bouillabaisse and snake oil

since I was lucky enough to retrieve this correspondence from Google's voracious spam filter before it was recycled into a binary spam-and-egg quiche, I have published here PJ's letter concerning fond memories of his old friend's rambunctious gastric afflictions and associated antidote dependence.

thank you for your kind flattery, PJ, at least on my behalf. methinks, however, that perhaps JG will be underjoyed at the references to his former profligate ways with the booze and falling asleep on pizza, awaking to eat the drool-soaked leftovers, night-time attacks on other peoples' refrigerators, and the wanton theft of JP & Blackadder's milk. (While I much admired Blackadder's elaborate ruse - hiding a morning stash of milk the night before in a cereal bowl concealed in the back of the refrigerator and covered with a plate - I found this time consuming. After trialling an untenable plan involving small packs of UHT milk hidden in secret locations in the pantry I have had much success with simple threats and fulmination.)


Dear food tragics,

And tragic be thy name. I found myself dumbfounded, and I was not alone. For while I was singularly impressed with the obvious writing talents of VB and her even more obvious intelligence, I was astounded by the writer's naivety.

It concerns her sidekick JG. I was at once struck by this fellow's resemblance to a travelling snake oil salesman's assistant I once witnessed in my youth. The uncouth fellow would stand in front of the crowd while the salesman would hold forth on the evils of drinking and binge eating. He would stand hunched over, scratching his arse, farting and belching with particular force and thumping his chest in an obvious sign of indigestion distress. The salesman would then hold up a bottle of "Bubba Ho - Tep's Health Elixir" to the crowd, pour a good wack of it down the expectant throat of the stooge and then wait for the orders to roll in as the sick and indigestant chap is miraculously cured.

"What the?" I hear you say, which is not totally inappropriate given the likeness (or Ikeness as I prefer to call it when two people are thought of in the same breath, like Ike and Tina or Rove McManus and this JG bloke) of the afore mentioned comedy tragic to our hero. Well, anyway, the point of all this is, simply, this. Do not lay the blame of unwellness on a dodgy muscle and therefore by very association the cook, but rather, look to JG himself. I suspect he has not chewed the muscle in question with due diligence and the customary required 42 times in order to prevent indigestion and general stomach malaise. Cure him I say with some 21st century snake oil,"Quick-eze", encourage thorough mastication (his forté you may mistakenly think) and the indigestion should, unlike Macarthur "not return".

Yours, blah blah blah.

the luis buñuel

some time ago JG got into his martinis in a big way, concocting strange variations, including one containing the world's most disgusting vodka, Absolut Raspberry. he suggested Luis Buñuel's martini recipe, from his autobiography My Last Sigh, was a necessary blog entry. I had forgotten all about it until I read my friend JP's most excellent blog Experiments in Booze: tested on humans, devoted to all things ethanol.

the Buñuel must be the most repeated alcoholic recipe on the web, however no account of our kitchen would be complete without it. if you're in Melbourne they’ll make you one at Gin Palace. if not, get busy freezing stuff.

"To provoke, or sustain, a reverie in a bar, you have to drink English gin, especially in the form of a martini. To be frank, given the primordial role played in my life by the dry martini, I really think I ought to give it at least a page. Like all cocktails, the martini, composed essentially of gin and a few drops of Noilly Prat, seems to have been an American invention. Connoisseurs who like their martinis very dry suggest simply allowing a ray of sunlight to shine through a bottle of Noilly Prat before it hits the bottle of gin. At a certain period in America it was said that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception, for, as Saint Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative powers of the Holy Ghost pierced the virgin’s hymen 'like a ray of sunlight through a window – leaving it unbroken.'

"Another crucial recommendation is that the ice be so cold and hard that it won’t melt, since nothing’s worse than a watery martini. For those who are still with me, let me give you my personal recipe, the fruit of long experimentation and guaranteed to produce perfect results. The day before your guests arrive, put all the ingredients – glasses, gin, and shaker – in the refrigerator. Use a thermometer to make sure the ice is about twenty degrees below zero (centigrade). Don’t take anything out until your friends arrive; then pour a few drops of Noilly Prat and half a demitasse spoon of Angostura bitters over the ice. Shake it, then pour it out, leaving only the ice, which retains a faint taste of both. Then pour straight gin over the ice, shake it again, and serve.

"(During the 1940s, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York taught me a curious variation. Instead of Angostura, he used a dash of Pernod. Frankly, it seemed heretical to me, but apparently it was only a fad.)"

chicken salad of my sleepless nights

I only read Haruki Murakami between the hours of two and five in the mornings.
before any fortunate sleepers think this connotes disrespect to the wordy Japanese jazzman, I would hasten to mention that the insomnolent don't always read to induce sleep. sometimes it's a deliberate search for literary weapons with which to battle those wakeful demons.

nobody can illuminate the temporal discord experienced by the insomniac quite like Murakami. his cities, like all cities, never stop. but they change in the shadows between the last train and the first morning service, becoming surreal versions of their lighted forms. nor does his time stop; but the count can creep slowly and inexorably like treacle, dragging the past through the present like a thing stuck in the flow.

I am reading his newest fiction, After Dark. Murakami describes the city in a nocturnal lull as still alive, but on basal metabolic function. from the couch I hear my own city making the sounds of basic continuous motions. sparse, benevolent motors freed from daytime urgency. the buried humming of the elevators and their insistent arrival bells. more importunate are the garbage trucks. an easily neglected fact about cities, this one at least, is that for the sake of traffic and pedestrians the garbage can only be removed between 11pm and 5am. people ask me if I like living in the middle of the city.
"Love it, but for the garbage trucks".
"Oh yes", they agree, "we get woken up by ours on Wednesday mornings too".
but mine are different. they are nightly, numerous and frequent, each taking a different category of waste from the subterranean loading dock below my window. they beep, seemingly with intent to disturb, as they begin their long, tight reverse into the hidden darkness of the dock. once the truck is in place a hydraulic whine begins; lifting, compacting, grinding. this is loud, the straining engine part. when it ends twenty minutes later the regular hum of the truck's engine seems unobtrusive by comparison. the air brakes screech on release and the truck grunts as it climbs out of the dock and on to another load up the street. on a busy night there's another one waiting in the street to take its place. I have Murakami-esque images of a truck which removes only the plastic fish shaped soy sauce dispensers which the take-away city sushi-munchers generate daily by the thousands. he would thoughtfully problematise the categorisation of the little red or green plastic caps for the fish shaped bottles, I'm sure.

Murakami's descriptive style almost avoids sensorily provoking the reader, as if out of tact or modesty, while evoking the scene in a more prosaic manner. at times the scenes in After Dark turn us from reader to viewer as he tells us what he and we are seeing on the screen or through the lens, taking away scent, taste and sometimes confounding our clear view with blurred images and static. but he doesn't restrain his use of sensual language for aural pleasures. once the owner of a jazz club in Tokyo (in the 70s, when jazz was not Big In Japan), Murakami's passion for Ellington et. al. is irrepressible. the sounds of those musicians are scratched out by needles in various rooms, for Murakami is a vinyl lover. he elucidates a soul-search for the true meaning of music through the young trombone player, Takahashi, who answers Mari's question about what it really means to play:
"Hmm, let's see... You send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of physical shift, and simultaneously the listener's body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It's giving birth to that kind of shared state. Probably."

in Murakami's style of casually revealing the profound and extaordinary to the reader in the most prosaic of scenes, this conversation takes place at 3:07am in a Denny's restaurant. Takahashi orders a chicken salad with crispy bread, because he always orders the chicken salad at Denny's, even though he pretends to peruse the menu anyway, just so it's not apparent that he always orders chicken salad with crispy bread (which is never as crispy as he requests, despite Japanese technological proficiency, he muses). the implied repetition of the chicken salad reminds me of the more obvious temporal indicator in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in which the narrator is always cooking spaghetti when he receives mysterious phone calls, and informs the caller that she only has nine minutes left to talk because the packet indicates the cooking time is ten minutes. when I read that book I pictured Mr. Wind-Up Bird swirling the boiling spaghetti with his cooking chopsticks, and wondered what kind of sauce he added.

now After Dark sees me awake at 4:57am wondering what a Tokyo Denny's chicken salad is like.

twisties for dinner

we must be halfway through the film festival. I would know if I knew what day it is, but that's what I get for trying to keep up with the beer-drinking prowess of my dear friend AF (I put it down to proper German fortitude, JG thinks I'm a lightweight and just need more practice... no, I do not need to drink more, I promise you)...

some random observations regarding the film festival -

during this 19 day period of July into August, dinner can constitute any or all of the following: twisties, cheezels, m&ms, (king size) cherry ripes, choc-tops (for those without an irrational fear of biting into cold hard things that induce dental pain - I must reveal here that I've never eaten a choc-top - I imagine them to be like horrible frozen rocks masquerading as something sweet and nice).

some people bring souvlakis into the cinema. am I a killjoy or does this violate a natural law of some kind?

Grated Onion, the cinema on Russell St, is quite the crappest cinema ever. this observation is justifiable according to the following -
- the seats are old and crap and uncomfortable
- they can't run a session on schedule
- the carpet smells faintly of regurgitated popcorn. do people really eat so much popcorn that they vomit? or is it reversed gastric matter of unspecified content, mixed with un-masticated popcorn spilled on the floor?
at least they're allowing queues inside this year, instead of letting us stand around in the skanky laneway in the freezing cold.

those coconutty-almondy Rafaello things come in VERY LOUD PACKAGING, as politely noted by Pseudo-Professor-Creepy-Guy in the row in front of me at the Regent. pompous jock-itch. damn those things are good, has anyone eaten one lately?

the Regent is quite the best theatre, and it is worth going there even to see a crap film, just to sit in that beautiful, majestic space.

my two picks to date: The Cats of Mirikitani and Return to Goree. both beautiful, excellent, inspiring...

the film about the people who shag horses: a bit naff.

Black Sheep by Jonathan King, a horror-comedy with lots of kiwi sheep jokes is going on general release most likely at the end of August (can't waste valuable festival sessions on films that will screen at the Nova in a few weeks). it's had good reviews and I await general release for some cutesy-baa-lamb-blood-guts action.

black pudding

I'm glad I bought this book even though it was a they-don't-have- the-book-I-want- but-I'm-not- leaving-without-a- new-book kind of purchase (realistically, if it wasn't that it would've been a new handbag... there is no rationality when retail desire strikes). also I did quite like The Age article on Reynaud's visit to Australia. and when I opened the book for a flick-thru in the bookstore the first thing I saw was a photo of some piggy dish with a big gooey slab of Saint-Marcellin cheese melted on top. you see, what choice did I have?

anyway I didn't get near the book again for quite a while because JG sequestered it immediately, enthusing over all things porcine and planning the assembling of his own pig-killing team (underwhelming response so far).

JG's only criticism of the book is the lack of explicit instructions for actually killing and dressing your own pig. this, clearly, is a benefit for most other readers (he's not weird or anything, he just grew up on a sheep farm so killing your own animals is normal, kind of...) instead Pork & Sons is a rather sweet and sometimes strange homage to Reynaud's grandparents, his hometown and his friends, and a document of what was once an integral part of family and village life in France (and also in Italy - my father can remember pig-killings in his village Circello, near Napoli, where they say that a man who marries is happy for a day, but he who kills a pig is happy for a year). there is in fact, nothing particularly disturbing about this book, although for an ex-vegetarian of many years I have achieved an extraordinary suspension of morality. so much so that while some committed carnivores won't even eat black pudding, I'm right there, totally into it, totally dig it.

JG's black pudding inspired by a dish from Reynaud's book could possibly change a few minds.

black pudding with pear and beetroot crostini



we used morcilla, the Spanish variety of blood sausage. I think an Italian sanguinaccio would also work in place of the French type of sausage but English style black pudding might be too sweet. this entry should really be labeled 'small tasty things', but we are somewhat gluttonous and ate this as a big main event.

for 2 (I did mention we were gluttonous)

2 blood sausages, in half-centimetre slices
1 onion, chopped
2 pears, cut into eighths
3 medium beetroots, each cut into about 6 wedges
half a teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon brown sugar
2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
4 slices of ciabatta or similar bread, at least 2 cm thick and 12cm long
3 garlic cloves, smashed
oil for frying

boil or steam the beetroot wedges until tender.

fry the onion with the salt in a large frypan over a medium heat to slowly caramelise. when the edges are browning add the sugar and vinegar and stir for a few minutes.

add the pear slices and cook these to the desired softness, then remove and set aside.

add the sausage slices to the onion and raise the heat a little. stir continuously to ensure the sausage cooks but the onion doesn't burn. add the beetroot and stir everything well to mix the flavours.

in another frypan heat quite a lot of oil and add the garlic, cooking aver a medium heat until the garlic just colours to flavour the oil. remove the garlic then turn up the heat and fry the bread on both sides until you have crisp, golden crostini.

place two crostini on each plate then lay the pear slices on top with a little space in between. fill the gaps with the beetroot and onions and arrange the sausage slices on top. garnish with long chive strands.

claudia roden

being attached to my computer in this dungeon by a wire and small speakers in a cruel twist of economic fate (mortgage) was actually quite ok this morning because Radio National's Book Show featured a couple of recordings of Claudia Roden talking about her newest book. she talks about her passion for collecting and recording recipes and the things people do and say in their kitchens. hers is a particularly beautiful kind of anthopology, which is what makes her such an engaging writer. Roden's subjects, participants or informers are not estranged from her as with some anthropologists, they are people who have shared something with her, and while she regards documentation as an important outcome it's as much about the process of meeting, understanding and giving something to people along the way.

I find particularly interesting Roden's discussion of innovation versus tradition in cooking. she sees innovation and fusion as a specific kind of cultural change, but instead of being caused by the mixing and merging of ideas which influences characteristics and behaviours in other cultural fulcrums, food cultures are to some extent directed by publishers and the perceived reader demand for newness. this is all fine but as Roden points out, it's a fast track to losing origins and meanings. i find it comforting that there is this kind of discussion about recording and acknowledging tradition, because I sometimes feel that my pedantic documentation of original source material, secondary references and changes made to recipes is somewhere between mildly didactic and tragically boring for people who ask for recipes.

the BBC have published some recipes from Arabesque here.