Month: September 2019

It’s harder and harder to escape the feeling that something is very wrong, everywhere. 

I’m sorry to start this week’s dose of escapism with a total void, but I can’t lie. Every which way there is a disaster, a crumpled, leaking wreckage or a sinkhole about to open up. It’s harder than ever to “appreciate the good things”. But it’s more important than ever before to do it. I know this, so I’m trying to find them and keep hold of them.

One thing I’ve been clinging to harder than ever is education. The more I study, the better I feel. I might be going overboard though. I’m studying grape varieties and the history of bread, geography, politics, dialectology and social history. I’m working every day on my Spanish vocab and learning about aromas and flavours, and trying to teach myself about the intricate, seemingly infinite world of yeast. Learning more about the things I care about is giving me purpose. I feel steadier and less like I’ve been coloured in with a run-out felt tip pen.

Up until now I’ve usually only ever written about the things I can see and feel in the here and now. But in a world that’s constantly changing, and often terrifying, poring over solid books and arming myself with knowledge feels like the most secure thing I can do.

Other Stuff

• A sweet piece in Grub Street on looking for, but not necessarily striving for (who has the time?) home cooking perfection

• Two Friend’s-based stories from Vulture (no, they aren’t problematic like the show). First: What it’s like to own Central Perk when you had no idea it was Central Perk. Second: A lovely and fun and generally smile-inducing story about what happens when you make Rachel Green’s beef, peas and ladyfinger trifle. I really like the line “What did I…have to add to the Möbius strip of the Friends discourse?”

• Artists don’t just have pudding. According to Elephant, puddings can represent pleasure, socioeconomic commentary, titilation, consumption and excess, class, gluttony and elitism. But also they do just like puddings.

• Yeast is great. I love it. This article about everyone’s favourite fungus on the equally wonderful Artful Amoeba section of the Scientific American is satisfyingly detailed and really easy (and dare I say it, fun?) to follow. Even if you think you’re a yeastfluencer, this is bound to teach you something new.

• Black — yes BLACK — chardonnay. The goth in me approves.

• I swear there won’t be a skate video every week, I’m not cool enough for that, but this from July this year is awesome. A must-see if you like ridiculous skating and disused water parks. Ideally both.

• I really, really, REALLY want a big jug of federweisser thanks to this by Evan Rail.

• How being bedridden as a child taught Ben Myres how to write.

• Stop what you are doing and read this piece on the beer scene dialect by Jonny Garrett now. It’s amazing.

• And finally — walk through the rainy streets of Manhattan without getting out of bed. Perfect ambience.

My Stuff

• No. Nothing published this week. I’ve started two blog posts but been too busy scrolling through the apocalypse to finish them. Sorry.

• Off to Germany next week to harvest grapes. Already terrified about the aeroplane.

• What with the Cask Report coming out today it seems totes appropes for me to dig this piece about northern cask out of the archives.

• Heading to Moorhouse’s tomorrow to finish off the elderberry porter as part of Cask Week 2019. I’ve got a good feeling about this one!

Marcel van Eeden, Cat 2.8: Desserts

I’ve cooked Pad Krapow twice in five days, and I’m thinking of making it again tonight. It’s not really Pad Krapow anymore though. It started off that way, about two years ago, when I first got a craving for something I’d eaten on holiday. I was pretty faithful to the most authentic-sounding recipe I could find back then.

A few months later I went vegetarian for bit, so I used soy kibbley bits instead of pork mince. Of course, it’s hard to find Thai holy basil in the Ribble Valley, so I swapped it for regular basil and a couple of crushed fennel seeds — apparently that’s a good approximation, according to a recipe I read on the internet that I’ve never found again.

Online recipes are like horoscopes to me. I live them and I love them, but essentially I just search for one to tell me what I want to hear, so that I can go about my life with confidence. It’s nice to read that I’m heading in the right direction, even if I might as well have written the predictions myself. So, if a total stranger on the internet writes that today I should “take chances” and another says “forget the basil, use dried oregano instead”, I’m not completely ruining a classic Thai dish. I’m simply living my life according to Fate. 

(For what it’s worth, and if you’re as haphazard a home cook as I am, Quorn mince works really well, especially if you use some Kecap Manis to thicc-ify the savoury-sweet oomph.)

Other Stuff

God there’s so much this week, hence the warning in the subject/title. Deep breath.

• Fuck it, let’s go. Chef Mark Spence talks about his life, and his life is pressure, heat, flame and food. I fuuuckiinnnggg loooovveeddd eevverrryyy wooorrdddd.
  “I need life that blisters and scars. I spend enough of my day-to-day trying to avoid doing something wrong; I need an outlet that lets me create something great.”

• An estate riven by one of the busiest motorways in the north. I love reading pieces about communities and this is a good one.

• Life lessons from John Waters. I don’t need to say any more. This is wonderful.

• Mark Johnson’s latest blog post on supporting local football and visiting pubs as you do so is great, and struck a chord, because Tom and I are doing this very thing for the first time this weekend! Stanley here we come.

• A true-crime-style article from the MEN about a pub landlord in Oldham who also happened to be a local executioner known as one of the best in his field.

• There’s a doc about chef Gary Usher (Sticky Walnut/Wreckfish) on Ch4 tonight (Thurs 19 Sep). To prep, here’s a great feature-interview about it with director Dan Burns. (It’s an advertorial, if you mind about those things.)

• Lily Waite’s latest piece on Berlin and it’s craft beer scene made me desperate to go there. And you know what? About a million people have told me to go to Berlin and I’ve never really fancied it. So this is actually a massive endorsement.

• Lily was also mentioned in Vinepair’s 10 Biggest Beer Stories of 2019 and named an “LGBTQ Icon”. Absolutely yes, Lily.

• Cooking a one-pot masterpiece in the forest on a canoeing adventure on the Root River, Minnesota. Beautiful stuff from JD Fratzke — and there’s a recipe too.

• Does a het audience dilute drag? Follow Cheddar Gorgeous around Manchester and its rich drag scene that straddles “bills” and “art” gigs in this brilliant piece (for Vice, a pre-warning if you’re boycotting). Although the writer calls Albert Schloss’ lager “overpriced” “craft” which I’d have to disagree with. It’s copper tank Urq!

• Rodney Mullen on Bath Salts Pt.3. Found by Jonny Hamilton, I must have watched this mesmerising, brain-melting skate video a dozen times by now. Just watch it. It’s unbelievable. It’s pure creativity. It’s art. And the music is lush too. (Also take a look at the comments underneath, there are some real heart-warmers.)

• Even more skating: This oral history of Tony Hawk Pro Skater is completely stuffed with details and anecdotes and it’s absolutely amazing. Did you know it started out as a Bruce Willis franchise?

My Stuff

• Nowt to report published-wise, but plenty going on behind the scenes.

• Working on a mega-monolith of an article about bread which is taking up a great deal of my time.

• I’m also reading A LOT of books about wine because I’m heading to Mosel in two weeks to help with the harvest and I’m suddenly aware that I know SO VERY LITTLE.

• I read Convenience Store Woman on Monday and I need everyone else to read it so I can talk endlessly about how weird it has made me feel.

• Don’t send me links about the Bourdain auction because I thought I was fine and then I thought about someone buying his knife and not using it and letting it go blunt and it made me cry.

• Something from the archives: Sam’s heading over to Burgundy soon to harvest and vinify his 2019 vintage. Here’s my piece on Black Hand Wines from when I visited him back in freezing, frosty February. See you next week.

​Still from Matt Tomasello in “Rodney Mullen on Bath Salts: Round Three”

My favourite recipe book at the moment is Midnight Chicken, by Ella Risbridger.

I was warned — well, not so much warned as prepped — that it was almost unbearably wholesome. A Famous-Five-without-the-bigotry, warm-potatoes-in-your-pockets romp through some of the most delicious sounding dishes you can think of. What people in the 1930s would have considered “all good things.”

Well, I thought. Isn’t that what I bloody well need right now? A distraction from the hellish waking nightmare that is the world at this moment in time? I mean, yes, we’re getting all our favourite jumpers down from the attic, but everything’s going to shit, right? So why not pore over a deeply personal, beautifully illustrated cookbook that’s not a cookbook but a food-based memoir? It’s very sad at the end, but the rest of it exists to remind you that you’ll be alright. You’ve got the time to go back and look at the best bits. It’s chucking it down out there.

Another thing I love about this book is that Ella remembers all the things about food in books that I remember too. All the delicious descriptions of steam rising from a jolly teapot (they were always jolly, somehow), or pale butter being slathered onto great hunks of bread (never slices). Food is always so much more tantalising in fiction, I think. I said earlier in the year that when I read The Mask of Dimitrios the only part I really loved was Eric Ambler’s satisfying descriptions of a tiny cafe in the back of a shop somewhere in Morocco. Was there intrigue and suspense and murder? Yeah, I guess so. But that cafe had fat sausages and cured meats hanging from the ceiling and I could almost smell the broth they were served coming up through the pages. That’s what I want from a book.

Other Things:

• I really liked Jonathan Nunn’s short review of Banaadiri for Eater last week, especially because of his recognition that there is often some over-romanticism (or say, patronisation) around immigrant restaurants (which he admitted to being just as guilty of in his own work on Twitter).

• This short news story from British Columbia is fascinating and sad, and it’s an odd topic too: a teen boy finds a car in a lake with his GoPro. But rather than running it straight, it’s written beautifully, with not a word to spare. Don’t you love good local journalism?

• Can’t tell you how much the intricate form and detailed horror of this piece crept into my thoughts this week. It’s basic job was to outline the everyday nightmare of surviving sexual harassment and abuse. Creating shock from this subject that sadly has become so commonplace due to the horrifying word we live in (sorry to mention it again) is not easy, but framing it using the vaguely-connected tales of One Thousand And One Nights was a stroke of genius.

• Fancy some melancholy Americana? Lana Del Rey’s new thing is out, sure you do. This photo project documents the people who visit the Elvis Presley festival in Porthcawl.

• I have never been to Berlin and I don’t know much about it’s modern beer scene. Through this piece by Lily Waite, who clearly loves the city deeply, I feel like I’ve visited and seen it for myself now — although she believes it’s impossible to ever understand it, and I can quite believe that too.

• This, on Le Grappin, is one of my favourite ever pieces by Anthony Gladman. It’s a profile but it’s just so… fun! And even so, still packed with his penchant for facts and treasures. Yes Anthony.

My Things:

• Not much to report, I’m afraid! Got a bunch of things lined up but as I am terrible at spacing things out, I’m doing them all at once. You should see my to-do list.

• I’m looking at an interesting project with the makers of The Lancashire Cook Book but it’s early days yet so keep it under your hat.

“A little girl from Tennessee who was visiting Elvis’s house with her family.”Photography Clémentine Schneidermann

Coming back from Blackburn on the train the other day, I saw an apple tree out of the window.  It was heavy with fruit, RUDE with fruit (what a saying). They were perfect globes of gold and red, and they were growing straight out of the unloved ground between the tracks and the countryside.

Maybe someone had thrown an apple core from the train window as it passed. I thought about this for a while. Given the size of the tree, it must have been some time ago. I imagined a smartly-dressed woman in a pea coat, with a respectable-yet-towering beehive and white musk perfume sliding the partition across and pushing the core out of sight and into the brambles. I imagined what she might have been doing on the train, and who she might be. Or whether she’d actually been a schoolboy in one of those unfortuante caps they still make them wear at the private school nearby, or a businessman in a pinstripe suit, or a farmhand, or a shopper, or a vicar.

And then the tree grew, blossoming in the spring, bearing fruit in the autumn, shedding leathery leaves before the frosts came, and perhaps the woman (I decided it was the woman who did it) saw the tree without realising she’d planted it. Or perhaps she never came this way again. I wondered if anyone had ever eaten the apples off that tree, or if it created them every year for birds and worms and compost. I kept thinking about those apples, ripening in their nowhere-place, and about the person who might have thrown their ancestor there.

And then I got home and wrote the first chapter of something I’m tentatively calling “a book? Maybe?”, and the thought of those apples kept me writing and writing.

I think this is why I’m bad at listening to audiobooks on trains.

Other Stuff

• This profile on Iliana Regan, a Midwestern chef who focuses on foraged, local ingredients is a beautiful and, very importantly, incredibly interesting insight into her life and why she cooks the way she does.

• The very first paragraph of Phil Mellows’ piece on beer in the Faroe Islands is gripping, and from there it just gets better. Related: I need some Rinkusteinur in my life, and I need to take on the term “mountain beer”.

• Lilias Adie was imprisoned for witchcraft in the 18th Century, and when she died she was buried on the Fife seashore, her soul weighted down by a huge sandstone slab. She was the only so-called witch to be buried in Scotland — all others were burned. Her bones were pillaged during the 19th Century, and now councillors are seeking out her remains so they can give her a proper burial, and create a memorial in her honour to mark the needless cruelty inflicted on those charged with Witchcraft. This sad story of persecution and rabid superstition never gets any less shocking or pertinent to me. Read the whole article here.

• I found this blog post by Alfonso Cevola on how wine influencers make him feel stupid and patronised really insightful and incredibly useful. Yes, I agreed with him to some extent. Then, I wondered how I could use his thoughts to improve my own writing. Then I hurriedly wrote down all the writers and “influencers” he recommends in his excellent list.

• This has been shared a lot already but it really deserves your time — Sanjeeta Bains for Birmingham Live has taken an in-depth look at how British Asians have rescued many of the area’s pubs from closure and turned them into thriving community hubs, and it’s a joy. 

• Tony Hawk Pro Skater is getting a documentary. I cannot wait. Here’s the trailer.

• I absolutely loved this piece on how the year 2004 changed California wine forever. It somehow manages to be packed with data and details, but be thoughtful and engaging too. I guess that’s why Esther Mobley is one of the greatest.

My Stuff

• Not much to report this week — I’m working on plenty, as usual, but none of it is visible to the naked eye.

• Grab this month’s copy of Ferment magazine to see my piece on the Carnivale Brettanomyces homebrew festival. I’ll hopefully have a link to an online version next week.

• I wrote this profile on Harbour Brewing recently and I loved Adam Sergent’s attitude, so here it is for a bit of escapism.

 Stained glass depicting Malcolm X visiting a Workers Association
meeting in Smethwick at the Red Lion in West Brom
// designed by artist Steven Cartwright as part of the Creative Black Country project