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’.

Why do people photograph food?

 Why do people photograph food?  For any number of reasons.

Mainly because it’s free.  Before digital photography you had to first pay for film and then pay again to get it processed, so people took a lot less photographs.  It was not unusual to see for the first and last photographs on the same roll of 24 exposures to be of Christmas – and not the of same Christmas (although chances are that ‘The Sound of Music’ would be visible on telly in the background in both shots.  ‘The Sound of Music’ at Christmas, ‘The Great Escape’ at Easter, those are the correct films for the major Christian festivals in the calendar).

In addition to cost, getting your film developed meant others saw your photographs (before the invention of digital photography the only way a 17 year old would see a picture of your drunk girlfriend naked was if he worked in Boots), and nobody wanted to be known as the Guy Who Takes Pictures of Chips.

With the advent of digital photography, we are free to take pictures of food, then e mail them to our friends to torture them by pointing out that they are not about to tuck into a huge portion of egg and chips.  Yum!  Or the weapons-grade variation, taking a picture of a mid-morning pint when on holiday and e mailing or texting it to a friend at around the time when you know they are at their most frazzled.

To a certain extent, the growing trend of photographing food has been driven by the illustrations in the growing pile of celebrity chef cookery books that continually clutter our kitchens.  Food porn is not, as you might rationally suspect, something to do with cucumbers or a bloke holding up a melon without using his hands, but a term used to describe luscious pictures of food intended to make the food look delicious, like the photographs in fast food joints convincing you that what’s in the cardboard container you have just been handed is luscious and plump and full of flavour, rather than simultaneously limp yet full of flavourings.

There’s something of an OCD aspect to all this too.  I can quite understand the pleasure one can take in, for instance, taking a picture of the occasional tasty looking dish or, even better, a surprising looking offering on a plate or, jackpot! a rudely shaped scoop of mash, and then e mailing it to your mate to compound the monotony of their day, but I can also imagine that there are people that delight in documenting everything that goes in their mouth. 

Knowing something of human nature from the internet, I strongly suspect that there are probably people who equally delight in documenting the other end of the process.  The next time you get all self conscious when you hear the distinctive click of a camera shutter in the next stall over in a public lavvie, just remember it may not be you who has just become an addition to some pervert’s album.  But it probably is.  In either case, screaming is perfectly acceptable.

The next step is blogging about your food and while there are probably a gazillion blogs where foodies exalt excellent cooking while pretending to be restaurant critics in the same way that kids wrap their sheds in tin foil and pretend to be astronauts, the most entertaining ones focus on the rougher end of the culinary experience, such as the ‘traction man’ blog that highlighted the problems with hospital food (starting with it being the last thing anyone feeling under the weather would want to be confronted with) or the excellent ‘no second helpings’.  Both blogs took pot shots at the establishment and attracted the attention of the national press in the way that some twat who wrings 1,000 words out of couscous never will.  I hope.

Food is life and people are recording more of their lives than ever, even the intimate – eating is putting something in your mouth – experiences.  On balance then, I’d rather see a recording of a pie than a sex tape, especially if it’s made by the sort of people who like pies.

Pop up fun

There are, I have read (in the trendier left leaning newspapers and magazines that I do not of course buy, but find in the better class of train carriage or clap clinic waiting room), about pop up restaurants.

Pop up restaurants are not, it would appear, giant three dimensional cookbooks with seating for thirty and a turbulent chef hidden in the index, but rather restaurants in unusual places. Disappointingly, what is considered ‘unusual’ in these circumstances is anywhere well ventilated, spacious and in a trendy postcode.

When I hear ‘pop up restaurant’, I have certain expectations. I want to open doors to the most unusual places, I want to open the door to trap three of a public lavvie and find a candlelit table, two chairs and a hot plate there, or be climbing a tree, mountain or loft ladder and find a place at the top renowned for doing interesting things with ducks.

Of course, for those of us in the real world, we have known about pop up restaurants for years. They are layby cafes and they serve up the very best in greasy baps and tea.

Why though, draw the line at pop up restaurants? I rather like the idea of pop up libraries, swimming pools (okay, ambitious that one), cinemas (already being done through mobile cinemas), film studios (the next logical step) and, already here, pop up theatre in the form of site-specific theatre…but site specific theatre that you’d actually want to see – for instance you slip into your chair at your check-out for a nine hour shift and next to you is played out not some bloody monologue about feminist bar codes, but rather a feel-good musical rom-com! With lasers. And sequins.

Decanters

What could be better than a drink? I'll tell you, a drink poured from a decanter. In truth, some people choose a wine because it's got an interesting looking label. And it's a natural assumption to entertain preconceptions about the quality of a drink based on what it's poured from. If it comes out of a bottle, shiny cocktail shaker or tartan thermos flask, you are probably in for a treat. If it's being poured from some sort of novelty bottle, that is, a bottle in the shape of a landmark, fruit or, God forbid, a naughty clergyman, then sip with trepidation. If it's being poured from something labelled 'value' or 'evidence', best avoid altogether.

If it's a decanter, chances are you're at home or, if not actually at home, making yourself at home.

Decanters perform two vital functions, they smoothly pour spirits into a large glass and they make it socially acceptable to have a lot of booze piled up in the front room, readily to hand yet looking elegant in a way that a clustered field of bottles would not.

Moreover, they can be a piece of history. The best place by far to obtain a decanter is your local charity shop, where you can not only ironically make a contribution to the fight against, for instance, liver disease but can give an important artefact a new lease of life. That's why one of my decanters has 'Terry's team 1985' engraved on it. I have no idea who Terry is or what his team did in 1985 to win that decanter but I enjoy speculating as I chase down the level of booze in the thing of an evening.

Current theories include something to do with golf, armed police response or transplant surgery.

It's a straightforward square job that normally holds enough sherry to stun a cart horse or point eight of a vicar but at Christmas is pressed into use as reserve port decanter. The other reason decanters are so useful is that one can serve visitors drinks from them without the visitor seeing the label that adorned the bottle used to fill said decanter. That's the other reason why it's important to know your various different engraved decanters, one must always know which is the good stuff and which is the 'visitors' brew'.

Yet to be acquired; the ship's decanter. One of those enormous ones with a fat bottom and a thin neck that looks like an unfortunate princess. These are rather harder to come by as, I suppose, sailors are not soon parted from their vessels, especially their booze vessels.

Of course decanters have their place and that place is in the home, one's club or, on those rare occasions when needs really must and the rebels are in the embassy compound, the front line. I have seen, in a rather chi-chi shop in Burnham Market in Norfolk, picnic decanters. These were plastic replicas of their lead crystal or glass models and, while I am of course now kicking myself for not buy several, at the time I took a rather purist approach and decided that if I was going to decant on a picnic, I'd bloody well do it from a crystal jobbie. If I had been thinking clearly I would have realised that the weight saving of a plastic decanter allows another bogle of wine to be carried to the table. Moreover they would make excellent combat decanters, light and durable they would be just the right thing to bring a touch of elegance to one's fox hole as one spends the evening guzzling scotch and loosing off the occasional volley at Terry Taliban. Naturally if one were to take prisoners, one would have to have two decanters, as even the Geneva Convention does not insist on having to give the enemy the good stuff when offering him a drink.

Postcard from Ireland - Glengarriff to Dublin

Just when you think you’ve seen all the rugged beauty of the wild west Atlantic coast, you round (yet) another bend and some other view is revealed. If you gave into the temptation to stop the car and take a picture every time you wanted to when driving through the Killarney National Park, your progress would resemble a stop-motion animation crossing of the hills and valleys.

There are those of course that have to drive the roads every day – like the chap with the van stopped by the side of the road hefting a sack of sheep feed onto his shoulders. The feeding troughs for the hillside sheep are within easy tipping distance of the road and the sheep seem terribly pleased to see the feeder – I don’t know what sheep feed tastes like, but it’s obviously an improvement on the normal fare of tuft and thistle.

In Killarney itself we stopped for coffee and cheesecake. In accordance with the rule that no meal or snack in Ireland shall consist of less than seven million calories, the huge slice of cheesecake comes with a scoop of ice cream. Nothing sets one up for a long journey quite like metabolising a lot of sugar.

The motorway in Ireland was a revelation – a smooth ribbon of tarmac and, compared to the crowded motorways at home, blissfully free of traffic. Possibly the locals are put off by the signs that adorn the junctions, explaining that motorways are not the place for scooters and learner drivers and, right at the bottom of the list of prohibitions, stating ‘no animals’. Trap racing may have its place in Ireland still, but that place is not the overtaking lane.

The road signs on the motorway continue in gaelic and English. Normally having signs in both languages is a sign of trying to resuscitate a dying language that is dwindling but here in Ireland people do actually speak gaelic and for those who don’t, it adds a delicious sense of being abroad. Visiting Ireland, English speaking and driving on the left, can be somewhat unsettling. There’s much that is familiar but you’re constantly reminded that the place is different to home, in a way less obvious than when you visit, say, France (which is bloody different from home, what with everyone being French).

Gaelic and English may be thriving languages in Ireland, but the most common language is Romanian. I’ve never been anywhere were there are so many foreign workers – including abroad. Obviously the thing that’s done is that

After the wild romance of the south, Dublin is a much more cynical place. It’s the capital city of course and, as cities go, it’s intimate but still manages to hang on to some charm with a historical centre, making much of the Georgian architecture. And, indeed, if you’re looking the craic, then Grafton street is the place to find it. Buskers busk and tourists move along slowly in a Brownian motion of gawking. Possibly the best addition to the street are the flower stalls. They turn street corners into tropical gardens, with the flowers raked up, like waterfalls of colour against the drab city centre.

Tourists too at Temple Bar, this time French school children, all sporting identical orange backpacks, clustered round a busking rock and roll band. Tres cool.

Postcard from Ireland - Cork to Glengarriff

Taking the N71 from Cork to Glengarriff; a word about Irish main roads. One of the most charming things about them, as they twist and turn along the wild Atlantic coast or wind through beautiful countryside (FACT: Ireland contains over 90% of the world’s twists) is that they will suddenly plunge straight through a wee village. You’ll be happily hammering along with only bemused sheep there to witness your speedy progress and the next thing you know you are in a street rather narrower than an anorexic’s belt (usually with cars parked on either side of the street) and pondering the possibility of shopping for a newspaper simply by extending your arm out of the car window, into the newsagent next to you.

To get to the Drombeg stone circle, one of the most famous tourist attractions in the area, you turn off a road, turn off the side road and, just when you’re starting to wonder whether or not you’re actually on a goat trail, you enter the car park.

Walk past the tiny model circle of stones that some wag has put in a nearby field, along a twist in the path and there, emerging from behind the hawthorn hedge, is the stone circle and, behind that, the Atlantic.

This is no henge, so don’t expect something on the scale of Stonehenge or Avebury, but it’s impressive. You can walk around it, touch the stones and take a moment to think.

Or leave an offering. People had – a few coins and a flower (a daffodil, the flower currently in season and, perhaps more importantly, the flower of the Marie Curie cancer charity in the UK and also the leading cancer charity in Ireland) or, on one of the uprights, a mound of coppers in a sea shell placed on top of the stone.

Looking round, you can see why the circle was raised here. Circles are raised in sacred places, they do not make the place sacred. With the hills embracing the field and the Atlantic stretching to infinity, this is a special place.

Knowing how seriously the Irish take their food, it comes as no surprise to learn that next to the stone circle is a Neolithic kitchen. There are two rock lined pits in the earth; one for fire, the other for water. Sudies showed that hot rocks from the fire depositied in the pool of water could raise the temperature to boiling in eight minutes, and it would stay hot for three hours. If this is true then it shows that the priorities in neolitic times were boiling meat; the lack of a soap dish shows that this was a kitchen rather than a bath. So, Neolithic Cork man was well fed with hot food, but smelly.

Glengarriff is a small village running either side of the main road, like many other little villages. The only thing different about this one was that it had our hotel in it. Like otrher irish hotels, this comes with a pub attached to it (that’s right, sod the hotel bar, why have one of thjose when you can have an entire pub?). This was the second pub I happened across a breast feeding mother in. Nursing her three and a half month old baby the lady and I had a brief conversation, while I practiced the art of looking anywhere but at junior and resisted making some quip about draught versus bottled.

Thirty twisty turny minutes away is Castletownbere, a fishing village with a particular claim to fame. There are, I learned, very very many pubs called McCarthy’s bar in this part of Ireland. But this is THE McCarthy’s bar that adorns the front of the book of the same name by the late Pete McCarthy. After walking through the town and trying to wrestle with the apparent defiance of logic that suggested there were more pubs in the town than there was actual town, I ended up in McCarthy’s bar. It is, indeed, a grocers at the front and a bar at the back (actually it’s more like two thirds bar) and it is, without doubt, one of the most charming places to drink I’ve ever been. There must be something about a pub with a literary connection – the Woody Creek Tavern in Aspen is the same, it has a certain quality; maybe it’s the relaxed bar staff, maybe it’s the slightly shabby furniture or maybe it’s the beer (it’s the beer), but the place was fantastic.

It also served, without doubt, the best Guinness in Ireland.

Postcard from Ireland - Cobh and Kinsale

The Irish are supposed to take their drinking seriously. They do, I’m sure, but that’s as nothing compared to how seriously they take their food.

Cork has a food market called ‘the English market’. It’s made up of various stalls selling everything from soup to nuts and, to put it in context; the fish counter is sixty feet long and that doesn’t include the lobster tank at one end and the portable oyster bed at the other. There was very little that I didn’t want to buy but, I suppose, fruit has its place (which is adorning the side of a cocktail).

In the end, in seeking a picnic lunch, I purchased what appeared to be a loaf sawn in half and stuffed with enough cheese and meat to feed a regiment but was, I was reassured, just a sandwich. I managed to get the thing loaded in the car without assistance, although I was wondering if assistance might be required in eating it. The sandwich counter at the English Market manages to combine artisan sandwiches manufactured on an industrial scale.

Cobh is famous for being the last port of call of the Titanic. It’s also famous for being the place that many of the emigrants from Ireland left their home country, driven by the lack of potatoes to seek a new life, and a tan, in the United States. So, obviously a place that is associated with tragedy and grinding misery is a must see on the tourist trail.

And for many, it is the beginning of the Irish tourist trail. Because the reason that the Titanic anchored off Cobh was that it provides excellent deep sea anchorage for ocean liners or, today, cruise ships. I wonder if they play up the Titanic connection to those who still have some sailing to do on their ‘Europe in two weeks’ package.

Cobh was also the first time I saw an image on a tourist guide book brought to life; the houses are all painted different colours. Not unusual you might think but an unusual effect when it’s a row of terrace houses and every house is a different, vibrant, colour. The Irish, it would appear, do not go in for ‘blush of pea’ or ‘murmur of straw’. No, it’s green green, yellow and the red normally found on post boxes or the lips of a certain type of hooker.

The overall effect is charming, even on a grey day. Maybe the houses are a colourful revolt to the predominant weather front of the Atlantic, where nature has a colour scheme of ‘grey with a hint of damp’. Of course, when the sun shines the place is transformed, the sky turns a dazzling blue and the houses resemble a giant painter’s pallet.

Cobh is also where you take the Cobh to Monkstown ferry (five Euros for a car), cutting out a lot of tedious driving around roads in a landscape that would delight industrial historians and is beloved of those that like to see thriving industry but is not as appreciated by those that like to see their landscapes unblighted by, for instance, steam plumes, spoil piles, ugly warehouses, cranes, more warehouses, docks and yet more warehouses.

Catching a ferry is a very holiday thing to do. In normal life, one very rarely feels the desire to catch a ferry, incompatible as they are with any city without a river running through it. However, if global warming really catches on, we may all be catching the ferry to work. So catching the Cobh to Monkstown ferry was great fun and something special…so I thought right up until the moment I realised that my car was just one in a line that had arrived to make the short (two minutes) trip across the river. To the others on the ferry this was no doubt just another crossing but to me, seeing the waves slosh and froth through the raised ramp in a ‘should that really be happening?’ sort of way, it was all very jolly.

I was so happy to be travelling on a ferry (really, they ought to have one of those funfair wooden signs on the boarding ramp, showing a middle aged bloke in a suit, with moustache and a wife-and-kids-and-mortgage hangdog expression and a notice saying ‘you must be at least this mature to ride on this ferry’) that I forgot the problems that previous Cobh maritime departures have had. Luckily, I can report that the trip was Iceberg, Kate and Leo free.

I was also mature enough to sit in the car and not demand to see the engine room or to pilot the ferry in by pretending that it was my birthday. In truth, getting the car off of the ramp was challenge enough and I think the ‘woo-hoo!’ I uttered was entirely justified.

I do though have to consider whether or not I have an issue with the Sat Nav directing one onto a ferry. I thought the whole idea of a car was to be in charge of ones own destiny, and go by road. It was quite a novelty though to hear ‘next left, next right, next left, onto ferry’.

On to Kinsale via roads straight out of ‘Return to Glennascaul’. Kinsale is, I strongly suspect, very different in August than it is in March. Ireland in March is much as you would expect. The rain is cold but, hey, the people are warm and that’s what we’re here for. Seeing the Irish countryside obscured by a soft rain and the spectre of the sun trying to break through the clouds, highlighting the daffodils with the promise of spring is enough to lift the heart, and remind one why Ireland has a reputation for being green.

Postcard from Ireland - Cork

Cork is a mobius place. The city itself is small, but by the clever application of a one-way system the city-planners have managed to wrap at least twelve thousand miles of road around what is essentially a small port.

Cork has some interesting features. For instance, if you’re asked in a pub quiz where the greatest number of coffee shops per person is, then forget Naples, New York or anywhere obviously peppy and suggest Cork. The only rational explanation to the very great number of coffee shops in Cork is that the national social health system can’t afford methadone and so everyone is combating hard drugs by downing double shots of espresso in various forms.

I’m not kidding. Everyone is drinking coffee, all the time. Possibly this is to give them the energy to get them to the next coffee shop and score their next hit of the dark gorgeousness. Given that many of the coffee shops double as chocolate shops, this is a good reason to sprint to the next one. Frankly, I can’t get excited about latte but give me a free chocolate truffle at the same time and I feel so good I want to have a dog tail grafted to my ass so that I can wag it and show my appreciation.

One citizen of Cork not drinking coffee was the baby being breast fed in a pub. That’s right, I was in Ireland for about an hour before I saw what has to be the ultimate in underage drinking. Actually, it sort of made sense. Cork has pubs everywhere and they are usually of a type: quiet, made gloomy by all the dark wood and dully shining brass and Guinness and affording many places where you can have a quiet pint, or a conversation, or unfetter your boob and feed junior. Much better than having to do it in a more public place.

One of the odd things about Cork (as soon as you accept breast feeding in pubs as normal, you realise your whole yardstick for what’s odd and what’s not in Ireland has to shift) is one of the main streets comes equipped with these green lights recessed into poles. What the hell is that all about? I could only assume that the city council have imported the maritime idea of giving guidance and they produce a handy marker for those who are weaving their way from bar to bar, pub to pub, on a dark and rainy night. Or if they are a bit pished.


One thing that becomes quickly apparent is just how seriously food is taken in Cork. The main food market ‘the English Market’ is home to the longest fish counter I have ever seen. Never mind that some of the fish looked spectacularly ugly, I was too distracted by the lobster tank at one end and the portable oyster bed at the other.

Taking food seriously, having a passion for it is, I think, linked to the famine in Ireland all those years ago. Not having enough food does rather concentrate the mind and, once the immediate threat is averted it’s natural enough to carry on thinking about food – not just ‘where can I get a potato’ but ‘I wonder what interesting things I can do with garlic and seafood today’. I think the collective historical memory of the famine may also go some way towards explaining the portion sizes. When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you make sure that the current one involves piling the plate high.