretty hot) but she doesn't quite look like a savory pie girl to me.

THE UNFASHIONABLE FUTURE OF FOOD

Why does food from the past seem so downright hilarious?

All those illustrations from 1950s cookbooks seem so kitsch, so innocent, so naïve, so lurid: people have packaged them into gift books.

Now, I don’t want to seem holier than thou about this. I giggle along with everyone else at tripe and onions, or the idea that avocado was once a sexy, exotic food, but I’m not sure I have any right to.


The idea that, as eaters, we’re becoming ever more knowing and sophisticated is clearly absurd. People are destined to keep shoving the same old stuff in their faces. All too often when it comes to "new" food habits we’re just following fashion. And the one thing we know about fashion is that sooner or later (usually sooner) it becomes unfashionable.


I was in England a couple of weeks back (more blogging about this soon) and I couldn’t get over the pretentious “modernity” of the food: rather ordinary sandwich bars that served a beef sandwich with rocket and shaved parmesan; pubs (I’m sure they thought of themselves as gastropubs) that served charbroiled hamburgers. Fact is, few people in England know what broiling is, and I’ll bet good money that the pub didn't have any charcoal. As for home-cured gravlax: whose home?

Anyway, I’ve been looking at old science mags; and it strikes me that when food and science, and notions of the modern, or even, God help us, the future come together, it becomes completely impossible to keep a straight face.

New ways of serving food are always a source of amusement: the food pill, the feeding tube, the Mongolian barbecue, sushi on a conveyor belt,: though I admit I was always taken by Warhol's idea of the AndyMat, a restaurant where people sat alone in booths and ate while watching television.

And here's an idea from Popular Science, April 1940, for food that emerges magically out of a table top. I'm really intrigued by the woman's hat. Was she hiding from a bad boyfriend?


And what could be sexier and more futuristic than this ketchup pump, seen in Modern Mechanix, December 1951.


Why thump it when you can pump it? Words to live by.

EATING ART

All food establishments face the problem of attracting customers. An eye-catching sign is one simple, folksy way of doing it, and as I wander around Los Angeles I’m drawn to signs showing an “artist’s impression” of the food on sale inside. Of course this image may not have a lot to do with reality, but I suppose that’s what makes it art.

I’m always impressed by the sign above Pink’s on La Brea.




Admittedly the bun looks kind of two-dimensional, and that thing that’s wrapped around the dog looks a little weird, like psychedelic camouflage, but the dog itself – wow. It has an airbrushed sheen to it, it looks metallic, futuristic, like space food. If Pink’s really sold hotdogs like the ones on the sign I’d be in there every day.

The other, as it were, “mainstream” sign that amazes (and actually really disturbs) me is the one for Wacky Waffles on Sunset Strip.



OK, I suppose I can accept an anthropomorphic waffle with arms and legs and eyes and teeth (though I sure wouldn’t want to find any of those things in my waffle), but what really alarms me is the huge bite that’s been taken out of our lovable pal. Worse still, the tooth marks in his side seem to match his own teeth fairly precisely. Either he’s taken a bite out of himself, or he’s had a run in with some other anthropomorphic, and in fact cannibalistic, waffle. I’m not sure that’s totally appetizing, but others will surely feel differently.

Still, the illustrations I like best are the odder, more eccentric, more homely ones.



I think this painting seen outside a sandwich store on Hollywood Boulevard is really very fine. That bread looks grainy and nutritious, the tomatoes have a nice gloss to them, and yes, maybe the ham looks a little store-bought, but to be able to depict store-bought ham convincingly strikes me as quite an artistic achievement. And, as the sign says, it’s healthy too!

Now, I’m no artist, but I’d imagine that depicting Mexican food must be quite a challenge. It often consists of various gloppy mounds, and it can’t be easy to depict them in a way that distinguishes one from another.



The artist here at a restaurant in Silver Lake hasn’t entirely solved the problem – I mean I’m not really sure what each of those sketchy blobs represents, but nevertheless there’s a certain exuberance about the image, a sense of energy. Heck, you can even see the brush strokes. It looks like eating here might be fun. If you happen to be passing and you’re in the mood for an enchilada, why would you go anywhere else?

And here is the saddest bit of food art I know, from the Norword market, a Mexican grocery store on the edge of Little Armenia.



All right, it probably isn’t great art, not even great naïve art, and yet I find myself strangely moved by these simple, in some cases almost diagrammatic, depictions of beer, Cheerios, a sandwich and a hot dog (at least I’m pretty sure it’s a hotdog). And that image of the eggs, it’s so perfectly, beautifully simple. Here we see an artist doing his or her best with what are, let’s face it, extremely limited talents.
And then some scumbag has come along and sprayed graffiti all over it; some rather short scumbag it appears since he could only reach the lowest illustrations. Philistine. Still, I guess that’s how it is with art, some people are just never going to get it

ENDS

WHIP IT GOOD

This just in from my pal Susanna Forrest, a British writer based in Berlin and with a book in the pipeline "about ponies," including the eating of them as far as I can gather.

She sent me this piece of vintage advertising.


I know that to the pure in thought all things are pure, but since I imagine that everybody who reads this blog has a mind like a sewer, I think I can allow you all to draw your own tawdry conclusions.

THE PIG'S REVENGE

My companion there at Ngamo, the one who ate the beef ugalini sukuma wiki was Scott Peake, movie director, DJ, bon viveur and all round omnivore, though with a special soft spot for all things porcine.

A couple of days after our lunch he had his annual pig roast in his back yard. Here he is in action:


A whole pig, 70 pounds or so in weight, is placed in a Cuban-style marinade for several days then cooked whole in an improvised cinder block oven.

I love the ritual of the thing and like everybody else I gorge myself on pig skin, pig cheek, pig tongue as well as the more conventional cuts. But I almost never get to see the whole pig. By the time I arrive the carving has usually started and the pig is in pieces.

The head, of course, keeps its structural integrity to the bitter end.


And just to prove that sometimes the pig bites back (metaphorically at least) her's a close up of Scott's hand after some of his carving got a little too sharp.

OH AFRICA

“So, what did you have for lunch?” It’s a common enough question, but how often do you get to say, “Oh, I had the goat nayama choma served with kachumbari and ugali and collard greens.”


Well if you go to Ngoma, a pan African restaurant at 5358 Wilshire Boulevard here in LA, that’s exactly the kind of thing you can say. You might also add, “My companion had the beef ugalini sukuma wiki.

It looked like this:



And the food was really good. Ugali is that white sphere on the left of the plate, made from white cornmeal.

As far as I can tell (my source here is www.congocookbook.com) nayama choma just means roasted meat, and my goat had been rubbed with spices and probably marinated; and it was delicious with something quite bacon-like about it.

Sukuma wiki I discover is a Swahili phrase meaning literally “push the week,” a way of combing leftovers. Ours came with a huge quantity of tender stewed beef. And I guess if you wanted to question the restaurant’s authenticity you might say that surely nobody in Africa ever eats a fraction of the meat we were served. Still, they obviously know their meat-loving American market.

The list of appetizers included Dodo, and you can imagine my excitement, but this turned out to be African for fried plantain.


The food was all very good. It was the rest of the experience that was so peculiar. We got there at one pm, and the restaurant was completely empty with no sign of any staff, but after a while a very shy, polite African woman appeared, took our order and then disappeared again. We were prepared to move slowly; we knew we might be working to “African time,” and we also suspected that our waitress might also be the cook, which would slow things down further. But as the meal went on things slowed down more and more.

Two more tables filled up, and our girl came and went to take orders and deliver food, but her appearances were ever fewer and farther between. But after a while our food arrived, and we had no cause for complaint.

Then after we’d been in there about an hour, and had finished eating, a rather annoyed-seeming black guy in a wheelchair bustled in, and waited for the waitress to appear; and she never did.

We waited for twenty more minutes or so. She didn’t come to offer the guy a table, didn’t come to ask us if we wanted anything else or to leave our check, didn’t serve any of the other tables. It did cross our minds that she’d had some terrible accident in the kitchen or perhaps that she wasn’t the cook, and was in the back getting up to lord knows what with someone who was.

We’ll never know. By then we’d had enough and we left some cash on the table and went on our way; not unhappy but a little confused. The wheelchair guy had had enough by then too and followed us out.

As we were leaving we noticed the banner mounted above the door.


We couldn't understand why that wasn't packing them in.

COOKING AND EATING STYLES OF THOSE WHO ARE FAMOUS FOR DOING SOMETHING OTHER THAN COOKING AND EATING: NUMBER 2: KIM JONG-IL

There’s some debate (and of course a huge number of web postings) about whether or not there’s food in heaven. The general consensus is no, that heaven will be a place of spiritual rather than bodily pleasures, thereby avoiding heavenly toilet and sewage issues.

The blessed Christopher Hitchens says that North Korea currently resembles a Christian heaven; a place without irony, art or privacy, with no respect for individuals, and where you’re required to offer perpetual thanks to the great leader; Kim Jong-Il, in the case of Korea.

Hitchens might also add that North Korea is a place without food, at least for a large portion of the population, although Kim himself, is quite the foodie and certainly gets all he can eat, and more.


His apologists, and strangely enough there are one or two, insist that he’s a gourmet rather than a gourmand. Yes, yes, they say, he flies in lobster and French cheeses, and camel’s feet and blue-shark liver, and sometimes send couriers on international food shopping trips, but once the food is in front of him he eats very sparingly, as if he’s working his way through an endless tasting menu.


There have been two “cook and tell” exposés of Kim’s eating habits; a series of articles by Ermanno Furlanis titled "I Made Pizza for Kim Jong Il," and another by a sushi chef who worked for the man between 1988 and 2001. Now I can’t see anything very wrong about having a personal pizza or sushi chef, but other parts of the story are way more excessive; such as personally importing $560,000 of Hennessey cognac each year.


Then there’s an institute in Pyongyang devoted simply to extending the life of Kim Jong-Il. Among the large staff are 200 people who work solely on his diet; which I would have thought might be a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth.

But strangest of all, he also has a staff of women who’s job it is to inspect the rice that comes into Kim’s kitchen to make sure that every grain is perfect and resembles every other grain. Grains of the wrong shape or size aren’t allowed to come into his presence. Now that does seem nuts. As for the women, well no doubt it’s a strange job, and definitely a boring one, but in North Korea it’s probably a job worth having. With a bit of luck, and possibly some subterfuge, at least the women may get to eat some misshapen rice. In North Korea this places them among the lucky ones.


Back in 1998 former agriculture diplomat Kim Dong-Su defected to South Korea and estimated that 2.8 million people had died of starvation in the three year famine immediately before then. It’s thought that figure is exaggerated but even if it’s triple the actual figure that’s still an awful lot of people starving to death as a result of the actions of their own government. The UN World Food Program believes that a large part of the population has been undernourished for 15 to 20 years.

All of which makes you think of Amartya Sen, the Novel Prize-winning Indian economist; the man who famously asserted, “In the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in an independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.”


Sen is an Indian, and he observes that the last famine in his country was in Bengal in 1943, five years before India gained independence from Britain: and there has been none since, although there have been a couple of “near misses.”

Meanwhile the folk at the US Department of Agricuture have declared that 13 million American families, made up of 38 million individuals, are “food insecure,” meaning that they worry at times about being able to buy the food they want. This seems to be so broad a deifinition as to be almost meaningless. And, unlike Kim Jung-Il, I am clearly food insecure. I just don’t where my next camel’s foot or blue-shark liver is coming from.