Crucifixes and pig's trotters

Returning to "Pudding Island" after a trip almost anywhere is a depressing experience, especially when it's a Sunday and the Stansted Express (From £8* to central London) is closed for engineering works. Fuck knows what the engineers do every Sunday - the trains only seem to get slower. Squeezing my fat arse into a coach seat apparently designed for Haitian children, I opened my copy of the Observer, bought just before boarding to pass the interminable journey to London Victoria. Since I last read a newspaper, The Observer seems to have transformed into a gossip column for lefties, with the same stock pictures of royalty the Daily Mail uses but with added snide comments. Desperate for something to read, I turned to the restaurant review in the magazine. Jay Rayner is a fine restaurant critic and here is an extract of the words of high praise he has for Tuddenham Mill, "a smart boutique hotel" in Suffolk.

"A starter of pork neck carpaccio brings thinly sliced piggy that has been marinated and spice-rubbed then cooked sous vide for most of a weekend...It's fautless...Roasted chicken wings join hands with tiny brown shrimps in a cross-cultural marriage that is astonishingly successful...A perfectly cooked tranche of hake is served on bright green tapioca flavoured with watercress foraged from the bank outside...None of this is cheap, but then each dish is so evolved and elaborate that it feels like good value." The price per head, including wine and service, was £60, which probably doesn't sound unreasonable.

I'm just back from three days in the Picos and the Pyrenees, collecting seeds. Last night as it was getting dark, exhausted and hungry, I found a hotel in a small town in the central Spanish Pyrenees. I dumped my bags and went straight to the dining room, which was full to capacity with families and couples. I waited only ten minutes in a comfortable leather armchair before being shown to a table in one corner of the wood-paneled room. The waitress (there was only one) brought a menu, which she patiently translated, enquired whether I'd like red or white wine, and bustled off to attend to another table.

I cannot read this menu (see below) without my salivary glands going into Pavlovian overdrive. What would you have ordered? Should I start with a salad of baby lettuces with anchovies and langoustines or with artichokes stuffed with mushrooms? After that should I have octopus stewed in its own ink, pig's trotters or peppers stuffed with hake and salt cod? The life of a traveling seed collector is full of such dilemmas. After much mulling, the edge of my hunger blunted by the first few mouthfuls of red wine, I ordered the artichokes followed by the pig's trotters. The waitress queried my order. Would I really eat the trotters - "only people from here eat them"? I assured her that I would.

The artichokes arrived, four of them, perfectly pared down to their pale green hearts. A few tender leaves had been left to contain a broth of fungus, the basis of which was morels. The only thing that I will hear said against a perfectly cooked artichoke is that it makes all wine taste metallic but even I can endure ten minutes without a sip of wine, while I eat artichokes.

Years ago I went to La Tante Claire, a celebrated restaurant on Royal Hospital Road in London. The signature dish of the chef, Pierre Koffman, was stuffed pig' trotters, which I duly ordered and ate. It was an extraordinary dish, not least because to make a pig's foot palatable there are days of steeping, simmering and surgically precise de-boning to be done. What was brought to my table yesterday evening cannot have taken the cook much less time to prepare than Koffman's masterpiece took him and it was what you would expect it to be - pig-flavoured gelatine. I sucked it up, every last fatty morsel, and wiped the plate clean with bread from the basket that had arrived with my wine, which, incidentally, was a very passable red from Navarre.

I'm not really a pudding man but I felt obliged, in the interests of preparing this report, to order the yogurt mousse with strawberries. You may imagine for yourselves how delicious this was.

While traveling alone I often have the opportunity to watch fellow diners surrepticiously. I am very often struck by the fact that many couples dining together seem to have run out of conversation. They stare into space, at their neighbours, at the congeling food on their plates, anywhere but at their companion. I often have cause to celebrate the fact that I have only a book for company. Last night, however, the room hummed with conversation and everyone seemed to be having a good time despite, or perhaps because, they were dining with their families and friends.

At the table adjacent to mine was such a party; a young couple, with two children and several grandparents. The young mother was attractive and it was hard not to stare, especially because between her ample (but not too ample) breasts - to all intents and purposes naked - hung a large, silver crucifix. It was impossible to admire the crucifix without ogling the breasts, and vice-versa.

The price, advertised on the menu, including wine and bread was eighteen Euros. Now that, Jay Rayner,  is good value.


* If you happen to live in the arse end of Stratford or are prepared to spend fifty quid on a taxi to get to your actual destination.

Asparagus and hake

Jack Kerouac wrote "On the Road" in three weeks, prompting Truman Capote to quip, "That isn't writing, it's typing." In the same vein, I sometimes think that what I do isn't traveling, it's driving. I pass swiftly on modern tarmac roads through vast stretches of territory, home to peoples whose ancestors fought and died for the right to inhabit a particular valley or cultivate a certain patch of land. My eyes and mind are on the vegetation and I give scarcely a thought to the human beings toiling in the fields and eking a living from the often marginal land where wild plants have so far survived the encroaching tide of civilisation.

The industry that has sprung up in the last thirty years to exploit tourists makes it much easier to visit a foreign country without experiencing anything in the least discomfiting. I remember a former customer relating incredulously the story of his honeymoon in Thailand. On being shown to their suite, this couple's first instinct was not to strip bollock naked and fuck, but instead to turn on the TV. A search ensued and, behold, there was no TV!!! My customer advised me to stay away from Thailand.

It is easy to take the infrastructure of tourism fro granted. Going out of season, as I often do, to regions that have no industry other than tourism and agriculture is a pain in the ass, because the hotels and restaurants are generally closed. Why would they open when there are no customers? I spent a week in the Picos de Europa in late March and was greeted with incredulity at most of the hotels at which I stayed. On the first evening I was presented with a long and implausible menu, featuring creatures from most of the extant Phyla on earth. I ordered goat, reasoning that you can't really go wrong with a goat stew. Bad choice. By the time I admitted defeat I had christened my dinner 'Goat Extra-Matura' in honour of its origin in the previous season, if not the Burgess Shales. The Rioja was passable.

A few days later, driving east through the southern approaches to the Picos, I felt a familiar sensation in the pit of my stomach. Lunchtime approached. I passed village after village with no sign of an open restaurant or cafe and I resigned myself to making do with a picnic comprising an emergency stick of salami and half a bottle of Rioja. While looking for somewhere to stop, I passed an unprepossessing building that appeared to be a restaurant. Dozens of cars were parked on the nearby verges. I drove a few hundred meters down the road before reversing course and finding a place to stop.

I wish I could say that the welcome I received, as I walked into the dimly lit basement of the restaurant was warm. In fact it was curt. Then again, I speak no Spanish and it was clear that every other person in the place was a Spaniard. I managed to indicate that I'd like to eat lunch. The waiter shrugged and pointed to the absolutely full restaurant, implying that there was no room. "Might I eat outside?" I asked, in sign language. Another shrug, which I took as a yes. I took a seat at a table outside and opened the book I had brought with me from the car. A good book is an essential tool in the armoury of the solitary diner. Eventually a waitress appeared. She recited a list of the things I might eat and, negligible though my command of Spanish is, I understood. I would like asparagus, followed by hake and I would decide about dessert later. Also red wine and water, please. The red wine and water arrived by return, the former chilled, unlabelled and utterly delicious. With it came a basket of bread.

For a few minutes my book lay ignored as I soaked up the sunshine, drinking cold red wine and eating bread that can't have been more than two hours out of the oven in which it was baked. The waitress reappeared with a plate bearing five fat spears of white asparagus, skillfully peeled, a blob of oily mayonnaise the only accompaniment. The asparagus melted on my tongue and slipped sensually down my throat. After a long, welcome pause the hake arrived, pan fried to perfection. There may have been a salad as well. I don't remember for sure. Each flake of fish parted effortlessly from the last and went into my mouth with a squeeze of lemon juice and a sigh of pleasure. The faintest hint of iodine was the only indication that the hake hadn't died the day I ate it. These two courses epitomise everything I love about cooking and eating. The ingredients were simple and few, their quality unimpeachable and they were cooked with great skill and masterful restraint.

I had no room for dessert but finished with an espresso, also perfectly made. The bill came to eight Euros. I left a tip.

Reims

Should you chance to find yourself in Reims on a Saturday evening do not on any account decide to have dinner at Le Boulingrin, the city's most famous brasserie. The cuisine is exceptional; the ambience is Belle Epoque; the dining room hums in tune to a hundred interesting conversations; the guests and the waiting staff are beautiful but the maitre d' is a turd and does not deserve your custom.

I'd arrived in Reims quite late and was tired and hungry. Could the concierge at my hotel recommend a local restaurant? I'd asked and had been directed to Le Boulingrin, a few minutes' walk away. Approaching from a side street, I passed the open door to the kitchens and paused to watch the chefs adorning aluminium platters, piled high with crushed ice, with crustacea and molluscs before being hoisted shoulder high by waiters in evening dress and whisked into the adjacent restaurant. I made a mental note to leave a large tip for the concierge and pressed on to the restaurant's door.

A table for one? I asked. Although the place was busy there were a few empty tables and I didn't anticipate a problem. Did I have a reservation? No, I said, I had stopped unexpectedly in Reims and my hotel had recommended Le Boulingrin. The waitress hailed the passing maitre d', who looked me up and down through piggy eyes. 'Non. Nous sommes complet! ABSOLUEMENT complet!' he said, turning away as he spoke. Then he half turned on his heels and added, jowels quivering with emotion, 'Malheureusement', making it sound as though this unfortunate state of affairs was entirely my fault.

Twat. There is no excuse for abysmal behaviour of this sort. After being denied a table at Le Boulingrin I crossed the road to another restaurant that, it turned out, was also fully booked. The manager could not have been more charming, however, and was deeply apologetic that I could not be accommodated. She suggested two alternative nearby restaurants and I left vowing to return better prepared another day.

After receiving the shrugged shoulder at four restaurants, I went back to my hotel and asked the concierge to reserve a table for me, which she did, at Brasserie Flo. I arrived early and was greeted by name. I apologised for arriving before the specified time. No problem, Mr Mitchell. We have a table for you upstairs." said the maitre d', who led me to a room devoid of atmosphere and replete with hedge fund managers. My heart sank. I'd wanted to indulge my enthusiasm for shellfish in the company of other enthusiasts, not surrounded by wankers with expense accounts inversely proportional in size to the credit card holder's ability to appreciate food and wine. Let me record here, however, that the service at Brasserie Flo is exceptional. The ability to materialise at a guest's side when service is required and to remain aloof at other times is a rare gift in a waiter but the men and women who work at Brasserie Flo have this skill in spades. I'd have preferred to dine downstairs in the bustling main dining room but still, I had a fantastic evening.

I was asked whether I'd like an aperitif and, this being the capital of Champagne, I ordered a glass of whatever the house recommended. While drinking this slowly I perused a lengthy menu and contemplated the effectively infinite combinations of courses I could order. In the end I settled on the 'Plateau Royale' which arrived in due course, causing the busy restaurant to hush momentarily as it was brought to my table. Surveying the feast that lay before me, I ignored the envious glances and open stares from all sides. I could hear the group of British bankers at the next table exchanging pathetic stories about 'my first oyster'. There was no way I was going to eat everything on the plate. Where to start? In what order to engulf the delicacies arrayed before me? I knew that the pleasure I'd derive from each succeeding mouthful would diminish but this made the problem harder, not easier. Embedded in ice and arranged on the vast aluminium salver lay the following: half a lobster, half a crab, nine oysters, of three different varieties, six whelks, some large prawns, a dozen clams or so, a few langoustines, a bowl of crevettes grises, abundant bread and butter and several lemons. Where should I start? Perhaps with an outrageously luxurious mouthful of lobster - the entire tail engulfed at once - a blob of mayonnaise the only lubricant? Or should I should select the plumpest, fleshiest and most lubricious of the oysters, its shell fully six inches from umbo to ventral margin. Perhaps I should suck the salt from the carapaces of the tiny crevettes grises before smearing them on brown bread and butter, squeezing lemon juice over the whole and engulfing them, shells and all.

I cannot tell you in which order I consumed this feast, for I was too absorbed in the task of eating to take notes, but I can assure you that the exorbitant price was emphatically worth paying. When I was sated, a few whelks short of the full plate, the waitress took away the detritus and brought, at my request, a cognac and an espresso. I took the cognac with me out onto the balcony overlooking the main street of Reims and watched the party-goers disperse as it trickled down my willing throat.

Barolo

Italian wine has always been a closed book to me, although god knows I've drunk enough of the stuff to pickle a Brontosaurus. Valpolicella, Soave, Chianti, Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, Orvieto: these are names that speak to me of sunshine and warmth but as to the distinctions among them, I am clueless. Driving recently across the ancient plain of Piedmonte I grasped for the first time why the cuisine and wine of Italy is so diverse. Here and there a limestone hill stood proud of the plain and its flanks were invariably cloaked with vineyards. It suddenly became obvious that great wine could only be made on these rare, sun-washed slopes, the luckless flatlands being restricted to the cultivation of maize and vegetables.

I was heading for Alba, hoping to find a fat truffle for my supper, when I passed a road sign for Barolo. Executing a swift and dangerous handbrake turn, I negotiated my way down a series of switchbacks into the village. Arriving in the center of town, all was quiet. I was tired and really didn't want to get back on the road, so I approached a hotel that was obviously closed but which showed signs of life within. A woman was sweeping detritus from the kitchen floor out into the street and I asked her, in English, whether there was any possibility I might have a room for the night. From within the proprietor, having overheard our conversation, emerged and replied: "Why not? Come in! Would you like to eat too?"

Eating was very much on my agenda and so, having dragged my luggage up to a top floor room, following the bewitchingly wiggling bum of the maid, I returned post haste to the restaurant. Obviously, I was the only customer but an elderly man was watching a football match on the television in one corner. He nodded politely as I took my seat and returned to his viewing. The proprietor emerged from the kitchen and placed before me a bottle of Barolo, a carafe of water and some slices of salami. He handed me a menu, which we discussed briefly, and I ordered Bagna Cauda with raw vegetables and a local species of pasta, the name of which I didn't write down. If I tell you that Bagna Cauda tastes of rotting fish I would not be lying but neither would I do it justice. It was one of the most memorable and enjoyable meals of my life, the more so for being unexpected.

As I was transferring the last fragments of pasta from the plate into my mouth, the innkeeper's daughter came into the room and approached my table. "What did you have?" she asked, in flawless English. Over the next fifteen minutes or so we established that I had eaten extremely well and that her English had been learned at a boarding school in this country, from which she was expelled after a three month tenure for smoking weed. Then she left, as did the rest of the staff, and I was alone.

The following morning, when I came to check out, the same daughter took my payment. "I'm sorry we were not more hospitable." She said. "It's just that we lost my grandmother last night. Next time, we'll be 'cha, cha, cha!'" I was speechless. I do not think that in all my travels I have ever encountered such graceful hospitality elsewhere.

Meaning

I spoke to my Dad the night before he died. I knew that he was very ill and I'd called him because I thought that there might not be another opportunity. At that time he was living, in near-penury, in a shack in the garden of friends in South Africa. Dad's landlady answered the phone. "He's in the garden, enjoying the last of the sunshine." She said.  "I'll get him." Before I could object she put the phone down. As it turned out, I interrupted Dad's last sunset. He was dead before the source of all our power set again. Dad and I had had our ups and downs but, at the time of his death, I loved him very much and, although he was an old man by then, I was devastated when my sister Wendy called to say his life was over.

My brother Ed and I wrote a eulogy, which we delivered jointly at Dad's funeral. Ed and I have different perspectives on Dad 's life and separate memories but we both, I think, wanted to convey to our audience the sense that it had meant something. What can I say about him here? He escaped a suffocatingly religious family (his six sisters were all devout to the point of insanity); he fought voluntarily in a world war; he overcame with grace and courage the loss of a leg in an Italian minefield; he traveled more widely that anyone I've met, in a era when travel was genuinely adventurous and held fast to convictions that never wavered, no matter how unfashionable or unvoiceable they became. There is a bench in the Outeniqua Mountains, bearing an inscription in Dad's memory, staring inscrutably at his favourite view. When everyone who knew Dad is gone, that inscription, etched into a brass plaque, may well be the only surviving reminder of his existence.

Cut to a wedding I attended as a guest many year ago. I cannot remember the name of the bride or groom, nor can I remember whom I accompanied to the party. I do remember, very clearly, a fascinating conversation with the woman sat to my right at dinner. Because I am deaf in one ear I find it difficult to follow a conversation in a noisy room unless I pay exclusive attention to my interlocutor. Strangers who are unlucky enough to be placed next to me at a table are therefore either ignored entirely or forced to endure my unbroken and unfeigned attention for hours on end. This girl had studied biology at university and was currently training to become a Church-of-England priest. This surprised me. Physicists - frustrated by the inadequacy of their equations - occasionally subscribe to some form of theism but biologists do so rarely enough for it to be remarkable (see here). I could understand, I said to her, how someone ignorant of evolutionary biology could subscribe to palaeolithic creation myths but how on earth could anyone conversant with Darwin be suckered in this way? I might have put it more politely than that but probably not.

Her answer fascinates me to this day. She did not give a positive reason for embracing belief in god, let alone for selecting a specific and testable hypothesis like the Christian God. Instead, she gave a metaphysical reason for rejecting scientific materialism. How could I, she asked, live in a universe without meaning? How could I bear to drag myself out of bed knowing that I was running a program encoded in genes  and enacted in a nervous system that was entirely mechanical. Surely there must be more to it than this? Her adoption of Christianity was part of her search for meaning. She went on to say that she would be unable to live with the belief that there was no purpose to her life; she would commit suicide rather than live with such a nihilistic view of the world. I suppose that pudding must have arrived and rescued her from my response for I recall that the conversation ended unsatisfactorily and, since I can't dance, there was no opportunity to resurrect it.

What is going on here? The naturalistic fallacy (falsely inferring that what is the case ought to be the case, or vice versa) is so easy to spot once you are alerted to it's presence that I cannot understand how any intelligent person can fall for it. To say: "I wish that life were meaningful, therefore it must be meaningful", is obviously fallacious and yet that is what my dinner companion was implying. In fact she was basing her career choice on the false intuition that you can derive an ought from an is (for an alternative view see here). Other than the gambler's fallacy (going back to Dad for a moment, he would very occasionally have a flutter at the roulette wheel, where his method, infallible he claimed, was to wait until black had come up so many times in a row that red was almost certain to be next), the naturalistic fallacy is the most pernicious species of logical error to which humans are vulnerable. It is responsible for most forms of prejudice (Dad again: "AIDS is god's punishment for homosexuals") and many forms of wishful thinking ("I deserve a very large bonus, therefore I will receive one"). It also facilitates a belief in heaven and hell ("Hitler ought to be in hell, therefore there must be a hell") and hence reinforces absurd and monstrous doctrines, such as Catholicism (see here for the most chilling description of hell ever written and a wonderful example of a blogger lost up his own naturalistic fallacy).

Moving on from the dead and the mentally deficient, let's consider a much more appropriate response to the cosmic cold shoulder. Recently, a friend found himself in a Japanese simulacrum of a wealthy eighteenth century gentleman's library. The shelves had been filled with original imprints of novels written by the popular authors of the era being represented. My friend is fascinated by literature and is well and widely read, yet there were authors on the shelves whose names he didn't recognise, much less whose novels he'd read. This experience caused him to reflect on the futility of writing about his own experiences. Nihilism is a very tempting destination indeed for us materialists.

There seem to be three categories of response to the question "what's it all about?"

1. I would rather be dead than alive in a world without meaning.

2. Life is essentially meaningless but we can create little bubbles of meaningfulness that persist during our  lifetimes and occasionally for a brief period after we die.

3. Life has no meaning. What's the big deal?

So here's the point. I have been thinking a great deal lately about suicide. The proximate cause was unbelievably banal (is there such a thing as a non-banal suicide?). I came home from a long trip abroad to find that many of the plants I had been nurturing were dead. What had I expected? Yet still, I had my little moment of being overwhelmed with the futility of it all. Would it make sense, I wondered, to kill myself and dispense terminally with the need to worry about these things? I went so far as to consume a cocktail of drugs (all prescribed legally, lest the authorities are watching) in the hope that fate would decide. It did, I'm still here. And here I intend to remain, for the time being, meaningless or otherwise. I'm glad, on reflection, that my flirtation with the idea of dying didn't become a full-blown affair. I like this messy, pointless, fascinating world and the bubble that I inhabit. I'm going gardening.

This is still the best answer to the meaning of life question.

The wicked witch is dead

It feels odd to be celebrating the death of a fellow human being. Yet I have to admit that the thought that Osama bin Laden's corpse lies rotting on the floor of the Indian Ocean gives me great satisfaction. Perhaps it is inevitable that the mainstream media feel obliged to proffer a 'balanced' view. For me, however, the death of a monster is cause for unequivocal jubilation.

Caprese

Only four ingredients and one implement are necessary to make an insalata caprese. You’d have thought it would therefore be difficult to screw up when assembling one. In fact it is astonishingly rare to find a caprese worth eating – the only decent version I consumed on my recent travels was prepared near Nice, in the south of France, and a long way from the Caprese’s spiritual home in Calabria. The worst abomination I encountered was served in Gargano, on the Adriatic coast of southern Italy, where they ought to know better. The tomatoes were cold from the fridge and tasted as though they had been grown in a Dutch greenhouse; dried oregano took the place of the basil and – I shudder as I write these words – the salad was served on what was known in the 1970s as a ‘bed of lettuce’. Iceberg lettuce.

The way it should be done is as follows. Take two large, very ripe tomatoes, warmed all the way through on a sunny windowsill (not, for Christ’s sake, in a microwave). Using a sharp knife slice them thickly, perpendicular to the principal axis of the fruit. The angle of cut is critical; if you slice a tomato any other way, the pips and juice will fall away from the flesh and it’ll look a mess. Eat the first and last slices from each fruit as you work, leaving only those from the fattest part. Likewise slice a whole mozzarella cheese, sourced from Calabria and made from the milk of water buffaloes. Arrange the slices of tomato and mozzarella alternately, so as to form a circle, on a plain white plate. Take a large bunch of basil and tear a generous quantity of leaves into shreds. Scatter these over the salad. Do not succumb to the temptation to cut the basil with a knife. If you do so, you will cut through cell walls in the basil leaf, releasing the cytoplasm, and the flavour of the basil will be too dominant. Finally, trickle a little, very expensive olive oil over the whole. Consume.

I learned the trick with the basil while reading a compilation of Elizabeth David’s journalism ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine’. She in turn got it from the novelist Norman Douglas who was in the habit of going everywhere with a bunch of basil in his pocket. As an aside, I cannot resist quoting the last words of Norman Douglas, who died in 1952 on the island of Capri: ‘Get these fucking nuns away from me.’