Tits Oot

Breasts, and womens’ breasts in particular, are once again the subject of vigerous, if not mass, debate.  Let’s be frank, there is a section of society where womens’ breasts are frequently a matter of debate, that section of society being males.  The question that has arisen recently though is not so much concerning breasts, but what is attached to them.  In short, breastfeeding.

If the question is ‘when is breastfeeding appropriate?’ then the answer is ‘whenever there is a hungry infant and a nursing mother’.

Simply put, and there’s no denying it, infants are poor at preparing their own food.  Give a newborn a can opener and a tin of tuna and they will be completely unable to open the can.  Utterly useless.  And they are no better with pouches or jars, or bottles, whether screw top or cork.

Breastfeeding is an excellent idea, not least because the mother deals with the removal of any packaging before commencing feeding, even on the bus.

However, some are not in agreement.

There is, for instance, discussion about breastfeeding in the workplace.  An interesting conversation to be sure, but surely the conversation should be about infants in the workplace?

There may be workplaces where it is not a huge distraction introducing the baby into the environment, for instance a crèche.  I can think of few others.  Just as playing death metal at ear shattering volume is not conducive to a productive day so an infant, even a well behaved one, is a disruption.  This is based on my experience of children on public transport, where one can be sat in a train carriage, oblivious to a whelp of mass distraction, until it goes off.  This is normally a noise far out of proportion with the size of the being generating it, more akin to some sort of city wide early warning system than a simple signal of hunger, or pooping.

While infants are possibly not suitable for the workplace, for instance on an oil rig or aircraft flight deck, breastfeeding of an infant in the workplace should not be an issue, and anyone thinking it offensive is invited to look at their fucking work and not the chest of their colleague.  Breasts are, of course, appropriate in the workplace, especially if that workplace has a name concluding with ‘Club’ or ‘A Go Go’.

There was also recently discussion about whether breastfeeding is appropriate in restaurants.

Once again, the question might more simply be are infants acceptable in restaurants?  The answer is ‘not near me’ but I concede that there are many, many restaurants that I do not patronise on a regular basis, in fact that’s the vast majority of them, so let’s take a more general view.

What, really, can be the objection?  Is the patron concerned that a punter is getting a free meal?  I hardly think that an infant having a feed is quite the same as some chancer rocking up, ordering a glass of tap water, then proceeding to unpack several cool bags and decant various thermoses while uncorking a few bottles they have brought, of home brew to neatly complete the example.  Will it offend other diners?  Again, what are those other diners doing looking at the chest of somebody at a different table?  I may not be an expert on etiquette, but even I know that staring at the breasts of a woman at another table has three likely outcomes, the first is your girlfriend storming out of the restaurant after catching you ogling, possibly covering you in today’s special as she goes.  The second is the lady’s dining partner thumping you, probably while your girlfriend holds you down, the third is a restraining order coupled with a lifetime ban from the entire chain, and that’s a long time to go without KFC.

Anyone who has seen breastfeeding will know that you don’t actually see breast, just the back of a baby’s head.  So what’s the objection?

The sooner children learn how to behave in a restaurant the better.  Of course, an infant can’t send a boob back, but they can learn at an early age that dining with family is one of the great pleasures in life.

Postcard from Norfolk - Seeseafood

 The Ship, at Brancaster, is one of my favourite pubs.  The staff are friendly, the parking ample, the beer good and the food great.  They make a great flat white coffee, they have conversations with one another about how to make a great flat white coffee, and at the end of the evening the bar staff get up on the bar.  They aren’t doing a dance or anything, they are holding the credit car machine aloft, trying to get a signal.  Maybe in a county as flat as Norfolk, a couple of feet makes all the difference.

Getting a signal was clearly a problem the day when their ‘phone wasn’t being answered, this resulted in taking a punt on getting lunch.  Bad call, no room at the inn.

No problem, onward to the White Horse at Brancaster, which is reliable, spacious, has a great bar menu and more than ample parking.

The White Horse also has something new on the menu.  The seafood platter.

Oh.  My.  God.

This is what bliss tastes like.  This is the desert island meal.  This is the Death Row meal.  This is so very, very good that you want to accost everyone else in the bar and ask them why they are not eating it, while simultaneously resenting anyone else ordering this because they might tell others about it, and reduce the number of seafood platters in future.

It was better than beer.

That’s right.

It should have been no surprise.  The White Horse does exceptional food.  This is a pub that is on the salt marsh and, when the tide is in, is so close to the water you can just about row up to the bar.  This is a pub that has pools full of mussels just outside its back door.  This is a pub, in short, that does seafood.

Presumably they know a chap who does platters and the chef thought, ‘hey ho!  I’ve got an idea!’.

Let’s be quite clear, I was ready to enjoy lunch at the White Horse as only a man who has been disappointed not finding a table and then found an excellent alternative can be.  I was simply not prepared for just how great that alternative was.

The Ship is still one of my favourite pubs in Norfolk, the reasons now extend to that time they were full and we went to the White Horse instead, and discovered the seafood platter.

Now we don’t need to worry about where to go for lunch for the rest of the holiday.  The only conundrum is how many times during the remainder of the holiday it is seemly to go to the White Horse and order the seafood platter.  I’m thinking ‘as often as possible and far more than is decent’.

A little bit on the side, or on the top

I adore chips.  I adore their many varieties.  There’s your basic chip, essentially a (thick) slice of potato, deeply fried.  Then you have your french fry, and finally, for the aesthetes in the crowd, the crinkle cut.  The shape of the chip is just the start of the journey, as it’s the preparation that makes such a difference.  Rule of thumb, the more of an animal you use in the preparation of a vegetable related product, the better the outcome.  That’s why double-dipped larded fat-and-grease loaded chips, cooked in cow, are the best sort of chips.
Of course, some see chips simply as the enabler of the main event – salt and vinegar.  Salt is of course essential for human life, as without it food would be bland, leading to the sort of ‘what’s the point’ ennui that may not be destructive on its own but, when combined with floppy hair, poetry and the ready availability of laudanum, can prove disastrous.
The chief role of vinegar as a dressing is to be sluiced over hot chips with the resulting cloud of scent wafted into a confined area, making everyone in that area want chips.  Now!
As a result of being deeply fried, chips formally cease to become vegetables and are granted honorary ‘actual food’ status.  But we should acknowledge that vegetables do have a part to play in the world of dressings and sauces.  That role is to assist delivery of thousand-island and other brightly coloured, tangy, vegetable-taste-disguising dressings.  Naturally, certain protocols have to be observed.  Stood at a salad bar with a spoon, wolfing down ranch?  Freak.  Stood at that same salad bar using a stick of celery to scoop and swallow?  Better.  But do remember to bite the end of the celery off rather than sucking the sauce off of the end and going back for more.  Such double-dipping can result in lifetime bans, even from a Harvester.  At a Berni Inn, it simply results in a good shoeing ‘out the back’.
Cooks occasionally get bent out of shape when a customer salts their food before even tasting it.  They should of course realise that this is infinitely preferable to the strangled cry of ‘agggh, this is shit!’  >sprinkle sprinkle< ‘Mummmm, much better.’ from the dining room.  If salt wasn’t so important we wouldn’t have fought wars over the stuff, and Waitrose wouldn’t sell seven different varieties of what is, at the end of the day, tasty aggregate. 

There’s nothing wrong with prepping your plate in anticipation of your meal.  Any sort of meat dish requires mustard, of course.  Coleman’s English Mustard to smear on the edge of your plate, French wholegrain to remain securely in its jar until the end of days.  Lamb is a game-changer, as you are now able to add mint-sauce to your greens to taste.  That taste should be ‘largely mint sauce’.
Pepper is an oddity.  The place for pepper is usually in the preparation rather than the consumption.  Back in the seventies pepper came in the form of a dust so fine it was one step away from being best applied by aerosol.  A spirited session with a pepper shaker could produce a cloud of the stuff that, if inhaled, led to the sort of reaction unseen since the Regency period when a new consignment of ‘Stonkers’s Very Strong Gentlemen’s Snuff’ landed on the docks.  Now pepper comes in chunks as folk wrestle with their grinders before giving up and reaching for the salt.  The only place where pepper is successfully served is in certain restaurants, where a man with, usually, tight trousers will sidle up to you and, holding an object which if it were coloured pink would see him arrested for indecency, will discretely grind to your satisfaction.
In an age when food manufacturers seek to pre-load edible excitement by helpfully including 125% of our daily salt, fat and sugar requirement in one portion of ready meal, we still love a dollop of sauce.  That’s why I live in hope of one day being offered the sauce menu when taking my seat in a restaurant and, when deciding on ‘the Daddies’, having the waiter murmur ‘excellent choice sir’.

Currywurst

Like many Premiership footballers, I enjoy taking pictures of my sausage with my 'phone.

Ever since I saw a ‘close up’ feature about currywurst on the BBC’s news web site (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8408716.stm), I’ve been excited to a degree best described as ‘juvenile’ about the prospect of trying this exotic new dish.

Apparently the Germans have the same enthusiasm for curried sausage as they do for lederhosen, beer and war. The origin of the dish is that a German Housefrau in 1940s allied occupied Berlin obtained some curry powder from British troops and created the curried sausage and the lucrative sex-for-food trade at the same time

Currywurst is available in London at Kurz & Lang, 1 St. John Street, Smithfield, London (www.kurzandlang.com). They are, apparently, a German sausage importer and the shop has a small café attached. And by café, I mean griddle in a room.

The café itself is a monument to white tiling, like a better class of public convenience. There is a shelf running along the front windows and at this you can sit up on stools, watching the world go by while passers-by look in end envy you your hot sausage and cold beer. Those having their wurst inside get it on a china plate, those who wish to sit outside at the small tables on the pavement and fag up get paper plates.

Inside it’s a cosy and warm place to be on a winter’s evening. The hiss and sizzle of sausages cooking on the griddle complete with the banging tunes coming out of the radio, more commercial rock than oompah. It wasn’t in the least crowded but there was an atmosphere, which by my reckoning was never less than about 70 per cent pork fat and occasionally took on an almost solid appearance not unlike one of my more enthusiastic weekend fry-ups.

There are a variety of sausages on offer, all cooked by an authentic German chap sporting a rather unfortunate beard. I went for the posh end of the wurst experience; currywurst, sauerkraut, fried potato and a roll. In truth all you need is sausage and sauce and roll.

The currywurst is a sausage, smothered in a spicy brown sauce and then sprinkled with curry powder. Seeing curry powder shaken over sausage and sauce was truly a cultural shock and something of a taste sensation. Curry powder in British cuisine has the reputation of being used timorously by housewives in the late 1970s to bring a touch of the exotic to the dinner table. But not too exotic - lest one inflame passions that, in an era heavy on man-made fibres and material, might lead to chaffing, or tremendous static discharge. No, you used just enough to have you reaching for your glass of blue nun.

It was quite a surprise to see that it’s curry powder that gives the currywurst its kick, not so much a curry sauce, Curry sauce is, of course, a staple of after hours cuisine in the Midlands where, smothering chips, it is often the last, desperate throw of the dice to try and head off a hangover. It’s probably possible to work out where you are in Britain by what people put on chips, curry sauce means Midlands, chips and gravy means t’north and chips and cheese is, of course combined with a glass of white wine to constitute the ‘ladies special’ at the Café Piccante in Edinburgh. (www.cafepiccante.com). God knows what they serve further north than that; maybe the national dish of the Shetlands is chips and sheep dip.

To drink? An excellent lager – pauliner in this case, but there was quite a selection. It was such a shock not to be grossly overcharged for decent German beer that I quite forgot to steal the glass as a souvenir.

Also on sale was Jagermeister (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4germeister). This was sold in a bottle (from which you pour a shot), a little bottle (from which you pour a shot), and in a test tube (and if you’re drinking from that, it’s time to go home). I’m wary of drinking anything from a test tube as a search of literature shows this inevitably leads to transformation into Mr Hyde. Unleashing an inner beast without conscience usually happens when I drink stella anyway.

In addition I’m made aware that there’s a practice called Jagerbombing, surely the preserve of somebody hell bent on self-destruction, you drop a shot of Jagermeister into a glass of red bull and end up hammered but unable to sleep it off. It’s exactly this sort of behaviour that makes you hellish grumpy and sets a nation down the road of fascism.

Fast food, convivial atmosphere, with booze! Surely this is the way forward.

Postcard from Norfolk – Fine dining

After many years of driving past the doors of Morston Hall, hotel and restaurant, we finally got round to eating there. I knew the time was right to do so when the phrase ‘we really must eat there one day’ moved from an internal thought, through mumbling, past suggestion and finally to a chant voiced with almost Gregorian-monk like discipline by all in the car. Not to have booked at this point would have resulted in the next trip past the gates of the hotel being heralded with the same chant, but in that slightly mocking and accusing tone by the rest of my family, while I simmer internally and wonder if I am the only one able to pick up the telephone or what?

The booking was made and the night arrived. It was, I have to admit, a pleasure to dress for dinner in a suit thinking ‘I am going to look good’ rather than dress for dinner thinking ‘if I spill grease on this shirt, it won’t be a disaster’.

Not that we don’t get out much, but we were the fist non-residents to pitch up for dinner. This was in part to get maximum enjoyment from the evening and also a cunning ploy to enable the consumption of two gin and tonics before having to go through to eat. On arrival we were greeted by a ridiculously young and infectiously enthusiastic young man who was less matre de and more master of ceremonies.

Our first visit? How lovely, and were we celebrating any special occasion? Yes, we were celebrating my Mother’s birthday, one week ago today. Without a pause the young man stepped forward and gave my Mother an affectionate hug, wishing her happy birthday.

Frankly, it could have gone either way. My mother is a rather prim and mannered Scottish lady and, to be honest, demonstrative affection is not something that my family are into (at least not until recent years, when the younger members have married into families and made the discovery that hugging is something you can do without alerting the council authorities). Luckily the young man was genuine, and very good looking, and probably a bit surprised at my mother hugging back. I know I was. It’s not often you see your mother surprised and melting and back to normal inside of a space of a skipped heartbeat. Granite, see, the Scots.

I looked at the waitress, twenty, gorgeous, and wondered whether I’d get away with saying it was my birthday today. Sensing this my wife steered me safely to a chair and the welcome embrace of a G&T.

Frankly, the food had a tough act to follow. The service was divine, but the food was sublime. The stand out dish though, the one I keep thinking about, was the parsnip soup. Now, I make a good parsnip soup, taking parsnips that are shaped like the ‘after’ pictures of an STD lecture and some curry paste, I can make a soup that will be hot and fiery enough to restore vigour on the coldest winter day, and that’s just with external application to the chest and pulse points, if you actually eat the stuff you feel great right up until your next bowel movement. But this soup…

They must have harvested the parsnips with a silver sickle when the moon was waxing gibbous. Such flavour, such subtlety. Then at the bottom of the bowl there was apple puree! Christ alive, it’s bonus food!

Frankly, anything after that was going to be an anti climax, yet it was obvious that the chef, if not his crepe pan, was on fire that evening. He was young and hence had something to prove and energy to spend proving it. Then, after dinner had finished, he pulled it out of the bag.

After he had done the rounds, a shy guy propelled out of the kitchen by his staff eager to see him complimented (as he deserved), we sat down to coffee. I idly reached for a chocolate and popped in my mouth and, oh; my. Chocolate and chilli! You can stick crack up your arse (and maybe you do).