Gavin Jones

The kitchen sink (more drama/film than book) was a genre which was characteristic of England in the 1950's. It featured angry young men and women shouting at each other in bedsits in industrial/manufacturing towns. Think Room at the Top, say. At the time it was felt that this was a huge advance on the mannered & coded works from the 20's & 30's (Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan). This was when food was beer - or vice versa. Elizabeth David was sort of the opposite - instead of dramatising the emergence of a new social settlement and the conflicts and frustrations - she packaged food as desire (& not just to assuage hunger). So an early form of Gastro porn. I could easily imagine Italian Food being published by Olympia say. However I don't know whether I'd be more frightened of being stuck in a kitchen with John Osbourne or Elizabeth D. Fiction - well I was only suggesting of the many ways of reading, treating her books as instruction manuals is inappropriate, so look for more interesting means of reading. The mixture of social history, technical knowhow, and invention of a foreign world would now fit comfortably within the broader remit of, if not the novel section, at least the short story/non-fiction section of a current bookshop.

you cook them until the definition of the constitutive starchy peas breaks up and the result is, well, mushy. The substance it most resembles (visually) is guacamole.

I view her writing as fiction. She can thus be counterpointed with the other kitchen sink writers of the 50's as well as compared with the lecherous mediterranean writers she liked so much such as Lawrence Durrell and Norman Douglas. Not wild difference between Durrell's travel writing and David's food writing.

Ouch! I nearly cut my ear off then. V. poor knife technique.

Let us hope they never reproduce.

My Mother recently purchased for me and my sister a handsome pair of matching funerary urns for the contents of our ashes (post cremation - not for me if I go back on the gauloises). I have no particular use for this item, but I wonder if it would be inappropriate to serve soup from it?

Me too.

I lunched there on Thursday - sweltering for local conditions. The unpretentious cafe had 5 or 6 tables filled with the workers of the quartier (adbiz). Set lunch £9.95 for 2 courses, £11.95 for 3. Starters Veg. Soup Salad with poached egg & lardons Salmon & Asparagus terrine Mains Mixed grill and chips Cod on a tomato sauce Supreme of chicken with mushrooms All very unpretentious and straightforward. I had terrine, followed by mixed grill. Washed down with kir & carafe of cab sauv. Foolishly opted for a slightly superfluous tarte tatin, so required 2 cafe express + a brandy on the way back to a very lethargic afternoon. The cod on the next table looked good, people either looked like they had the set lunch or their favourite off the carte. Not a destination place, but very good to have at hand. Service was good - though less over the top than La Trouvaille which was packed. I'd go again if I was in the area.

I don't 'merit' my dna/predecessors? damn and hell. Just another form of capital - less liquid than some & more liquid than others - depending on the means of exchange. I guess reincarnation offers another version of this economics. I hate to think what I will be eating on the basis of this life, in the next.

So we have a number of rules governing our ensemble. At least 1. Market efficiency 2. Democracy in the best of all possible worlds (it's the one Steve P. lives in - judging by his drinking selection). Is it conceivable that these two could manage a little mutual contradiction? Or that there are further implicit rules - the timescale over which they operate might also be interesting - I think Steve is suggesting they operate over timescales of around 2-3 generations.

I ate once at interlude de chavot, and was also struck by the po-mo'd fry-up. I recall a starter which had fried quails egg, fried pancetta, a fried slice of brioche (?) and a single baked bean + a couple of other things. I was amused, but slightly disconcerted - i suppose breakfast could be construed as the day's starter.

So confiture. i.e. duck jam. It was the practice of my mother to cook sausages slowly in a bath of lard. Does that make them confit of sausage? Or sausage jam? A plague on these frenchified menus.

Believe spelt Patogh - but Steve P. is v. accurate and brief (no, not unusual, no, no) just opposite M&S I think. Great Bread & meat & BYO which is a big + for London. Not sure how late - but take express to Paddington & cab round corner.

Saffron has been a spice associated with Cornwall for several hundred years. But I do agree that it often crops up in an i'd-do-anything-for-the taste-of iodine (aagh the Thorium) kind of way.

But this is a bit arse about face. Of course Brits liks Brit things - gruel, grey food, wooly jumpers, but if it was such a boon why did the proud brit colonizers not disseminate (I'm not sure I wanted to use that verb, but well, the verb used me), their 'distinctive' dining style. I would think that most of the traditional arguments for empah! where one developed other peoples economies so they could buy UK produced goods turned out arsey-versey. i.e. The UK ended up buying their food (& goods) - as they were better. So you get Anglo-Indian - is this sort of like Anglo-Catholic? - but not fish & chip places in Calcutta (I'm not sure about this, most cultures are better deep-fryers than England, on the other hand maybe Calcutta wouldn't do Fish&chips in Beef dripping. I seem to have lost the point. Please ignore me.

Bloody hell, I've ended up as edible underwear.

What sort of revolution shoots me ahead of his Lordship? If I'm going to be shot I'd prefer not to do it on my own. Wearing a napkin on my head. Anyway, to you comrades Balic and Finch I offer my intestines to eat as you will.

The key to the writing seems to me to be whether you end up wanting to eat or eat out - though perhaps not at the restaurant being described. In other words it is perfectly possible to write in a critical way and still arouse enthusiasm, what is poor is to write so that the reader has their appetite(s) suppressed. Cabrales appears to do this admirably, even though the tone of her pieces is strongly analytical, I find myself thinking in an involved way about the dishes described. Certain of the professional reviewers described here do the opposite - they leave me less interested in food (& the restaurant) than I was before I read their pieces. Anerotic gastroporn, if you like.

I have never felt my artificial palate inhibited my enjoyment of the food at my local Harvester. And for £26 you get a very special meal there.

Have just cooked delish onglet a l'echalotte. See restaurant point of onglet (=hanger/skirt), you have to serve it so thin for tenderness that it costs v. little. Probably slightly too aggressive taste for sirloin where a fuller flavour would be wanted.

He suffers by coming after Jonathan Meades who, whatever his failings, had a certain depth of knowledge of French restaurants and in consequence whose judgements could be appraised. Meades also writes in a curious, if slightly tortured, way. I do not believe myself that a smug & sarcastic means of self-expression is a useful stylistic feature for a writer, or only for very brief web-based comments perhaps.

Oh, that explains it. Delish mushrooms though. Not too much of a fan of trompettes though, they can rapidly shade from 'of the forest floor' to 'the forest floor' tout court.

I am endlessly ridiculed by flatmate for pointing out that pork products are inappropriate contents of a beigel. Dear agony aunt, am I correct in this stance?

I guess the difference is maybe better encapsulated in the separation of the verbs to eat (as ingest) and to taste (to interpret what one has ingested - not to eat a little bit of). So with the duck-rabbit Markman cooked you would at all times be eating 'duck-rabbit' but you might taste duck or rabbit or duckrabbit?

And am I correct that Chartreuse contains some element of wormwood? I believe most commercially available varieties of absinthe have the active ingredient (thujone ?) removed - though still available in Spain. And this leads to aspects of food/drink associated with heightening 'religious' experience - of which of course abstinence is one means.