A bit of flavour

When staying away from home I used to be an enthusiastic Full English man. Sitting down to make a choice among twenty items, knowing that whatever you have will make no difference to the cost, was a inspiring way to start the day. At a really good hotel you don't even have to choose: you can order the lot, starting, say with two poached eggs and finishing with kedgeree (omitting silly hash browns, of course, nothing English about them). I was once encouraged by a helpful waitress not to regard kippers and black pudding as alternatives but to have them both, before the bacon, fried bread, mushrooms and sausage.

At home all this is too much bother, and anyway is bad for one's health, so over the years I have found simpler breakfasts suit me better. Some of the healthier options are not too bad: a slice or two of a new white loaf, lightly toasted, spread (sparingly, as it tells you on the pot)with salted creamery butter and Patum Peperium,The Gentleman's Relish, Est 1828,  or, thickly, with taramasalata (the kind with smoked salmon in it is good) are quite acceptable.

But looming over the breakfast scene is the horror of cereals. It's not that there is little choice; every supermarket has a whole aisle of colourful boxes, containing fifty varieties of the stuff: some consisting of polystyrene, some of dust with bits in, called muesli, some which degrade to a brown sludge when you add milk, some tasting of straw and some made almost entirely of sugar. There is one called Grape-Nuts, invented in 1897 by C.W. Post, a competitor of Kellogg, containing neither grapes nor nuts. This was part of the Jungle Rations which were given to American soldiers from 1939 and in WWII, as if they didn't have enough troubles: it is like eating gravel.

However, I have recently discovered a way of making a plateful of breakfast cereal almost edible: choose a bland and harmless one and, before you put in the milk (or, better, crème fraîche), add a tablespoonful of lemon curd.  

This will not actually be very nice, but it's not as disgusting as anything else you can do with cereal (like the dreadful gritty buns suggested by the manufacturers of All-Bran).  

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Let Them Eat Bread

A few months ago we wanted to have a major decade-related family birthday celebration, but our favourite caff couldn't accommodate a party of nine, so we chose another local one, also Michelin-starred. I will call it The Gannet, for that was not its name.

Last week there was an exchange of emails:

Me to The Gannet
Will you please take our names off your mailing list. We shall not be visiting The Gannet again.

The Gannet to me:
Yes, of course we will remove you from our mailing list, right away. I am so sorry to hear that you won't be visiting The Gannet again, may I please ask why?

Me to The Gannet:
Well, yes, as you ask, I will tell you.
Last year my wife and I booked a birthday dinner for nine family members. We had some email correspondence with you beforehand, and consulted all the guests so that we were able to tell you exactly what everyone wanted for each of the three courses. We also ordered the wine and, to facilitate the service, provided name cards and a table plan. It was an enjoyable evening, and we had no complaints about the dinner or the service.
However, we had asked if there could be a few black olives and some amuse-gueules on the table when we sat down, and in your reply you wrote:
"...With regard to the amuse [sic] and black olives unfortunately they are neither things that we offer. We do however offer our chef's freshly baked bread, which at the moment is a warm fruit bread served with chestnut honey and butter. This is served to you once you are seated."
In other words, "...It's not what you want that matters, but what we intend to give you"; some such observation was made to me by several friends who heard the story. It was a very small thing that we were asking; the fact that, given more than a week's notice, you could not be bothered to get a jar of olives and put them in a couple of bowls shows an inflexibility and lack of eagerness to please quite unacceptable in any restaurant, let alone one of the top rank, and a customer proposing to spend five hundred pounds on a meal might well be dissatisfied.
As for the amuse-gueules, if your chef is unwilling to make them, or has never heard of them, so be it, but warm fruit bread and honey is no alternative.
Had we not already gone to some trouble in asking our guests (some of whom were coming from overseas) to order in advance from your menu, we would have cancelled the booking and gone elsewhere. As it was we merely resolved not to come again, and it was only recently, when I noticed your newsletters piling up in my junk mail folder, that I thought of asking to be removed from your mailing list.

The Gannet to me

Thank you for the feedback. We’re glad that you enjoyed the overwhelming majority of your experience at The Gannet.
We do not usually serve an amuse bouche or olives at The Gannet, it is out of keeping with the offering for which we have become renowned. Our pre-meal offering is complimentary and very well-received. We were offering our warm bread, chestnut honey and butter as an alternative to olives, and something more in-keeping with The Gannet's British philosophy and values. Had we known your predilection for black olives, we would, of course, have supplied them.
We’re disappointed you weren’t able to embrace The Gannet experience in its totality. The Gannet is purposefully an informal, relaxed restaurant. We remain committed to serving excellent local produce to a community passionate about food served with imagination and flair. As a kitchen, service team, family and business, we work incredibly hard to ensure visitors to The Gannet enjoy their experience, it is a commitment unrelated to the lining of our guests’ pockets.
It’s a shame the absence of an amuse bouche left you so down in the mouth and that you no longer wish to receive our newsletter especially as it continues to put a smile on the faces of those that receive it.
 

Me to The Gannet

Thank you for your email explaining why you were unwilling to give us what we had asked for.
To say that a few olives are "out of keeping" with your British philosophy and values is fatuous; if you reject everything foreign then you should not have "crème fraîche" on your menu. Merely leaving off the accents is not enough: you should call it "sour cream"'.
We do not have what you call a "predilection" for olives: we asked for them because one of our guests was an eight-year-old girl who lives in Spain and loves them; it had occurred to me that they would keep her amused while we had our pre-dinner gin. I did not think it would be necessary to explain this, imagining that a simple request for such a trivial thing would be enough.The absence of any hint of apology, and the patronising and generally arrogant tone of your response, makes me certain that our decision not to "embrace The Gannet experience in its totality" was a wise one.

***************

I am not a complainer by nature, and am normally sympathetic towards the failings of those whose task it is to please the public. But here was a perfect example of the wrong way to handle a complaint, and I could not let this incompetent idiot get away with it.
Of course, it really wasn't worth the bother of writing at that length, or indeed at all. However, this exchange began last weekend, when I was snowed in and there was nothing much on TV.

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Skål!

Some of my friends have noted that I have several things in common with pregnant women. It is true, of course, that I have never actually been pregnant or anything of that kind, but I do feel rotten most mornings and am disinclined to take up the pole vault. Also, like many an expectant mother, I sometimes have a sudden craving for some exotic comestible or extraordinary combination of foods.

My fancies are not dramatically perverse; no dill pickles with raspberry ice cream, or hot chocolate with minced ox kidney stirred in. Nothing like that; for example, it came to me the other day that what I hankered after at that moment was a snootful of Aalborg Jubilæums.

I am speaking of Danish akvavit. Nothing exotic about that if you live in Scandinavia, but it's not easy to find in leafy rural Sussex where I live. It's years since I used to sit all evening in a café near Copenhagen harbour with an old havnearbejder and his friends, a bottle of the stuff and a bowl of herrings between us, singing many a chorus of Det Var En Lørdag Aften and then perhaps a few rude verses of Den Sag Er Aldrig I Verden until some kindly politiman told us to go home.

But I can still remember the effect as the first tiny, bitterly cold glassful is knocked back: the aaah! of delight, the instant clearing of the nasal passages, and the feeling that you had been struck violently on the back of the neck by a large soft object. It has a mere 42% of alcohol by volume, but somehow it feels like more.

I suppose I could get a bottle on the internet, to have ready for whenever I am next overcome by a fancy for it.

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Gormandising

Tasting menus in restaurants, basically a lot of little bits of stuff served consecutively, apparently became increasingly popular during the recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s. It is hard to imagine why, because now they are usually aimed at the well-heeled, not at those suffering from the economic decline of those years.

In 2008 I described a couple of such menus offered in San Sebastian, and how an intrepid (or foolhardy) journalist just managed to eat them both in a single day.

Earlier this year my friend Grumio took some friends to the American equivalent in California. Here is the menu:

Often a tasting menu gives you no choice, you eat whatever turns up, but in this case you can choose one dish from most of the nine courses; in the case of the Maine Lobster Tail there is no alternative, but they probably don't get many complaints about that.

The wine list comes on an iPad which isn't a bad idea, but choosing wines by the bottle to balance nine courses would not be easy, so wise guys take the sommelier's choice by glass.

The price mentioned is in US dollars, though they don't actually say so.

Grumio tells me they didn't spurn the supplements ("Who turns down the foie gras, ever?") and the bill for four was 2000.  American dollars, of course: what other currencies are there?

In Glorious Drearicolor!

The website World of Soviet Groceries is not nearly as exciting as it sounds, though it does give an accurate if depressing picture of what life in the Soviet Union must have been like. 

When I was there the USSR still had a few years of life left in it and I don't remember what I ate in Moscow so I suppose most of the dishes must have been along the same lines as those illustrated.

So indeed were the entertainments provided for us by our hosts, though I suppose they meant well: the high spot was an hour spent in a glum queue waiting to file past the embalmed corpse of Lenin, and a close second was a promised afternoon at the Bolshoi Theatre, which turned out not to be one one of the great ballets or operas but a two-hour talk on the history of the Bolshoi, in Russian.

Cab and me

Last Thursday was an important anniversary for me, and by an extraordinary co-incidence it was also an anniversary for the great Cab Calloway, for on 3rd March in the year I was born he published Minnie the Moocher, the first million-selling jazz record.

But sadly I could not invite him to join me in celebration because he died in 1994, and I certainly wouldn't want to invite his trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who stabbed him in the leg with a small knife in 1941 and died in 1993.

So to mark the occasion I had dinner with my immediate family, nine of us, at a restaurant in rural Sussex: no scat singing or HBTY, just a couple of hours browsing and sluicing.

As a matter of interest (my interest, that is) I ate:
Potted Herring, Slow Cooked Gloucester Old Spot Belly, Fennel Gratin, Chestnut Honey Tart, Green Walnut Ice Cream... and miscellaneous forkfuls from the plates of those who had something different: Barbary duck, onion jam potatoes, pigeon, that sort of thing. An eight-year-old grand-daughter had chosen Jacob's Ladder (illustrated below), but needed very little help from me in putting it away. 

It was a splendid evening.

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Flavour of the Month

Here's an extract from The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit:   

Avocado and Lime: Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra singing ‘Some Velvet Morning'.  At once beautiful together and distinctly separate, Lee the velvety note of avocado, Nancy the high-pitched lime that that cuts through the smoothness just when you’re getting too comfortable.

The association may largely be down to my having played the song over and over again, driving down Highway 1 in California on honeymoon. While others toast their future together over lightly grilled fish and flutes of champagne served on a lapping pontoon in the Indian Ocean, we stopped at striplit taquerías and ate burritos the size of shotputters’ forearms. Tender strips of grilled steak come rolled in a floury, slightly crisp tortillas packed with rice, beans, soured cream, mouth-watering, lime-laced guacamole and salsa so fiery you have to grab the sides of the little plastic service basket till your eyes stop streaming tears.

On the subject of guacamole, some say that leaving the avocado stone in will prevent discoloration. My view is that if the guacamole’s around long enough to find out, you’re not making it right.

Her rapturous description of a jumbo burrito reminds me how disgusting Tex-Mex food is. But isn't she fun to read?

The Flavour Thesaurus

This is the title of a wonderful book by Niki Segnit subtitled Pairings, recipes and ideas for the creative cook. Published in June last year, it is original, witty and demonstrates a magisterial knowledge of food.

She chose 99 flavours, sorted them into groups (spicy, cheesy, sulphurous and fifteen others) and then wrote this manual to explain how and why one flavour might go with another, their points in common and their differences.

Some of the pairings listed are familiar: Bacon & Egg, Lemon & Chicken..., others less so: Apple & Horseradish, Coriander Leaf & Peanut (ugh!), Sage & Anchovy...  (One of my own favourites, Ice Cream & Sauerkraut, is unaccountably omitted.)

The recipes crop up in the book almost casually:
"To serve two [fried trout]...make a watercress sauce by blending a bunch with 150 ml soured cream, a squeeze of lemon and a pinch of salt and sugar".

I've tried this, and it works. Having bought the book as a gift for someone I knew would love it, I just had to read it, and there is now a nasty food-related stain on page 199, so I had to buy another copy to see if  Butternut Squash & Chestnut  ("sounds like a couple of fat Shetland ponies") is any good. But I shall not bother to find out whether Celery & Truffle make a good pair, as Segnit quotes food writer Elizabeth Luard reminding us that "truffles are an acquired tase, redolent of old socks, the locker-room after a rugby match, unwashed underpants, methylated spirits and a gas-pump on a wet Saturday".

Out of sheer curiosity, though, I might try Grapefruit ("lumbering old uncle of the citrus family") & Shellfish, or Rhubarb & Black Pudding.


Niki Segnit joins the tiny band of food writers (headed by Elizabeth David and Alan Davidson) who can  be read with enjoyment even by those who have no particular desire to try out their recipes.

A cheese too far

Cheese seems to attract poetasters, for there are hundreds of odes to it. Here is one written by Deric Guest, and published in Wine and Food, André Simon's Gastronomic Wine Quarterly, in 1950:

How shall my palate aught but fickle be
Confronted with such wealth of choice choice—in Brie,
Blue-veiny Dorset, Wensleydale and Dutch,
Stilton and Gruyère, Shabzieger and such
Exotic brands—for Nature sets no term
To the emulgent products of the lactic germ!
To wash down hunks of cheese from Lancashire;
Broaden my vowels, don corduroys and foster
The yeoman spirit bred on Double Gloucester?
Or, with abandoned braggadocio, dare
The cloying decadence of Camembert?

Passing over the pleasure of finding aught, emulgent and braggadocio cropping up in a bit of facetious doggerel about cheese, it is interesting to note that while most of the named cheeses are not exotic to us now (this was written in the grey postwar days when we still thought olive oil was only for pouring into your ear), one of them is no longer widely known.

Shabzieger? Haven't seen that in Tesco's. Surprising, when Wikipedia, spelling it slightly differently, tells us that it was first made by Swiss monks in the 8th century, that it is produced exclusively by Gesellschaft Schweizer Kräuterkäse-Fabrikanten (well, it would be, wouldn't it?), contains blue fenugreek, and is sold abroad under the name Swiss Green Cheese. It was introduced into New York pharmacies in the 1800s under the brand Sap Sago: perhaps they tried to sell it under that name over here too, which would account for its lack of appeal nowadays.

Angel hair football coach?

Much has been written recently about one Fabio Capello, and some confusion has arisen about him, many people arguing that he is a kind of pasta and others saying that he is connected in some way with football or some such game.

For an authoritative answer to this question we can turn to that veritable vade mecum of sporting lore, Alan Davidson's Companion to Food, where Capello appears in the plural as:

Capelli d'angelo ('angel hair), capellini ('little hairs'), the thinnest form of the spaghetti family.

So that clears that up. While we are on the subject, let us note the names of a few other kinds of pasta which also have no connection with sport. Skipping those we all know like LASAGNE, MACARONI, VERMICELLI and so on, here are some of the less familiar (in England at any rate) ones:

BIGOLI, a thick spaghetti from Venice; BOMBOLETTI, a short cylindrical form with a smooth exterior; ELBO MACARONI, an American term for short, curved macaroni; LUMACHE, like snail shells; ORECCHIETTI, 'little ears'; SIDANI, a S. Italian sort of macaroni ridged like celery; ZITE/ZITI, a tubular pasta from Naples.

Davidson describes thirty-eight types of pasta. It is easy to see why it is said that 'Surface-to-volume ratio is important; marrying a particular form of pasta to a particular kind of sauce is an art instinctively acquired by Italians from an early age but needing to be learned by others'.

Little bits of stuff

A while ago I quoted from a report on the ridiculous kind of grub you get at three-star caffs in San Sebastián. I have not been to any of them, because I cannot imagine that either the expense, the months of waiting to get a table or the food will be really worth it. But very complicated dishes in tiny portions are becoming commonplace; no-one talks about cuisine nouvelle or cuisine minceur any more, but the influence remains.

At the moment, either from the goodness of their hearts or because they are doing poor business during the recession, most of the Michelin-starred restaurants in London are offering excellent deals on mid-week lunches; you can have three courses for half or even a quarter of the cost of their grand menus. The really elaborate dishes are excluded, but the quality is no less and the service just as assiduous.

Grumio and I, sometimes with our wives and sometimes as two old codgers, have been working through the best ones at the rate of one a month or so, and very enjoyable it has been. It is an intellectual as well as a gastronomic pleasure; one tries to guess what the dish of Ravioli of Lobster and Scallop with Caramelised Cauliflower, Peanut Butter and Smoked Whimberry Purée is going to look like, let alone taste like, and will the Confit of Pork Belly with Fricassée of Paimpol Bean, Pineapple and Coconut Sauce be as good as it sounds? Ah, and for dessert how about this Buckthorn Parfait with Fig Compote, White Miso Ice Cream and Yuzu Sauce?

It never disappoints, though sometimes it is not quite as one imagined. It may be surprising when something that was described lyrically in fifty words arrives in the middle of a huge white plate looking like a bloodstained golfball with a couple of tea-leaves on top; by then they will have taken your menus away and you may have forgotten what you ordered, but anyway the waiter is going to tell you again, at length.

And the beauty is that such lunching is an economy, really. Doing it once and then having a bacon butty the next day will cost no more than having a prawn cocktail, steak-and-chips and apple crumble sort of thing, twice. Provided, that is, that with your high class deal you have restricted yourself to one glass of the house wine and skipped the £7.50 aperitif.

Try it with cornflakes

Japanese knotweed, fallopia japonica or sachalinensis, has arrived in the UK and established itself over the last few years; huge and costly efforts are being made to eradicate it and there are even proposals to introduce an insect from overseas which might act as a predator and eat the invader.

This seems very risky. Supposing this evil foreign bug takes a fancy to one of our honest British plants, and we woke up one morning to find the country denuded of runner beans, delphiniums or even oak trees?

It might be better to consult the ever-useful Oxford Companion to Food, which notes in its article on Knotweed: "The young shoots make a pleasant vegetable, whose acidity can be tempered by the addition of a little sugar in the cooking. Or, they can be steamed and made into a purée, which can in turn serve as the basis of a sweetened cold soup. The mature stems, peeled, can be treated like rhubarb and it is even possible to make jam or a pie from them".

The trouble is that all this sounds pretty unappetising and it is hard to imagine that people will chomp their way through enough of the stuff to make any substantial inroads into the hundreds of acres of 2-metre shoots already growing. I suppose the TV chefs will have to tempt us with it, demonstrating Knotweed à la Japonaise, Barbecued Knotweed Kebabs or even Knotweed Crumble.

Summer eating

At this time of year the magazines are full of ideas for tossing dreary salads and burning stuff on the barbecue, trying to excite us with beautiful photographs of depressing food. Isabella Beeton, though well aware of the importance of eating what is appropriate to the season (in her day you had to), saw no reason to limit the choice just because the sun is shining.

Here are her suggestions for a week of Plain Family Dinners for 6 in July:

Sunday: 1. Julienne soup. 2. Roast lamb, half calf’s head, tongue and brains, boiled ham, peas and potatoes. 3. Cherry tart, custards.

Monday: 1. Hashed calf’s head, cold lamb and salad. 2. Vegetable marrow and white sauce, instead of pudding.

Tuesday: 1. Stewed veal, with peas, young carrots, and potatoes. Small meat pie. 2. Raspberry-and-currant pudding.

Wednesday: 1. Roast ducks stuffed, gravy, peas, and potatoes; the remains of stewed veal rechauffé. 2. Macaroni served as a sweet pudding.

Thursday: 1. Slices of salmon and caper sauce. 2. Boiled knuckle of veal, parsley-and-butter, vegetable marrow and potatoes. 3. Black-currant pudding.

Friday: 1. Roast shoulder of mutton, onion sauce, peas and potatoes. 2. Cherry tart, baked custard pudding.

Saturday: 1. Minced mutton, Rump-steak-and-kidney pudding. 2. Baked lemon pudding.

A little heavy for our tastes, perhaps, and vegetable marrow with white sauce doesn't sound much fun for a pudding. It's all a bit dull, but this is only for the family so there are no guests to impress. Much more interesting is Isabella's menu for a dinner party of eighteen:

First Course
Soup à la Jardinière, Salmon Trout and Parsley-and-Butter. Fillets of Mackerel à la Maître d’Hôtel.

Entrées
Lobster Cutlets, Beef Palates à la Italienne.

Second Course
Roast Lamb, Boiled Capon and White Sauce, Boiled Tongue, garnished with small Vegetable Marrows, Bacon and Beans.

Third Course
Goslings, Whipped Strawberry Cream, Raspberry-and-Currant Tart, Meringues.Cherry Tartlets, Iced Pudding.

Dessert and Ices

And very nice too. But goslings for afters? My first thought was that these must be some kind of joky sweet in the shape of a bird, made out of sponge cake and fondant icing, but the dictionaries have no mention of such a thing; the OED gives 1: A young goose 2: A foolish inexperienced person 3: A catkin or blossom on a tree.

Perhaps they were real baby geese, fried in butter and eaten as a savoury: you pick them up by the head, dip them in anchovy sauce, pop them whole into your mouth and crunch them up. Yum!

Mrs Beeton's great work was originally published in 24 monthly parts and then as a bound volume in 1861. The meals she writes about seem a bit excessive to us, but it would be another forty years before the Edwardians began serious gormandising with 24-course dinners.

Outstanding value

Global recession has clearly brought out the Dunkirk spirit in us, with ordinary people putting their noses to the grindstone, shoulders to the wheel (not like this), best feet forward, thinking caps on and all the other sternly heroic things we British do in difficult times, unlike lesser breeds who just sit around saying how terrible it is.

The other day I saw a splendid example of the drive, ingenuity, courage, inititiative and sheer grit which make us what we are. Driving along a main road I passed a row of houses; in one of the tiny front gardens there were two little tables and half a dozen chairs of assorted design, and leaning against the wall a carefully-written sign offered BACON SANDWICH AND CUP OF TEA 99p.

There appeared to be no customers and if I had not already been invited elsewhere to lunch I would have pulled up and supported this brave venture. As it was, I just drove past, worrying about the profit margin and the sadness of the proprietor if no-one at all ever stopped.

Kung Pao Kosher

I had no idea, until I read a fascinating piece by Patricia Marx in the New Yorker, that one and a quarter billion dollars in kosher-certified ingredients are exported worldwide from China each year. There is an abstract of the article here (you have to subscribe to get the full text), and here are some of Marx's observations:

...Dozens of mashgihim (kosher inspectors), have been crisscrossing China for decades, eyeing the goings-on in hundreds of factories to insure that the ingredients and the production methods are in accord with kashruth (Jewish dietary laws). Thus, they ask: Does the fish have fins and scales? (A must.) Are the bamboo Sukkoth covers strung together with cotton string or synthetic fibres? (Only material that grows in the ground is permissible.) Is the yak milk stored in containers that might have previously held meat? (A big no-no.)

If a mashgiah deems that the exacting standards have been met, then off to the four corners of the globe go the rice crackers, canned berries, dehydrated vegetables, frozen fruits, chocolate, tea, cooking oils, pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements, preservatives, garlic, food additives and coloring, and sundry other products. And, lo, it has come to pass that China is now the fastest-growing exporter of kosher goods on earth. And, verily, every party involved—the kosher-certifying agencies, the factory owners, the Chinese government, and the consumer--doth benefit, for I say unto you that the value of the worldwide kosher market has been estimated to be a hundred and sixty-five billion dollars per year.

Some of the inspectors work for the Orthodox Union, the largest kosher-certifying agency in the world. If you look carefully, you can see the little "O" with a "U" inside that is printed on every container of Haagen-Dazs ice cream and five hundred thousand other products. That is the Orthodox Union's hechsher (seal of approval). The first product to receive it was Heinz vegetarian beans, in 1923.

There is an abundance of earnest rabbinical discussion about what is permissible under kashruth: Is it O.K. to use toothpaste that does not have a hechsher? What is the kosher status of water buffalo? Can dishwashers be made usable for Passover by changing the racks? Despite such issues, the basic rules, as laid down in the Torah, are (arguably) straightforward. They include proscriptions against eating meat and dairy at the same meal, consuming bug-infested fruit or vegetables (though there are those who give grasshoppers and crickets a pass), and partaking of the flesh from a beast of the earth unless it has cloven hooves and chews its cud. Were these laws designed to keep Jews (a) healthy, (b) holy, (c) isolated, (d) fat, or (e) all of the above? Savants have opined at great length about these matters, and they agree on only one thing: the answer is not (e).

This business of certification is a mostly twentieth-century phenomenon. In the old days, we did not need anyone to tell us if our chicken was kosher, because we slaughtered it ourselves. We made sure that, as Deuteronomy more or less instructs, our supper was done in by a knife that had no nicks, with a quick, deep stroke across the throat which severed the carotid arteries, jugular veins, vagus nerve, trachea, and esophagus, at a point no higher than the epiglottis and no lower than where the cilia begin on the trachea. After that, we made sure that all its blood was drained within seventy-two hours.

That all seems quite straightforward but not something one wants to do every day. Nowadays, though, we can just look out for the little U in a circle and know that it's been done for us.

Taking the bigger slice

Last Sunday's's edition of a terrible TV game show called Beat the Star (originally Schlag den Raab; sixteen episodes on German TV since 2006 and still running) featured a game which, unlike the show, deserves to be more widely known.

It is played with two identical lengths of salami, and I should mention at once that it is in no way connected with the constant references Kenneth Williams used to make to his old friend Maudie Fittleworth (Fun-With-A-Frankfurter), particularly in a radio show called Just a Minute in which he starred together with assorted drolls such as Derek Nimmo, Clement Freud and Peter Jones, who vied with each other in keeping up a flow of off-the-cuff conversation, displaying great erudition and wit.

But I digress. The salami game is for two players, each of whom chops off a slice of his salami: the one whose slice is the heavier wins the round. A game consists of five rounds. These are the only rules.

Can tactics in this game involve mathematics, or can you win when you have played many games with the same opponent by recognizing and exploiting non-random behaviour, as it is said you can in Rock-Paper-Scissors?

After a game, of course, you can celebrate its conclusion by eating the consumables. You just need to add a baguette, radishes, butter (you already have the knife for spreading it), parmesan, salad, and a bottle of wine; this is not true of other games like croquet or bowls. You can do something similar when you have been using chocolate chessmen or playing Go with jelly beans, but it's not so much fun.

I suppose if Maudie Fittleworth's cryptic subtitle referred to some sort of game one could finish a tournament in the same way, but Kenneth Williams has left us, alas, so we shall never know.

It passed over at nightfall last Wednesday

You are allowed to eat matzos even if you have never made the acquaintance of a mohel, and I quite like them; it came as a shock to me three weeks ago when I found that the familiar packs now had a red background and not the usual blue; this apparently means that the Beth Din had approved them for Passover. But this started on April 8th, 5769, so it seems that for several days earlier this month I had offended YHWH, Elohim, El Shaddai, Adonai, El Elyon, Avinu and all that lot by spreading my rillettes du Mans on matzos not made under orthodox rabbinical supervision. However, as a balabatisher yock I need not fear retribution, though I may be censured as a chazzer.

In searching the web for further information about all this I found an article about Jaaber Hussein, an Arab living near Jerusalem, who has a nice little earner once a year when he buys up huge quantities of unleavened bread, pasta and beer which should not be consumed or even kept in the house by the faithful during Pesach. Then he sells it all back later and everyone is happy, most of all Mr Hussein.

Squalus acanthias and pollack

To say that the Belgians call them zeepaling (sea eel), the Germans call them seeaal (sea eel again) and that they are known to the French as saumonette is only a footnote to the long and complex story of the names for the spiny dogfish. These sad creatures labour under the handicap of being a kind of shark and being a member of the family squalidae; this is off-putting enough, but when you find out that they have no anal fin, that the males are identified by a pair of pelvic fins modified as sperm-transfer organs, or "claspers", and that gestation then lasts 22-24 months (long than with elephants, for God's sake), it is hardly surprising that only a great variety of names (in the UK, they can be huss or rock salmon>) ensures that people will want to eat them.

Similarly, coley and pollock (or pollack) never really cut the mustard for the marketing of fish in the Pollachius genus, because the first had long been firmly associated with something that cats eat and the second reminded one either of bollocks or of the derogatory name (in North America) for a gentleman from Warsaw, neither being something one would want to find on one's plate. Now we are being urged to eat them in order to preserve cod stocks, a cause dear to all our hearts, and Sainsbury's are telling us bossily that the word should be pronounced as the French do. This is confusing, since in the OED colin refers only to the American partridge; better if they had put it about that it is an English word like Bryan or Derek, or that it should be pronounced like the former four-star general C. Powell: coe-lin.

Anyway, Sainsbury's are really gung-ho about this fish, and are selling it in special packaging in bold, bright colours "inspired by Jackson Pollock". The designer has said " ...the new-look colin sleeve will be the star of the Sainsbury's store; we expect coachloads to travel by land and sea to see it". This seem a very modest expectation for such a bold venture: surely charter flights from New York will soon be on offer, combining private viewing of the bold bright pre-packaged fish shelves with a look at the latest thing in Gerhard Richter-inspired wrappings for the four-pack beetroots, and a night at the Heathrow Sheraton?

Since the news (or rather, the PR handouts) got round earlier this month the media have been flogging this extremely uninteresting story for all, or much more than, it's worth. And Sainsbury's have got it all wrong, anyway: colin is actually hake, and pollack is lieu jaune.

Blessed are the cheesemakers

I suddenly had this thought: Why have I never written anything about American cheese?

Perhaps not all of my readers would find this among the most engrossing of topics, but then neither are funny hats, or obscure religious observances, or comic songs of the nineteenth century, to all of which I give earnest attention from time to time. And publishing a piece about American cheese would be one more step towards the attainment of an aspiration which has long been close to my heart: the establishment of OMF as an internationally respected compendium of all human knowledge to which anyone may turn in search of enlightenment, guidance or spiritual sustenance.

So, here, with acknowledgements to the mighty Oxford Companion to Food, is an authoritative summary of the subject:

Two American cheeses which claim to be original are Brick, a whole-milk cheese with an elastic texture, and Liederkranz, developed at the end of the 19th century by Emil Frey, a dairyman of Swiss origin, to replace the German cheese Schlosskäse; in fact it was better. Originally made in New York State, it is now popular throughout the USA and its centre of production is in Van Wert, Ohio; it is an orange-skinned surface-ripened cheese with a strong aroma, a mellow taste and a creamy centre.

Other American cheeses are are mostly versions of European ones, especially American Cheddar, which was first made in New England early in the 17th century, and was being exported to England by the end of the 18th century. The Cheddar technique, adapted to a greater or lesser extent, now produces numerous varieties, including Colby, Colorado Blackie, Coon, Cornhusker, Herkimer County Cheese, Longhorn, Monterey, Sage (or Vermont Sage), and Tillamook.

One might also mention Philadelphia cream cheese and, if one must, the products manufactured and sold worldwide by Kraft Foods Inc, which include Real Kraft Cheddar Canned Cheese.

There is much, much more to be said about American cheeses but I think I will stop there. Quite possibly, I will never return to the subject.

Cream of the cream

It is hardly surprising that nobody outside Norway knows much about römmegröt, which is porridge enriched with sour cream (römme).

Sour cream is a traditional ingredient in Russian, East and Central European and German cooking, and over the last fifty years has become a staple in Western Europe, North America and elsewhere. Smetana is a mixture of sour and fresh cream and is probably not named after the self-interested Czech composer who knew which side his bride was bartered.

Sour cream used to be be made by letting fresh cream sour naturally but nowadays is made by pasteurising and homogenising light cream and inoculating it with a pure culture of selected bacteria, keeping it warm to facilitate their growth and then re-pasteurising it to stop the process. This is not the same as crème fraîche.

I had intended to write an authoritative survey of cream and crème in all their variations, covering French and English official regulations (e.g. crème fraîche must contain at least 30 grams of fat while crème légère need only have 12), but I really couldn't be bothered to look up all the EU regulations which may have superseded them, or to explain the French Chantilly, fluide, épaisse, à café, and aigre and what we call double, whipping and clotted.

And then there are all the other French crèmes: anglaise, patissière, au beurre, frite, renversée, brûlée and caramel, and the English creams: crackers, soda, puffs and eggs.

Easier perhaps merely to quote the OED's definition of cream, though it is singularly unappetising:
The oily or butyraceous part of milk
[ME. creme, creem, creyme, a. F. crème, in OF. cresme, Pr. cresma. By etymological conjecture crème, cream, was in 16th c. referred to L. cremor, and latinized as cremor lactis, crema lactis.]
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