Drunk And Disgruntled In The Kitchen

Contemporary still life: cookbook with wine and acid-reflux medication.

Further to an adventure in house sitting that I wrote up in an earlier entry, I recently came into possession of a new cookbook. This is Rachel Roddy’s An A-Z of Pasta, which bears the subtitle: ‘Stories, shapes, sauces, recipes‘. I don’t really need another Italian cookbook, I have the encyclopaedic Silver Spoon collection, the River Cafe books, plus admirable tomes by Alistair Little, Mary Reynolds, etc. (My cooking is inexpert but, on a good day, brutally effective.) But I came to own the Roddy book by default, as it belonged to the friend in whose house I was staying and I left it lying where her determinedly chewy French bulldog could get his chops round it. The result is plain to see. So I bought a new copy for my friend and took the mauled edition home. 

I was looking forward to consulting the book during the long winter nights but it turns out that I’d got Rachel Roddy mixed up with Felicity Cloake, whose Guardian food columns I enjoy very much. No, Rachel Roddy is a different Guardian food writer and, it says here, is ‘one of the best food writers of our time’, which is no small claim. But after a week in the company of this book my enthusiasm for using it as a practical kitchen guide, or indeed anything else, has dwindled; in fact I began to wish that Robin the Frenchie had eaten the whole thing. The recipes aren’t the problem: it’s the prose. Ms Roddy describes herself as a food writer rather than a chef and this is significant. Staples of Italian home cooking are given the full Guardian Lifestyle treatment, a sort of gastronomic gentrification. One recipe begins with the sentence: ‘Leeks go softly.’ (Go where? Is that an injunction to the vegetable?) Another is characterised as ‘A beige woolly sock of a dish’, whilst another features chickpeas and chestnuts that ‘get on so well, like affectionate old friends …’. A serving of pasta is a ‘soulful bowlful’, or is covered with a sauce like ‘an expensive pashmina‘; Neapolitan basil has ‘head-girl mintyness‘, whereas sage has ‘moleskin mustiness‘, and we are treated to a description of a Roman pasta shop smelling ‘hopeful and sappy, like fresh sawdust and a clean baby.’ (This last one reminded me of an old Reeves and Mortimer sketch, wherein a stand-in for TV wine guru Jilly Goolden described a wine’s bouquet as like ‘two newts holidaying in Tangiers’.) And pity the poor adjective … We are warned that garlic can turn into ‘a bitter bully’, but reassured that tins are ‘trusty’; fingers are ‘knowing’, linguine stirred into a sauce ‘tangles’ with it, whilst elsewhere sauces go ‘slumping’, and we are invited to ‘snuggle’ a chicken into a pot, etc., etc.. To employ an adjective of my own: this book is as fey as fuck. 

As for Roddy’s ‘stories’, they have limited entertainment value. No-one in her book eats shellfish and gets the runs before an appointment at a swanky Milanese fashion house, thus blocking the toilet and flooding the entire reception area (as once happened to a long-lost acquaintance of mine; the poor girl was entreating the furious women on the front desk with cries of ‘Mea culpa!’). No-one lets out an inadvertent but catastrophic fart at the end of a good lunch with the girlfriend and prospective in-laws (who, as one, turned on their heels and left). No-one’s dog eats the Christmas lunch – boeuf en croute – just before it goes in the oven. The ‘stories’ in Roddy’s book are of the I sit in Raffaela’s kitchen and watch her knead the dough sort, presented with a cloying reverence in line with the aspirational tone of her project. To paraphrase a fatuous advertising slogan: this is not just food … this is Middle Class Food. (Incidentally, there is also – on page 172 – a fabulously Ill-judged Holocaust reference, a misguided attempt at gravitas that has no business in a book like this.) This would have been a far better book if she’d just stuck to the mechanics of food preparation rather than the fetishisation thereof, especially as her forays into local colour are as flaccid as overcooked bucatini. But it set me thinking: could I do better? Could I cut it as a food writer? What highlights from my culinary experiences can I inflict upon my public? Well, there’s the time I upchucked chateaubriand on the Northern line, following dinner at Chez Gerard and a bout of alcoholic poisoning, whereupon I got home in a state of near collapse and narrowly avoided setting fire to the curtains. That was an experience I will treasure, always. Or the tureen of stew lovingly prepared for the family by my elder sister whilst on holiday at a Mallorquin villa, and into which my grandfather sneezed, explosively, as it was being placed on the table. A cherished memory of generational togetherness. Then there’s the memorable night at a Battersea tandoori house where a waiter sprayed UHT cream foam all over my lamb passanda just as I was about to eat it. A truly singular serving suggestion. Or all those flickering, purple nights in Brockley, like the one when we threw a ten-egg Spanish omelette on the floor whilst trying to flip it, or the curdled romantic evening which saw me throw a frying pan in the general direction of a dinner date as she was flouncing up the stairs. (I missed.) Such quiet joy in the warm company of good friends! 

One failed culinary experiment worth recounting is an encounter with game birds in a south-east London setting. I had been gifted a brace of pheasants (long story) and my young wife and myself followed the rules and hung them for a week in the basement of our small terraced house in Charlton. We’d done a deal with a local butcher; he’d draw them if we plucked them. A week passed. We went into the basement and prepared to pluck the corpses. Suddenly, the room took on the aspect of a particularly sinister crime scene. Gingerly, we pulled at a few feathers; a space of bare flesh was revealed. My beloved let out a noise, a sound impossible for me to describe, and practically screamed: ‘Why doesn’t it look like it does in Sainsbury’s?!’ We were as green – literally and metaphorically – as the pheasants in front of us. So we called Tim. Tim was a neighbour of ours, a fifty-ish 1970s relic, an ex-fashion photographer and full-time bon viveur. He knew a thing or two about game. He came round very quickly, his presence announced by his distinctive aroma: an admixture of Givenchy Gentleman and Glenfiddich. He wasted no time, he took the birds in his hands (which I suddenly noticed were enormous) and proceeded to tear the plumage from their flesh with an atavistic fury that was genuinely unnerving. In less than a minute the pheasants slightly resembled something you might see wrapped in plastic on a supermarket shelf (well, in an Albanian hyper-mart perhaps). The following day was Saturday: we left the birds with the butcher who told us to come back in an hour. When we returned we were accompanied by Tim, who was taking a close interest in the proceedings. The butcher gave us a dubious look and said ’How long have you had these?’ A fly crawled out of one of them. Turned me up, to be honest. I won’t charge you. Do you want ‘em?’ We looked a bit sick but Tim eagerly grabbed them and took them home. On Sunday we were invited over to inspect – not eat – the birds as roasted.  He reported that the legs were a bit dodgy but that the breasts were lovely. ‘I reckon they were shot up the arse.’ It’s a real pity Tim is no longer with us; another one lost in action. A cookbook written by him would have been an event worth celebrating. 

There is an issue with class and food here, but I will get more into that another time. For now I leave you with a traditional Roman invitation, something a shy boy might say to a blushing girl to indicate his sincere intentions: Sei mai stato da una Mietitrice prima?*

(*Have you ever been to a Harvester before?‘)

Everyone’s a critic these days …

An A-Z of Pasta is published by Penguin Fig Tree.

One More Before Doomsday

This post originally appeared in April last year. I am running it again to mark this summer’s extreme weather. Pour yourself an apocalyptic one …

It should, by now, be apparent to everyone that we are living in a dystopian sci-fi scenario, but who wrote it? John Wyndham? Too cosy, perhaps. Or there’s J.G. Ballard … he wrote extensively about various kinds of societal collapse, either in ‘hard’ sci-fi novels like The Drowned World, or in his later sly and speculative manner, e.g. High Rise. But Ballard didn’t do comedy and the black absurdity of Donald Trump requires a satirical touch. Kurt Vonnegut’s brand of savage, slapstick sci-fi fits the bill, but I have been unable to locate my copies of Cat’s Cradle or Galapagos to refresh ecstatic youthful impressions. (It has also been suggested to me that Channel 4’s 1982 comedy show Whoops Apocalypse is relevant, chiefly with respect to its portrayal of the President of the United States as a total cretin.) 

But one work of science fiction that has been haunting me over the past few weeks is the 1961 film The Day the Earth Caught Fire, directed by Val Guest from a script written by himself and Wolf Mankowitz (the same team behind the Soho musical Expresso Bongo). The idea behind this inventive British movie is that nuclear testing has thrown the orbit of the earth out of whack and sent our planet spinning toward the sun. London becomes hotter than Cairo and the city’s residents wilt and go mad in the heat. It is a great time capsule of London locations, and the heroes of the film – as unlikely as this sounds now – are journalists working on the Daily Express, then still operating out of its beautiful Art Deco building on Fleet Street, right opposite St. Bride’s church. The nominal stars are Edward Judd (the producers wanted Richard Burton but couldn’t afford him), Leo McKern, and the delightful Janet Munro. The newspaper scenes have a sense of authenticity amidst the dodgy science, and the verisimilitude extended to the casting of the editor of the Daily Express, a character played by a former editor of the paper. (Arthur Christiansen, editor from 1933 to 1957. A nice conceit, but Christiansen couldn’t really act.)

Fleet Street’s finest … Leo McKern, Edward Judd and Janet Munro feeling the heat outside The Express Building.

There’s a lot wrong with the film: the banter-ish, ‘Front Page’ type dialogue is cringeworthy, Edward Judd is a charm-free zone, and the special effects are often risible – but for all that it remains unsettling and eerily prescient. The clever use of genuine news footage, indicating drought and out of control weather, now looks like an anticipation of recent wildfires in Australia and California. The evocation of oppressive, unnatural heat is very effective: everything dries up or burns up and water becomes the most precious of all commodities. Black market water is spreading typhoid, alcohol is in short supply and even a warm Coke will cost you. As society buckles under the strain, decadent young people express their nihilism by wantonly chucking buckets of priceless water about, drenching themselves to the implausible sound of trad jazz. (‘Beatnik music by Monty Norman’ is the byline in the credits. The crazed, trumpet-touting kids were perhaps inspired by riots at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1960. Was Acker Bilk a baleful influence on British youth? Discuss. )

And, as you’d expect in a film that trades in Fleet Street clichés (‘They say you used to be a writer’), there are many episodes where the hacks go the pub. The pub in question is ‘Harry’s Bar’, a private members’ club just next to St. Bride’s (a fictional one, as far as I am aware). By the end, the trip to Harry’s Bar has acquired a devotional aspect: the film concludes with our heroes assembled in the club – one that by now looks more like a bar in the Australian Outback – and wait to hear whether an operation to save the planet has worked. (The great powers set off ‘corrective’ nukes in an attempt to blast the Earth back to its correct orbit.) Harry’s Bar has run dry, but the manageress gives the small band of regulars a drink on the house from a special, reserved bottle of scotch. This scene reminds me of the titular bar scene at the end of Ice Cold In Alex, where an ordinary glass of lager is a miraculous answer to a fervent but unspoken prayer. And this link between booze and prayer feels pertinent to where we are now. Many of us are offering prayers of one sort or another, even non-believers like me who are simply praying for the pubs to re-open. Of course drink is not always the answer; but whilst we might not be able to drink Covid19 away, we can at least toast its demise. As Leo McKern says as he raises his glass in Harry’s Bar: ‘To the luck of the human race’. 

In Harry’s Bar, listening to the countdown over the radio …

For the cineastes out there, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is also notable for Michael Caine’s film debut in a bit part as a policeman (‘Stay clear of Chelsea, they say it’s pretty rough down there’); and also a groundbreaking moment of nudity in British cinema, when Janet Munro’s nipple is briefly glimpsed in her bathroom mirror. Society would never be the same again …

A Quick Sharpener Before Doomsday

It should, by now, be apparent to everyone that we are living in a dystopian sci-fi scenario, but who wrote it? John Wyndham? Too cosy, perhaps. Or there’s J.G. Ballard … he wrote extensively about various kinds of societal collapse, either in ‘hard’ sci-fi novels like The Drowned World, or in his later sly and speculative manner, e.g. High Rise. But Ballard didn’t do comedy and the black absurdity of Donald Trump requires a satirical touch. Kurt Vonnegut’s brand of savage, slapstick sci-fi fits the bill, but I have been unable to locate my copies of Cat’s Cradle or Galapagos to refresh ecstatic youthful impressions. (It has also been suggested to me that Channel 4’s 1982 comedy show Whoops Apocalypse is relevant, chiefly with respect to its portrayal of the President of the United States as a total cretin.)

But one work of science fiction that has been haunting me over the past few weeks is the 1961 film The Day the Earth Caught Fire, directed by Val Guest from a script written by himself and Wolf Mankowitz (the same team behind the Soho musical Expresso Bongo). The idea behind this inventive British movie is that nuclear testing has thrown the orbit of the earth out of whack and sent our planet spinning toward the sun. London becomes hotter than Cairo and the city’s residents wilt and go mad in the heat. It is a great time capsule of London locations, and the heroes of the film – as unlikely as this sounds now – are journalists working on the Daily Express, then still operating out of its beautiful Art Deco building on Fleet Street, right opposite St. Bride’s church. The nominal stars are Edward Judd (the producers wanted Richard Burton but couldn’t afford him), Leo McKern, and the delightful Janet Munro. The newspaper scenes have a sense of authenticity amidst the dodgy science, and the verisimilitude extended to the casting of the editor of the Daily Express, a character played by a former editor of the paper. (Arthur Christiansen, editor from 1933 to 1957. A nice conceit, but Christiansen couldn’t really act.)

Fleet Street’s finest … Leo McKern, Edward Judd and Janet Munro feeling the heat outside The Express Building.

There’s a lot wrong with the film: the banter-ish, ‘Front Page’ type dialogue is cringeworthy, Edward Judd is a charm-free zone, and the special effects are often risible – but for all that it remains unsettling and eerily prescient. The clever use of genuine news footage, indicating drought and out of control weather, now looks like an anticipation of recent wildfires in Australia and California. The evocation of oppressive, unnatural heat is very effective: everything dries up or burns up and water becomes the most precious of all commodities. Black market water is spreading typhoid, alcohol is in short supply and even a warm Coke will cost you. As society buckles under the strain, decadent young people express their nihilism by wantonly chucking buckets of priceless water about, drenching themselves to the implausible sound of trad jazz. (‘Beatnik music by Monty Norman’ is the byline in the credits. The crazed, trumpet-touting kids were perhaps inspired by riots at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1960. Was Acker Bilk a baleful influence on British youth? Discuss. )

And, as you’d expect in a film that trades in Fleet Street clichés (‘They say you used to be a writer’), there are many episodes where the hacks go the pub. The pub in question is ‘Harry’s Bar’, a private members’ club just next to St. Bride’s (a fictional one, as far as I am aware). By the end, the trip to Harry’s Bar has acquired a devotional aspect: the film concludes with our heroes assembled in the club – one that by now looks more like a bar in the Australian Outback – and wait to hear whether an operation to save the planet has worked. (The great powers set off ‘corrective’ nukes in an attempt to blast the Earth back to its correct orbit.) Harry’s Bar has run dry, but the manageress gives the small band of regulars a drink on the house from a special, reserved bottle of scotch. This scene reminds me of the titular bar scene at the end of Ice Cold In Alex, where an ordinary glass of lager is a miraculous answer to a fervent but unspoken prayer. And this link between booze and prayer feels pertinent to where we are now. Many of us are offering prayers of one sort or another, even non-believers like me who are simply praying for the pubs to re-open. Of course drink is not always the answer; but whilst we might not be able to drink Covid19 away, we can at least toast its demise. As Leo McKern says as he raises his glass in Harry’s Bar: ‘To the luck of the human race’.

In Harry’s Bar, listening to the countdown over the radio …

For the cineastes out there, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is also notable for Michael Caine’s film debut in a bit part as a policeman (‘Stay clear of Chelsea, they say it’s pretty rough down there’); and also a groundbreaking moment of nudity in British cinema, when Janet Munro’s nipple is briefly glimpsed in her bathroom mirror. Society would never be the same again … At time of writing, you can see the entire film (handsomely restored by the BFI) on YouTube.