about salt beef and other Britishisms

Oh, it’s such fun to live here. I know I am tire­some on the sub­ject of Sel­f­ridges Food Hall, but it really is a mecca, a dream come true, and a Pandora’s box of temp­ta­tion all at the same time. There’s a sim­ile I’m think­ing of… it’s like when you go on an aus­ter­ity cam­paign and for a good two months or so, you buy only house brand tinned tuna. Canned tuna to you across the pond, sorry. Then, you find your­self in Fair­way, in good old Harlem (home­sick for a moment! think­ing of the incom­pa­ra­ble finds to be had there, not to men­tion an awfully nice view of New Jer­sey), and, lurk­ing in aisle 4, is a huge dis­play of “Tonna di Sicilia all’olio d’olive”, hey, it’s only $4 a can, and look at the pretty font! You’re doomed. Well, all it took was one inno­cent trip to buy my spareribs over the week­end and now, sud­denly, I sim­ply had to have a salt beef sand­wich from Sel­f­ridges for lunch. So off I went, armed with my copy of the laugh-out-loud cook­book by Simon Hop­kin­son and Lind­sey Bare­ham, “The Prawn Cock­tail Years,” and a hearty appetite. I mean, a girl has to eat.

I ordered my savoury and luscious-looking half sand­wich (so civ­i­lized, the half sand­wich, a per­fect solu­tion to a lack of din­ing com­pan­ion), with a com­pletely inad­e­quate coleslaw salad on the side, awful, sim­ply drenched in salad cream. Bet­ter just left in the bowl. How­ever, the salt beef is good enough to make “The Rail­way Bar” in the Food Hall a des­ti­na­tion. A lovely man called Calvin behind the counter said, hand­ing me my wine glass, “That’s a great cook­book, I used to work for him at Biben­dum.” “Did you? What was he like?” I asked, fas­ci­nated by the pos­si­bil­ity of food world gos­sip. “Oh, a lovely funny man, but after seven years I had had enough of shell­fish. I opened an aver­age of 7000 oys­ters a week.” Hav­ing tried, 15 years ago, to shuck enough oys­ters for one measly Christ­mas Eve stew, I was truly impressed. “My copy’s signed, though,” he said, and I quickly leafed through to find MY signed title page (the book was a Christ­mas gift from my foody Lon­don friend Carla years ago, and hid­ing in it was a note from her thank­ing me for the pic­ture books I sent her son!), so it was a stand­off. I sat down and was just tak­ing my first bite when a man­ager sort of per­son came round ask­ing if every­thing was all right, so I asked what I had always won­dered, “What is salt beef when it’s in Amer­ica?” We debated the pos­si­bil­ity that it was pas­trami, but no, The Rail­way Bar offers pas­trami as well. This nice man, Alex, brought me a sam­ple of it, and we decided that where pas­trami is pep­pered and pos­si­bil­ity cured in a vine­gar bath, salt beef is just that, salt-cured. Deli­cious with plenty of yel­low mus­tard and rye bread. Not quite Katz Deli on the Lower East Side of Man­hat­tan, but pretty good, and the best I’m going to get until I get up enough energy to go to Gold­ers Green on the North­ern Line (Alex drew me a map on my receipt) to the Jew­ish district.

I rang up the Press Office at Sel­f­ridges to get per­mis­sion to take a pic­ture of the salt beef, but “Roz” was away from her desk or on another line, so I gave up and took these pic­tures of the out­side. I’m not sure who the flowing-garmented fig­ure is, but it’s cer­tainly a land­mark in Oxford Street.

Hop­kin­son and Bare­ham are worth the price of admis­sion to their cook­books. Their first col­lab­o­ra­tion, “Roast Chicken and Other Sto­ries,” won every award known to the cook­ery world and is an absolute must-read on a grey Lon­don after­noon when you don’t know what to cook. But this one I read over lunch is really sub­tle, very appeal­ing. Their con­tention is that the British own a rare tal­ent for cre­at­ing a per­fectly good dish, mak­ing it a clas­sic, and then run­ning it into the ground. They begin, of course, with the sta­ple of all Eng­lish menus, the prawn cock­tail. Now, my sis­ter aside (who has a sad his­tory with prawns, but we needn’t go there) every right-minded per­son with­out a shell­fish allergy loves a good “shrimp” cock­tail. But they can be so BAD. “Freshly boiled prawns from the British sea­side are rare today, which is a pity, so the next best thing is whole cooked prawns. They will often have been frozen but their qual­ity, once shelled and decap­i­tated, is sur­pris­ingly good. Frankly, if you wish to use those taste­less, bulk-frozen lit­tle com­mas, then you have only your­self to blame.”

The recipe for beef con­somme, how­ever, reminds me why I dropped my obses­sion, some years ago, with con­somme. There’s some­thing about this sen­tence that just pricks my culi­nary bal­loon: “When the first signs of froth and scum appear, and the clar­i­fi­ca­tion mulch begins to solid­ify, a trickle of stock will appear through it.” This is where my “some­body gut this fish for me” ten­dency kicks into high gear and I want to go to McDon­alds. I guess there’s a rea­son I never went to cook­ing school. I do want to talk to some­one about pot­ted shrimp. Would you believe this cook­book actu­ally con­tains a recipe that involves boil­ing trot­ters for stock (yes, they’re actu­ally pigs’ feet, trot­ting along), and then pick­ing out the boiled meat and pot­ting it under aspic? It’s a won­der the Eng­lish have sur­vived this long.

So Avery is out with her beloved Katie right now, going to Madame Tussaud’s and the Lon­don Plan­e­tar­ium! They’re just a ten-minute walk from school and Katie will have her trusty Lon­don A to Z (the indis­pens­able map book of Lon­don, don’t for­get to say “zed” instead of the crass Amer­i­can “zee”). Avery’s friend Anna came over yes­ter­day and in the cab tak­ing her home, they invented a sur­pris­ingly intel­li­gent, if even­tu­ally mind-bendingly annoy­ing, game. They said every French word they could think of (I was amazed there were so many!) only they pro­nounced them with a pho­netic Eng­lish pro­nun­ci­a­tion. So poor “ven­dredi” came out sound­ing like an Indy 500 dri­ver, “ven-dretti”, and “je suis” was “gee soo-is”. I have to admit it was funny. Con­sid­er­ing that the King’s Col­lege chil­dren are taught by the felicitously-monikered but markedly NOT French lady “Made­moi­selle… Stan­way,” they’re not doing too badly. Hey, it beats study­ing with the Span­ish teacher, “Senorita…O’Malley.” I’m not mak­ing this up.

And in case you were won­der­ing what’s up with my find­ing an actual occu­pa­tion for myself, I’ve put my name out in an email to a film pro­duc­tion com­pany to intern for them! My erstwhile-acting friends Anne and David at Stillmeadow Farm in Con­necti­cut assure me this is the way to get my prover­bial foot in the door. The adver­tised post is for one full day, pos­si­bly more, a week, doing who knows what. I won­der if I could offer to come more days, but for fewer hours? Not sure how much babysit­ting help I want. It’s prob­a­bly eas­ier to get Avery an agent and become a stage mother. I’m sure I’m qual­i­fied for that.