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Lear's Nonsense Cookery

Sometimes I find reading for this nightmare degree a complete chore. Sometimes it's a joy. I discovered a wonderful piece by Walter Benjamin on food I'd like to write about when I have the time. Today, the fat Welsh librarian kept walking past looking stern at my gasps of laughter reading Edward Lear. I thought I'd post this. It brightened my day.

Extract from the Nonsense Gazette, for August, 1870.

Our readers will be interested in the following communications from our valued and learned contributor, Professor Bosh, whose labours in the fields of Culinary and Botanical science, are so well known to all the world. The first three Articles richly merit to be added to the Domestic cookery of every family; those which follow, claim the attention of all Botanists, and we are happy to be able through Dr. Bosh's kindness to present our readers with illustrations of his discoveries. All the new flowers are found in the valley of Verrikwier, near the lake of Oddgrow, and on the summit of the hill Orfeltugg.'

THREE RECEIPTS FOR DOMESTIC COOKERY

TO MAKE AN AMBLONGUS PIE

Take 4 pounds (say 4 1/2 pounds) of fresh Amblongusses, and put them in a small pipkin.

Cover them with water and boil them for 8 hours incessantly, after which add 2 pints of new milk, and proceed to boil for 4 hours more.

When you have ascertained that the Amblongusses are quite soft, take them out and place them in a wide pan, taking care to shake them well previously.

Grate some nutmeg over the surface, and cover them carefully with powdered gingerbread, curry-powder, and a sufficient quantity of Cayenne pepper.

Remove the pan into the next room, and place it on the floor. Bring it back again, and let it simmer for three-quarters of an hour. Shake the pan violently till all the Amblongusses have become a pale purple colour.

Then, having prepared a paste, insert the whole carefully, adding at the same time a small pigeon, 2 slices of beef, 4 cauliflowers, and any number of oysters.

Watch patiently till the crust begins to rise, and add a pinch of salt from time to time.

Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible.

TO MAKE CRUMBOBBLIOUS CUTLETS

Procure some strips of beef, and having cut them into the smallest possible slices, proceed to cut them still smaller, eight or perhaps nine times.

When the whole is thus minced, brush it up hastily with a new clothes-brush, and stir round rapidly and capriciously with a salt-spoon or a soup ladel.

Place the whole in a saucepan, and remove it to a sunny place, -- say the roof of the house if free from sparrows or other birds, -- and leave it there for about a week.

At the end of that time add a little lavender, some oil of almonds, and a few herring-bones; and cover the whole with 4 gallons of clarified crumbobblious sauce, when it will be ready for use.

Cut it into the shape of ordinary cutlets, and serve it up in a clean tablecloth or dinner-napkin.

TO MAKE GOSKY PATTIES

Take a pig, three or four years of age, and tie him by the off-hind leg to a post. Place 5 pounds of currants, 5 of sugar, 2 pecks of peas, 18 roast chestnuts, a candle, and six bushels of turnips, within his reach; if he eats these, constantly provide him with more.

Then, procure some cream, some slices of Cheshire cheese, four quinces of foolscap paper, and a packet of black pins. Work the whole into a paste, and spread it out to dry on a sheet of clean brown waterproof linen.

When the paste is perfectly dry, but not before, proceed to beat the Pig violently, with the handle of a large broom. If he squeals, beat him again.

Visit the paste and beat the pig alternately for some days, and ascertain that if at the end of that period the whole is about to turn into Gosky Patties.

If it does not then, it never will; and in that case the Pig may be let loose, and the whole process may be considered as finished.

p123-5 in The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, ed Holbrook Jackson (London: Faber, 1993)

me and my microplane

Alright it's not massive news, but I bought a Microplane. Everyone goes on about Microplanes. If you watch television cookery programmes they all (them TV cooks) use Microplanes. Nigel Slater doesn't usually endorse products but he endorses the Microplane. The "Ask Nigel" he endorses it in hasn't made it to the Observer website, for some reason, unless, bizarrely, I imagined him endorsing Microplanes.

So yes, I paid ten times more (£22) than I could have paid for a Sainsbury's box grater and got this Microplane, I feel compelled to write, but grater, whatever. It is, I keep reminding myself, only a grater.

It minces very well, which (ha!) I find attractive: it's perfect for garlic and for fresh, zingy apple purée for Birchermuesli. It shaves featherlight curls of parmesan over pasta/risotto.

But I'm yet to get used to its tiny, vicious blades. My fingertips are in serious danger. A slightly blunt box grater I can rub my hand against, not for thrills, but to grate to the nub of a carrot, the nub of anything. And what about grating carrots? I have the coarse grade Microplane. Do I need the "supercoarse" if I don't want minced carrot? For zest do I need "fine"? Do I need to shell out £60 on graters, because TV cooks use them?

I'm sure Microplane is like Apple. When you buy something made by Apple - at least when I first bought this Macbook - you feel acutely you've spent too much, when something cheaper, really, would have done. When you've got it, you like how modish it is, but find it slightly irritating because it seems, simply, not as practical as what you're used to. But then it grows on you. People complain about how annoying it is and you feel a bit defensive. Though secretly you sort of agree; or did before. Eventually you love it, don't know why you'd bother with anything else. You become evangelical about its superiority.

Well, something like that. It's yet to happen with my shiny new Microplane, but I've only had it for a few days.

hm

Writing about food suits me better than trying to be urbane and sounding irritating writing about restaurants. I need to be a grown-up to do restaurants.

Tom Yum, paralytic, Tom Yum, anxiety

EATING NOTES

Tip Top Thai and Dim T, Heath Street, Hampstead

Here are a few things I haven't written down because I feel I should be working on my dissertation. I should be. I can't think to write. I'm anxious. I'm thinking about food because it's manageable and outside my head. Unlike, I suppose it's inevitable I add, my dissertation.

New Years Eve. Hampstead. A restaurant called Tip Top Thai on Heath Street we only go to because other restaurants are fully booked. The proprietor sits on a chair by the bar, grimly overseeing four metres square of restaurant. She gets brought tea through the time we're eating, but doesn't say anything. She just sits. The maître d' has a face barren of joy or, yet, expression and reluctantly gives us a table.

Those of us who don't order a starter receive (cue expression) a scowl for not ordering a starter, and I get a further one when all I order is a bowl of Tom Yum and some steamed rice. I am not hungry, so this is all I want. I am scared into ordering a glass of house white ("You want drinks" - not so much a question as a command) which turns out okay. The soup is a bare thimbleful, but it's hot and aromatic, lemongrass predominant. There are a few not-overcooked prawns floating around in there and the rice is, well, cooked and tastes like rice.

Okay so it's not really fair to judge a place on the food, having tried one dish of Tom Yum - what Thai can't knock up an acceptable Tom Yum? My Thai aunt uses stock cubes she gets from Yum Yum in Brighton and works a miracle with them - but the sweet and sour creation served to James is fluorescent enough to make me suspicious. Besides, the waiting staff are so awful it barely matters. I won't be back for it - the food.

Jess and I ask for filter coffee, which causes some consternation although the menu reads: "Filter Coffee". "What coffee? Fil-? Oh. No. We only have normal coffee." Which means instant coffee. You can see the undissolved flakes winking at the brim. Oddly, it's very good instant coffee. Almost I'm tempted to ask what brand it is, because I could drink this, at dire moments. (Unromantic thoughts.)

Resisting, we pay, and we're not going to pay service, except that bitchface assumes a harder expression and worse English than she can actually speak. I ask if it's discretionary. "Yes." So we don't have to pay it. "You pay this," she barks, jabbing her finger at the 110% total.

It's only a few pounds so we pay and get out. It's very irritating, and I leave with the kind of fury that you imagine compels people to write in to a newspaper, or ring Watchdog. Pathetic, in other words. But still, you resent giving money to people who don't even have the grace to bother seeming they care.

Next, New Year's Day. After a night of hard drinking to escape the worry of talking to people, which saw me alternately asleep and throwing up by half past ten, being taken into a fried chicken place on the Finchley Road at half past four in the morning, buying fish and chips and eating them to fill the gap which the vomit, leaving me, left in me, I wake up on New Year's morning in serious need of restoration.

(I regret that my first fish and chips in two or three years is from Montana Fried Chicken, Finchley Road - however satsfying, in a wrong, guilty way, they were. A retributive pilgrimage in order? Whitby? Padstow? Whatever. I think I'll go to Loch Fyne when I get back to Cambridge next weekend and have good fish and chips sans sick starter. I'd forgotten the joy of fish in batter - and chips for that matter. I don't have chips often enough, proper fried ones or even just wedges of potato left to care for themselves in a hot oven with herbs and oil. Potato made crisp, soggy, fluffy by mere application of heat and fat - be it of a goose, a cow, a sunflower, an olive - is without doubt one of the good things in life.)

Johan suggests a walk and we end up going for lunch at Dim T, again on Heath Street, but the Fitzjohn Av end.

Dim T is good - out and out, no bones, no cliches, good. Service is easy-going but professional and the food is - has been each time I've come - really excellent. It's pan-Asian so you could get sneery, but then you remember that places like Tip Top Thai exist, and you think how awful restaurants can be, and then, here, how good they can be, and authenticity is piffling jingoism.

I have Tom Yum again. I need something cleansing, restorative. It's repetitive, I know, but that doesn't matter. The basin - I mean mixing-bowl - of soup which comes is triumphant, a steaming bath of aromatic broth, with large, beautiful coral-striped prawns, noodles, pak choi, good thick bits of chilli with the seeds in, bits of ginger and lemon grass. This is nothing like yesterday's ramekin of liquid with bobbing prawns. The prawns are fresh, with the crunch they have when freshly cooked and on the point. The balance of flavours in the broth, which is all-important, really, is as it should be, hot, sweet, sour, salt. It could do with a bit more heat, maybe, but there's chilli sauce on the table.

We share dim sum. Pork buns. How do you get dough to be like that? It's light, but satisfyingly stodgy, skin-soft and clinging. The pork filling is gutsy, long-cooked, sweet, salt and delicious. Pork and prawn dumplings have a good mouth-coating oitment of porky fattiness, and the taste, which somehow goes so well with it, of sweet seashell prawn. Spicey beef ones have a little slice of red-chilli on top, the meat itself is minced, warmly spiced, rich, and again delicious. You get three of these dim sum in a basket, but you want more, and that surely is a good sign. I leave some noodles and soup in my bowl. It's not that I don't want more but I'm bursting with broth. It's at moments like this I envisage Christian Jessen, all square-jawed and healthy and wearing a lab-coat, saying your stomach is the size of a clenched fist. Groan.

Dim T seems, looking at the menu, to be generous with its pricing, but it turns out it's the food that's generous. Alright, dim sum are a little over a pound a mouthful - but they're so delicious! - and the bowl of soup is around eight quid - but it's fabulous, and massive! Tip Top should trip down the street a few yards to see how service should be done. I'm feeling poor - my bank account is scary before Student Loans give me my new year's pocket money - so I don't pay a tip here. I feel I should, but I don't; the waiter doesn't show a flicker of disapproval.

Lucy and Lucien

the Story of a Gosling

or: Tangled Thoughts on Christmas Dinner

The goose, plucked, unbutchered

Removing the neck and skin

Mummy's delicate technique for removing the feet

the housette, my bedroom, the dining room

Last night we had leftovers and champagne. I think it was my favourite of the Christmas meals. Ham, turkey and goose - with chutneys, pickles, salads. To start we had lentil soup made from the ham stock; to finish, a little Christmas pudding and some beautiful custard. I adore adore adore vanilla custard, cool, soothing, thickened with just the yolks of eggs and very lightly sweetened. It's ambrosial (if not "Ambrosia," I suppose you add). I mean it really is. Gran makes the Christmas pudding from the Eliza Acton recipe which contains no flour, only breadcrumbs for bulk and, far from being stodgy, it is light, aromatic and not in the least cloying. Particularly with custard...

Goose, I now really agree, is better cold. I've read it so often - in Elizabeth David, Matthew Fort among others - and thought No, you want it hot! On Christmas day you must have a whole, roasted bird, and it has to be goose! If only as a note to myself, for next year, I want to say that this is not so.

This year we had a turkey and a goose. I have come round to turkey. When I cooked Christmas dinner at college, we were mostly vegetarians (excepting me and Johan) so I didn't do meat. I didn't do any sort of replacement for it either. Trimmings are substantial enough not really to need the meat that's supposed to be their substance. Certainly they don't need something in pastry, something starchy and oily with nuts. Christmas dinner, let's face it, is the trimmings; otherwise it would just be roast dinner, roast dinner being a celebration of a glorious joint, or a beautiful bird, with a few veg to accompany it. If, for Christmas dinner, you have meat with your trimmings, turkey is not ostentatious. It sits there very happily and its light poultry flavour and thirsty flesh soaks up gravy and this partnership with bread sauce is a holy trinity you can't better. The potatoes, roasted in goose fat so as to be light but rich, are more easily stomached with a less fat bird than the goose itself.

Tentatively I'm saying I hardly wanted the goose. At least with the main course. For starter, I stuffed the goose's neck with its liver, some sausagemeat, some pheasant. It was fabulous, without doubt the best bit of the meal. I'll write the ingredients down in a minute, again if only as a note to myself for next year because I'll do it again. Gamey, richly and strongly flavoured, like one of those French pâtés you can't stop eating, and served with a few pickles, this really got me going for the main course. But then the goose felt a bit superfluous. Turkey alone would have been fine.

And then the goose, quite cold, was so good on Boxing Day. For next year, I'm thinking: do the goose neck as a starter, have turkey for the main - the whole, roasted bird - and then have the goose cold on Boxing Day.

I also think that I'd like to do a confit of the goose legs as a second starter, and just roast the crown to have cold. I wanted to write that I stuffed a goose neck and took the idea unashamedly from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, but everyone wants their Christmas recipes to be their own, so I am a little ashamed. The confit of goose seemed a step too far. That's his idea, too, as a second starter for Christmas dinner. Also it means taking the legs off so you don't get the humble Dickensian glory of a whole, roast goose. But next year I think should be all about these goosey starters. I shouldn't worry about decimating the goose, preserving a wholeness I don't care about by the time I'm into the dinner's fourth bottle of claret (between us all). And anyway there's a turkey.

All I can say is I did make up the recipe for my goose neck stuffing, which was this: the goose liver, chopped; equal quantities of fat sausagemeat and minced pheasant; an onion and an apple softened in goose fat; a handful of breadcrumbs; a glass of red wine; an egg; two fat cloves of garlic, crushed; thyme, sage, salt, pepper. Mixed thoroughly and sewn into the neck, it all simmered very slowly, immersed in goose fat for just over an hour, being turned every ten minutes or so.

Before that we did canopés, which caused a genuine family feud, my uncle to take his wife and say Come on, we're leaving! I made a fennel seed loaf to toast and have with cured salmon, dill sauce, and lump fish roe. I made a pissaladière and cut it into canopé-sized squares. I opened a bottle of Champagne five minutes after everyone arrived. Uncle and Auntie found Skype more fascinating than all this, than talking to us, than taking part. We said how angry we were. Things exploded. Really, I shouldn't have cared less, as they were so impolite, as we took the champagne away into the kitchen, along with all the canopés, and had a marvellous time, cooking and scoffing, downing champagne. I mean: really fab.

Anyway - god isn't it all so dissipated? - having whittled on about the ins and outs of this and that, I think, after all, what I found most satisfying about this Christmas was the goose. I'm thinking again about how to cook it and when to serve it next year; but I'm certain I want to have one we've raised from the beginning again. It felt good knowing how it had been raised, even better to have all its bits: the giblets, the fat, the neck and its skin.

Early this year, out of seven goose eggs, one hatched, and we called the resulting gosling Lucy - Lucy Gosling, becoming Lucy Goosey. Lucy Gosling's fate was to be our Christmas lunch. Lucy Gosling would also be raised as a girl, when in fact she was a gander. Lucy was Lucien, said mum. I argued that this renaming, while hilarious, was gender-normative and took the anthropomorphism too far, but I went along with it. Lucien Goosien was lunch.

Lucy

oysters, fish stew, Dermot O'Leary, Saki

EATING NOTES

Fishy Fishy, East Street, Brighton

Dermot O'Leary opened a Restaurant in Brighton earlier this year. It's called Fishy Fishy. I've been meaning to go for a while, because Brighton is surprisingly ill-provided with good fish restaurants - with any fish restaurants, for that matter. This is a rarity and a must. Loch Fyne, my beloved Loch Fyne, which does so wonderfully in Cambridge, failed miserably here and closed down last year. I never went.

Apparently, the "all round cheery chappie" (that's Dermot) "lives for fish." He has always wanted to open a restaurant, says the website, and as he had two mates in the industry, that's what he did. Cool. Brighton is a good location. It has the happy-go-lucky culture for a Dermot-styled restaurant. This could be successful. This could be more than a celebrity whim.

"We love fish at Fishy Fishy," the website goes on in its blurb, "we love it so much we named it twice." Yes, why did you do that? Fishy always sounds a bit off to me, rotten and bodily. How should good fish smell? Fishy? No, it should smell, aromatically, of the sea. As for bodily - well, I'm sure we all have artistic imaginations. Fishy Fishy really isn't a very good name, annoying and inappropriate twice over.

Still, Fishy Fishy it is, and Fishy Fishy is on East Street, at the bottom of Western Road, so that as you trot round the corner the seafront hives hopefully into view. The derelict Laura Ashley with its mdf boards in the windows does, too, but no matter; there's the seafront and the prospect of a fishy lunch! The Brighton seafront should be lined with fish restaurants. There should be stalls selling jellied eel and oysters, brasseries, bistros, fish and chip shops. There should be Michelin starred places in imitation of Rick Stein, bustling and buzzing. But there aren't, so I don't want to be arch about Fishy Fishy. It's just that its ethos invites arch and I can't help that.

Apart from anything, it's in a lovely, old Grade II listed building. I feel warmly towards it just for that. There's something I find very affirming about old buildings being opened up and eaten and lived and celebrated in.

There's conservatory seating at the front of the restaurant. I'm sure it would be a pleasantly airy, summery place to eat when the weather is right. When I walk in, it's lunchtime. I go through the conservatory glass door, up some steps, but the inner door to the restaurant is locked. I twist the handle, then the other handle. I push the door a little desperately. Nope, it's locked. I can see people eating inside so I wave. Nothing. Embarrassed, I turn away and make my way down the steps. Only now, the door opens and a man says: "Can I help you, sir?"

I'm bad at tables for one anyway. I still find eating alone terribly embarrassing. I'm determined I shouldn't be embarrassed about it but I am. Don't look down on me. I'm not lonely, I just want a good lunch. I'm not paying to be patronised. The drama of the locked door - awkward little events like this I do find very affecting and dramatic; again, I wish I didn't but I do - really doesn't help things.

I get taken upstairs to a little table. The interior is breezy, and, like Derm, it's cheery in here. There are shades of light blue, there are white slats, dark oak and light oak, and splashes of pine. There are mismatching mirrors on the wall and big sash windows which let in wedges of bright seaside light.

There is a very nice waiter serving me who is gratifyingly gangly and stammers telling me the specials. I warm to him and say No, thank you, but I order four oysters and a glass of sparkling wine. The wine is Ridgeview Cavendish and comes from the Ridgeview vineyard in Ditchling, a village five miles away from home and one that so perfectly fits the description sleepy you wouldn't believe it unless you'd been there. It's a fact that all the inhabitants of Ditchling go to church on Sunday mornings. The chalky hills that sweep round the religious little place bless it with the right conditions for the cultivation of Champagne-style grapes. Beatific, you feel. This wine, £5 for a 125ml flute, is very fine. It's quite punchy, but it has complexity with its punch. It makes me think of caremelised pears, vanilla, too, but that's not to say there's not good dry acidity; gooseberries, you'd say, or something like that, with a fragrant, sour hit. Really good.

It should be really good with the oysters, but I'm afraid the oysters themselves are not really very good at all. I'm thinking about the little ones, with their fine sheeny shells, I had in Covent Garden last week, tangy and beguiling, and I'm comparing them to these ones, Channel rock oysters, which are obese, awkward in their thick shells, and, frankly, bland. I'm glad of the tobasco on the table alongside the plate of ice on its stand. They need it. They taste faintly briney, and of the sea, but then you'd be worried if they didn't.

Next, I pass over "Fishy Fishy fish pie" and "Fishy Fishy fish and chips" and settle on "Brightonbaisse". (I'm not saying anything.) The idea of Brightonbaisse is that it's like the Provençal original, but using locally-sourced and in-season fish. This mantra is their constitution. The menu proudly claims that they will not serve lobster at this time of year because it's not the right time for it in the channel. Neither will they import fish like tuna from abroad. We have perfectly good alternatives in Britain.

My Brightonbaisse comes with lots of mussels and a couple of scallops. They're lovely, excellently cooked, and there're no complaints. The white fish is in quite small, flakey chunks so it's rather hard to discern what it is, but it's okay, if a little dry. The sauce has a good, deep flavour; you know there have been shells and bones, onions, garlic and fennel involved in its production. But it lacks an edge of saffron and doesn't quite avoid reminding you of Heinz tomato soup. That's mean of me though; I mop up the juice with pieces of baguette and enjoy it very much. I'd just like a little more finesse, some nicely filleted fish, a couple of turned potatoes.

But maybe that's not in the spirit of the place. It's a happy-go-lucky, cheery brasserie, after all, not the place for finessing sauces and turning potatoes. In an interview the Fishy Fishy website links you to, originally published in Waitrose Food Illustrated, the interviewer talks to Dermot about his cooking. He's not bad, he says. He's experimental. "At the moment, I'm adding smoked paprika to a lot of things... Actually, I've yet to find a recipe for which it's wrong to add it; no doubt it'll happen soon."

I didn't order dessert.

I got the bill: about £25, so that's alright, I suppose. I'd have liked better for my money though, really, a little more quality, a little less groan. But having said that, Fishy Fishy does not overcharge, its prices are fair. The cooking could just be more careful.

This is a bit of an afterthought. I was supposed to be reading Saki because I'm doing my dissertation on it, but at lunch I was reading Saki because I wanted to look nonchalant. You can see the frightful green cover in the photo. I came across this in of one of the Clovis stories. I really did, by the way, I'm not just quoting something I read the other day because I have the urge to. Not that it really matters, but to me it was part of my lunch. Sitting there in Fishy Fishy, I'd rather have been sitting in Saki.

"To think of all the adorable things there are to eat in the world, and then [there are people who] go through life munching sawdust and being proud of it."

"They're like the flagellants of the Middle Ages, who went about mortifying themselves."

"They had some excuse," said Clovis. "They did it to save their immortal souls, didn't they? You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed."

Clovis relapsed for a few golden moments into intimacies with a succession of rapidly disappearing oysters.

"I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion," he resumed presently. "They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. Do you like my new waistcoat? I'm wearing it for the first time tonight."