I SIN, YOU SIN, WE ALL SIN FOR BOURSIN

It's a croissant with Boursin and a venison sausage.  Could have used more Boursin. Couldn't we all?

BUNKERING

There was a fine (and provocative) piece by Jay Rayner in the Observer about the ‘binary choices’ facing the happy eater.  Do you go for tea or coffee, white sliced or sourdough, jam or marmalade?  These I found easy to answer but some of his other examples don’t seem quite so binary.  Vodka or gin he asks, and he doesn’t like gin, but for me there’s no definitive answer.  Gin in a martini, obviously, but vodka in a gimlet or a Bloody Mary.  Anyway I’m not here to pick a fight with Mr. Rayner – I’m no fool, unlike Gordon Ramsay.

But his ideas fitted in with some thoughts I had at The Grocer, a decent bar/restaurant in Spitalfields Market.

 

First impressions were great.  Our waitress, named Anneka, (lot of tattoos, one or two facial piercings – which I guess is standard for London waitresses) met us at the door and said ‘Sit anywhere you like.’ These are the best word I can ever here when entering an eatery.  The alternative is a server who insists on putting you at a small table, in a dark corner next to the toilet.  Hurrah for Anneka.  We went for a booth.

 

We ordered fish and chips which were good but they did, for me anyway, raise a binary question; does a pickled onion go with fish and chips? I know this is not one of the great existential questions but in fact I’ve got through my life this far without wanting a pickled onion with my fish and chips, and I’ve very rarely had one. What does that say about me?

 

However, The Grocer’s fish and chips came with a very small pickled onion, perhaps a bit large to be a cocktail onion but only just, and it was impaled on a cocktail stick which was in turn impaled in the fish, like this:

 

It was, of course, no problem.  I ate it and it didn’t trouble me, and if I hadn’t wanted to eat it I wouldn’t have, but I was still a bit surprised to find it there at all.  Jay Rayner says this kind of thing has a lot to do with where you’re born and raised, saying ‘Tell me whether you are chips with curry sauce rather than chips with gravy and I’ll have a strong sense of where you’re from.’  I think this is true, though for me personally the choice between curry sauce and gravy largely depends on if I'm in Yorkshire, and how many pints of Tetley’s I’ve had.

 

Anyway, the real beauty part of fish and chips at The Grocer was the vinegar: artisanal, old fashioned, slowly oak matured, and all this done in the Old Nuclear Bunker at Coverack in Cornwall, which looks like this:­

 

And some people claim to prefer ketchup with their chips.

 

DEATH STALKS THE KITCHEN

Look, none of us doubts that there are profound and mysterious connections between 

food, passion, love, sex and death.

 

Even so, I was surprised by a recent headline in the Daily Telegraph that read,

YouTube chef ‘chopped up lover and dumped his head in the sea.’

 

I won’t intrude on the grief of the people concerned by naming names, though of course you can look it up. What actually fascinated me about the headline was that the paper thought  ‘chopped up lover and dumped his head in the sea’ needed to be in quotation marks, whereas YouTube chef didn’t.  I suppose this mean that anybody who calls themselves a YouTube chef,isa YouTube chef.

 

The Telegraph article enters the Nicholson archive alongside other headlines that include 

 

‘I’ve got a taste for killing,’ says cannibal who ate man’s tongue.

 

The Head in the Hellman’s Box

 

Hunger forced her to eat raw batter

 

Teen ‘poisoned dad’s pasta and choked mum’

 

Chef cut corners on pie that killed worshippers

 

Sausage Tycoon killed in his sauna with a crossbow

 

How very different from the home lives of our own dear Angela and Helena.

THE SPUD IS IN THE HEART

 

There has apparently been ‘outrage’ in parts of the crisp 

eating community because certain Marks and Spencer 

crisp packets marked ‘British potatoes’ are overstamped 

on the sell-by label with the words ‘contains non-British 

potatoes.’

An M&S spokesman said: ‘An unprecedented industry-wide shortage, caused by drought last year, meant we – and other businesses – were forced to source some potatoes from outside the UK for a few weeks ahead of this year’s British potato harvest.’  So it’s only temporary anyway, supposedly.  

 

However, it’s said there’ll be another shortage this year because of a wet spring, plus rising costs of machinery and fertilizer.  In other words British farmers can’t make a profit growing potatoes, and when I see how cheap it is to buy a bag of supermarket spuds, I’m amazed they can make any money at all.

 

And so we come to Agnès Varda (1928 -2019) French (Belgian born) filmmaker, screenwriter, photographer, artist and so on.

 

She’s best known, to me anyway, for Cléo from 5 to 7(1962) about a woman waiting to hear the results of a cancer test, with appearances by Jean-Luc Godard and Eddie Constantine.  I don’t believe it features any potatoes.  Unlike her film The Gleaners and I(2000) in French Les glaneurs et la glaneuse.

 

‘Glaneurs’ as I understand it, gather crops left in the field after harvesting, so it has connotations of foraging, scavenging and collecting.  Historically they’ve usually been women, as in Millet’s ‘Des Glaneuses.’ I believe it’s also currently a brand of combine harvester.

 

In the movie, Varda goes to a field where imperfect (though perfectly usable) potatoes are dumped, and identifies with the discarded and misshapen tubers.  She takes home some heart-shaped spuds and lets them grow wrinkly and sprout, sees a resemblance with her own wrinkled hands, and compares her aging body with the far more rapidly aging potatoes, and thinks that she too has been discarded. So it’s all about death and decay and patriarchy.

 

Also I hadn’t realized heart-shaped potatoes were so easy to come by.

 

Later Varda did an exhibition and dressed up as a potato. Potatoes can get you obsessed like that.

 

And then today, life being the synchronicitous thing it is, my Instagram pal Barbara Lounder put up pictures of two different kinds of basket for gathering potatoes. Her captions reads ‘One from Norfolk, one from Unama’ki. These are currently in my exhibition “Family Gathering/Gathering Family” in Sydney NS at Eltuek Art Centre. The exhibition is on until August 18.’  Brava.

More locally, here in the Nicholson archive, we have lately taken possession of a plate featuring the ‘Baked Potato Man’ by John Finnie – 1985, Wedgewood – one of series of street food trades that includes ‘The Street Seller of Hot Green Peas.’  But it’s hard to get obsessed with hot green peas, I'd say.

 

 

 

 

ALL AMERICAN WALES

I knew it wasn’t going to be a big foodie weekend in Swansea, there were others commitments.  I didn’t think it would be all laverbread and crempogs; and that was just as well.  We were staying in a chain hotel with pretensions to being a boutique hotel, and since it was in the middle of nowhere, and since the weather was dodgy, it made sense to eat Friday night dinner in the hotel bar.

Now, I’m sure that people more sophisticated than me know all about Trash Can Nachos, but I had no idea.  It isn’t really a very special or inventive notion – you stick a lot of nachos in a topless and bottomless tin can, add grated cheese, sour cream, jalapenos, some tomato glop, and then the waiter drops it all out at your table into a big bowl. Who knew? 

 

Trash can pics by Caroline Gannon

Only subsequently did I discover this was a ‘thing.’ It appears to be devise by Guy Fieri, which isn’t much of a recommendation in itself, but why stop at Nachos?  It would surely work just as well with refried beans or Irish stew, or even, at a pinch, laverbread.

 

On the way to the hotel from the station we’d seen there was a Denny’s in a nearby retail park - the only one in the UK as far as I can tell. And the fact is I do love Denny’s – I think it’s a high point of American culture, so on Monday morning on the way back to the station in we went, if nothing else to see how it compared with the American original.  And the answer was, so-so.   

 

The menu was similar but there was no chicken fried steak.  Below is the Chicken Fried Steak I had last year at Denny’s on the Twentynine Palms Highway.

 

But I can imagine they wouldn’t sell a lot of that in Swansea so I ordered the American Slam – scrambled eggs, hash browns, sausage, bacon.  What came was this.

 

The shrewd observer will note the eggs are fried; I’d been given the wrong, and possibly someone else’s, breakfast. But the lad who was serving (and being run ragged by lack of other staff) was apologetic and happy enough to replace it.

I think it was a bit greasier than its American cousin would have been, but it was fine.  The lighting was a bit fancier than I think they’d have in an American Denny’s – but I’ll need to go back and check that.

THE MINDLESS MARTINI

 A true friend sends me an article from the New York Times, titled ‘The Martini Has Lost It’s Mind’ by Becky Hughes about the mutant variations on the silver bullet, currently available in New York and elsewhere.

 

Of course a mind is a terrible thing to lose, but since a martini has no mind of its own so the responsibility rests soldily with the makers and consumers of drinks.

 

For instance The Caprese martini at Jac’s on Bond is made with basil, olive and tomato-infused vodka.

 

The restaurant Bad Roman offers a pepperoncini martini.

Este in Austin, Texas offers a martini made with muscadet and kombu seaweed. There are ‘martinis’ with pickled fennel. radish water, garnished with mozzarella balls.

 

A chap named Jazzton Rodriguez who runs, a blog, a website, an Instagram page, titled Very Good Drinks  has invented a chicken soup Martini – funny you don’t meet a lot of people named Jazzton.

Now, you and I might argue that these drinks aren’t martinis at all, but Trevor Easton Langer, the bright spark who came up with the Caprese martini is there to put your mind at ease.  He says, ‘The word martini isn’t as much of a hard-and-fast rule as it is a descriptor of how you’re going to receive the drink. It’s much less about the contents and more about the glass.”

 

To which you may reply ‘Oh no it’s not.’  By this paradigm you could put a pint of crème de menthe in a beer glass and call it beer, but you wouldn’t would you?

IN THE PINK WITH OLD SAM PEPYS

 Like me, you’ve probably been intrigued by the Hyde Park incident at which a fan handed Pink a whole, boxed Brie. The fact that she held it up so clearly to display the name of the manufacturer did suggest to me that some sponsorship or at least product placement was going on, but then I’m a cynic.

 

My mind drifted back to Tuesday 4 September1666 when, in the middle of the Great Fire of London, Samuel Pepys recorded:  ‘Sir W. Batten not knowing how to remove his wine, did dig a pit in the garden, and laid it in there; and I took the opportunity of laying all the papers of my office that I could not otherwise dispose of. And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.’

I imagine a whole Parmesan might survive being buried better than a brie would, but I think more research may be necessary.

Not as part of this research, I went to the Samuel Pepys in Harwich, an establishment variously described as a pub, wine bar or hotel.  I understand it was previously known as Sam’s Wine Bar, and before that the Rose & Crown.

Pepys did have a considerable connection with Harwich, as naval administrator and then MP.  I’m sure he must have done a lot of eating and drinking in the town, though I haven’t seen any absolutely hard evidence of where and when, though the pub’s website reads ‘he is said to have frequented this old tavern.’ 

The inamorata and I, not being very hungry, decided to share a panini – There were no Parmesan options on the menu that I could see.  There was a brie panini but it came either with cranberry or Marmite; neither of which ever strikes me as a good idea.

So we had the Cheddar cheese and grilled back bacon. Tripadvisor has some poisonous reviews for the Samuel Pepys but we found our food was perfectly good and the service was very friendly. What more do you need on  a quiet Saturday afternoon?

Want to see a picture of Pepys inspecting the King’s navy, painted by Robert Lyon?  

Want to see a picture of Debbie Harry with a piece of Brie in her mouth, the photograph taken by my pal Lisa Jane Persky?  Well of course you do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE SQUID AND I

 

In general I’m constitutionally, perhaps pathologically, incapable of following a recipe, but when I saw a recipe in the Times mag for Stuffed Squid with Chickpeas by Tomos Parry (officially a ‘great British chef’) my kitchen companion (that would be Caroline) and I thought we might have a go at it.  

There was a message on the magazine page saying ‘For Good Cooks Only!’ but I’m not a man to be detered by a flying exclamation mark.

 

I reckon I can cook squid but I’d never stuffed one before and I’d never baked one either, pan frying is what I do, but the squid in the picture looked so good I decided I’d go down the stuffing and roasting route.

 

Basically you make a risotto: the obvious stuff plus the chopped squid tentacles and then  - and this is the beauty part - some black pudding.

 

Tomos reckons one squid per person but obviously his were small.  We got one big one that would probably have served three.

 

I could see there might be problems getting the risotto inside the beast but it proved easy enough. The recipe advised pricking small holes in the squid with a cocktail stick and then holding the open end together with another, or possibly the same, cocktail stick. This seemed like a good idea so I obeyed.

 

Tomos said to bake for 20 minutes but I couldn’t see that would be enough to produce the fine colour seen in the magazine photograph, so we decided to give it a bit longer and we began by rubbing some turmeric and paprika on the outside. It still never achieved the golden look I was hoping for but very likely Tomos has a fiercer oven than I do.

 

While the squid was roasting we cooked a bed of onions, chickpeas and actual peas, 

then sliced up the squid 

and lay it on the base, and the end result looked like this. 

In the Nicholson kitchen that counts as success, and a successful recipe.

 

If I made it again I’d use more black pudding, possibly a lot more, but apart from that I’d do what I was told by the recipe.

 

As a result, one might almost be tempted to go to Tomos Parry’s restaurant Brat in Shoreditch which looks like this:

 

In fact stuffed roasted squid wasn’t on the menu when I checked, possibly because the restaurant specializes in ‘open fire cooking.’  Still, the lamb chop with grilled sweetbreads for £14.50 sounds like a bargain.