Kaeng Som (Thai Sour Curry - แกงส้ม)

This is the ultimate grande dame of Thai curries.

On the one hand, it's so simple to make that it's made almost weekly in Thai households. On the other hand, simply because of that everyone, their mother, their grandmother, their dead great-grandmother and her long-dead ancestors have an opinion about it!

(Read the post about food and identity to understand this phenomenon.)

That having been said, the dish is easy to make casually but extarordinarily hard to make expertly.

It's hard for the same reason that chefs routinely test novices with making an omelette, or that you end up skating naked making certain Italian dishes.

You're using a minimal set of ingredients, and there's no place to hide. Either you nail it or you don't, and if you don't, there's no way to fix it.

It's the ultimate test of technique. It's doubly hard for those of us who didn't grow up with a Thai grandmother beating us up while we were learning. We're going to have to take our beatings the ol'-fashioned way via experience.

What is it?

It's a simple water-based "sour" curry that's really quite "primitive" (to use David Thompson's description) in which vegetables and fish are simmered. It's served with rice (of course!)

There are only five ingredients that matter - chillies (which are emphatically not Thai but New World), garlic, shallots, shrimp paste, and tamarind.

There are also ingredients that will "balance" it - e.g. palm sugar, etc.

All the magic is in the paste which takes a bit of effort with a mortar and pestle. Thai curries simply don't work with food processors. You need to pound the ingredients.  (The neighbors rang the bell to check that everything was OK since the sound of pounding wafted out the kitchen window. It sure was, kids, it sure was!)

For the record, it's harder to pound soft ingredients into the right consistency than hard ingredients. This one is filled with soft ingredients — garlic and shallots.

If you persist, and the CC is sure that the readers on this blog are the kind that would do so, you'll be rewarded with sheer magnificence. Everything that is so wonderful about Thai food distilled down into one elegant minimalist package.

Ingredients

Paste

2 tbsp dried shrimp

4-6 long red chilies
3 red shallots
3 cloves garlic
1 tsp shrimp paste

2 cups water
tamarind water (thin)

vegetables
fish

fish sauce (nahm pla) to taste
palm sugar (optional)

Note 1: The kinds of vegetables you can add varies. Long beans are classic as are bamboo shoots, or raw papaya but the CC has seen modern stuff like cauliflower, cabbage, etc.

Note 2: The village roots of this dish should be "obvious".

Note 3: There is a relatively modern variation that plonks in a square-piece of cha-om omelette. Cha-om is going to be impossible to find outside of California. It has a strongly sulfurous smell exactly like that of kala namak in Indian food. The texture is not dissimilar to samphire. If you're feeling particularly flush with money, the combination would do the trick. Otherwise substitute a bitter green and kala namak for a rough approximation.

Note 4: You still need to make the square "omelettes". Cook them thick with egg in a pan like a frittata. Flip, cook the other side. Cool and cut into squares. (They should be quite dry since you're going to plop them into a curry.)

Note 5: This is not a "fancy" dish. All the crazy caveats aside, this is closer to the fast and the furious. You should be able to make it in at most 30 minutes if you get all your ingredients in a row.

Note 6: There is considerable warfare even among the Thai population about how "thin" the curry should be. The CC is going to stay out of this particular "Vietnam".

Note 7: Side dish. The ultimate test of serving Asian food. Keep it simple. The dish is spicy hence sliced cucumbers.

Note 8: You need a fish broth ideally. David Thompson suggests pounding some dried shrimp as the first step of the recipe. Works like a charm. Instant "fish broth" as the deeply dead great-great-great-grandmother would've understood and appreciated.

Note 9: The "correct" sequence of pounding is the driest hardest first to softest wettest last. This just makes it easy to do the pounding. In this case, it would be dried shrimp, soaked chilies, garlic, shallots. and finally shrimp paste.

Recipe

First make the tamarind water. Soak the lump of tamarind in 1/2 cup of boiling water for 20 minutes. Strain it squeezing the tamarind. You can do this directly into the boiling water later.

Soak the separately chilies in boiling water for the same 20 minutes. Pull out the chilies. Reserve the water to add to the broth.

Roast the dried shrimp briefly on a skillet. Put aside. On the same skillet, roast the shrimp paste wrapped in aluminum foil. Flip and keep roasting until it gives off its characteristic smell. Be careful not to burn it.

(These first three steps can clearly be done in parallel.)

Start making the paste. Pound the dried shrimp followed by the chilies, the garlic, and the shallots. Add the roasted shrimp paste and make a smooth paste.

Combine the stock, tamarind water and paste and bring to a boil. Add fish sauce to taste. Add some palm sugar to balance the flavors. Let it simmer for 4-5 minutes.

It should taste hot, sour and salty.

Add the vegetables and let them cook through. Add the fish and let it poach for 2-3 minutes.

Serve at once with rice.

Tom Kha

No, the CC hasn't lost his marbles. He knows that the soup is uniformly referred to as tom kha gai in the US except that the soup is not a soup and the "gai" (chicken) is basically optional.

It's really a family of stews at the heart of it.

For starters, there is neither the concept of "soup" nor that of "courses" in Thai cooking. A rich dish such as this would be served with rice and it would be a blowout meal (because of its richness.)

The tom roughly suggests a soup or a stew and the kha refers to galangal. Substitutions are pointless since galangal is the main feature.

Secondly, it's really a meta-dish in the sense that the basic stew is prepared first and then other stuff added. You can have tom kha tao-hoo (with tofu) , tom kha hoi (with shellfish), tom kha talay (with mixed seafood), etc.

The dish is all about the aroma, and you have an insanely umami-laden broth with a mildly sweet, savory, sour broth and a solid kick on the back-end.

The CC will provide a recipe with a mild variant that he once had — it had a slight amount of pandanus (screwpine).

Superb in every way.

Ingredients

3 cups coconut milk
3 cups chicken broth (substitute with water)
1 stalk lemongrass (sliced on a bias)
10 pieces of sliced galangal
2 chillies
1 piece pandanus
2 cilantro roots
3 kaffir lime leaves
1 tbsp palm sugar

fish sauce

12 pieces chicken (sliced against the bias into thin slices)
1 cup straw mushrooms
2 shallots (sliced lengthwise)
1-2 lime(s)
1/3 cup cilantro leaves

Note: The chicken is cut into very small pieces. It's poached in the broth. This preserves its tenderness because it's barely cooked through.

Recipe

Smash the lemongrass, galangal, and cilantro roots gently in a mortar and pestle. Add them to the coconut milk, broth, chillies, pandanus, palm sugar, and kaffir lime leaves. Bring to a boil. Simmer very gently at a low heat for 12-15 minutes.

Add fish sauce to taste (this provides the salt.)

Taste it. It should be intense, faintly sweet and fragrant. It will become tart once you add the lime later.

(Technically, you can strain it at this point but that's not the Thai way.)

You can stop the process here if you like. (Remember it's all about the smell and it dissipates so don't wait too long.)

When ready to serve with jasmine rice, bring once again to a boil. Turn off the heat. Add the chicken, mushrooms, shallots, and lime. Let it sit for 3-4 minutes.

Serve with the cilantro leaves on top.

Hiyashi Tan-Tan ((冷やしたんたん)

One of the wondrous things about ramen is that it gives Japanese chefs full freedom to explore creativity outside the traditional norms of washoku. It allows them to escape the "wa" (和) of the washoku (和食) — the "Japanese-ness" of meal formats, rules, etc.

Every culture has some escape pod by which they can break the rules and are no longer subject to the dictates of "traditional culture". You need a release mechanism for creativity and rebellion.

Ramen is unambiguously Chinese and hence "foreign" however the Japanese have adapted it, refined it, and taken it to great heights. In the spirit of experimentation, it's not unusual to find "Thai Ramen" and "Indian Ramen" and "Italian Seafood Ramen", etc. in Tokyo. Any number of tricks from other cuisines are amenable as long as they ultimately get integrated into the ramen format.

The CC first ate the dish at a restaurant near his former workplace. It's a riff on a riff on a riff.

The owner of the restaurant is Burmese who ran away to Japan, lived there for a decade, and in spite of marrying Japanese, was unable to get a permanent visa. The couple opted for "life, liberty and happiness" and Japan's loss is New York's gain.

Tan-tan men is a variation on the classic Sichuanese dan-dan mian (担担面) — the spicy-tingly noodles with ground pork, pickled vegetables, and chili oil.

The Japanese version sticks to the idea broadly. It somehow got caught up with the very Sichuanese doubanjiang (辣豆瓣酱) possibly because its umami is very similar to miso.

So the ground pork is stir-fried with ginger, garlic, scallions and toban jan (as it's called in Japanese) until you have a loose dry mixture.

The ramen noodles are topped with an intense pork broth, the spicy ground pork mixture, slivered scallions, etc. This is a broad idea. The specifics depend on the creativity of each chef. You'd probably find slivered cucumbers or bean sprouts. It may be topped with rayu (chili oil.) It all depends.

Ramen, being served piping hot is cold weather food. Japan has blistering summers and a history of a lack of air-conditioning. The very hot weather dish, hiyashi chūka, featured here often is a response to that.

Hiyashi tan-tan is the bastard love child of hiyashi chūka and tan-tan men as conceived by a Burmese entrepreneur trained in Japan to satiate the ramen-crazy Yankees in a blistering New York summer.

What could be cooler than that?

There are some elegant subtle melodies inside it that make it sing.

Traditional ramen is frequently made with stock made from pork bones. It has a milky-white color.

The stock here is much lighter as befits a summer dish. Seafood-based or chicken-based which has been hit with a solid amount of sesame paste. Traditional Japanese sesame powder (gomashio) is made with roasted sesame seeds and has a brownish color. This one is clearly made with unroasted ones which gives the broth the same intense milky-white color. The CC strongly suspects that the restauranteur is just using tahini thus introducing a Middle-Eastern ingredient. It's New York, after all. Why not?

The advantage of cold-ingredients pre-prepared to a restaurant should be obvious but one of the complete non-negotiables is that the ramen has to be made fresh. You can dunk it in ice-water to cool it down but it must be freshly made.

Since the recipe clearly has diverged so far from its roots, such as they are, the CC feels absolutely no shame in diverging further. It would almost be regretful to stick to the format. The pork has been subbed by ground seafood (non-traditional) and bamboo shoots (absolutely traditional.) The cucumbers and scallions are retained in the summer heat.

It's the beauty of ramen. Within the broad tradition, as Cole Porter might have put it, "Anything goes".


Ingredients

(serves 2)

Dashi

2 pieces kombu
4 cups water
1/2 cup dried shrimp (or bonito flakes or both)

1/3 cup sesame seeds

Ground Pork

1/2" ginger
2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp toban jan
1 tbsp soy sauce
sugar (to balance)
peanut oil

1/2 cup ground pork (or ground seafood or ground chicken)
1/2 cup bamboo shoots

2 packages ramen

cucumber
carrots
scallions

sesame oil

Recipe

Note 1: Once the sesame paste is stirred into the cool broth, you cannot reheat it again. The broth and paste will separate which will destroy the texture. It must have its ice-cold white texture.

Note 2: Mound the pile of the ground pork mixture in the center. The toppings should be to the side. Yes, this is "only" aesthetics but it really goes a long way to emphasizing the cold-hot nature of the dish. The spicy pork with the ice-cold ingredients. It will all turn red-gold once you start slurping.

Note 3: If you have time, soak the sesame seeds in water. Don't worry too much about this step. You can always loosen the sesame paste with the dashi you make.

Note 4: The whole recipe is eminently scalable and can be made ahead of time. Except the ramen. They must be made fresh. You'll probably learn the hard way the science behind this step.

Note 5: It takes a while to chill all the ingredients especially the broth. Maybe the CC's fridge is crappy but it took more than 6 hours to get it down to the right temperature.

First, make the dashi. Heat up the kombu with the water. Just before the water boils, fish the kombu out and discard. If you don't do it, the broth will turn bitter. Add the dried shrimp/dried anchovies/bonito flakes and bring to a loose boil. Let it steep for at least 15 minutes. Pass the broth through a double layer of paper towels. You should be left with a clear golden broth.

Meanwhile, take the soaked sesame seeds and grind them to a fine paste in a mortar and pestle. Add some of the above dashi if you need to loosen the paste. Add the paste to the dashi and add salt. Set aside and let it chill.

Cut up the cucumber, carrots, scallions into long very thin batons of the same size and set aside to chill.

Make the ground pork mixture. Smash up the ginger and garlic in a mortar and pestle to a paste. Heat up some peanut oil in a skillet. When shimmering, add the ginger-garlic paste. Fry for a bit. Add the toban jan and fry for a little bit. Add the ground pork, soy sauce and sugar and let it cook until it is dry. You will probably need to add 2-3 tbsp of water to make sure it doesn't burn. Add the bamboo shoots towards the end. Take off the heat and cool. You can store this for a few days. Chill it.

When ready to serve, make the ramen. The ones the CC has require 2.5 minutes. Immediately dunk in an ice bath.

Top the ramen with the chilled dashi. Put the ground pork mixture in the center. The cut up scallions, carrots and cucumbers to the side.

(You can add sesame oil but that's gilding the lily.)

Slurp the intense icy awesomeness.

Stracci con Ragú di Pesce

This recipe is serious work so it's not for everyone.

This recipe requires access to the freshest seafood and that means a local fisherman not a supermarket!

This recipe isn't here to feed your pathetic little palate. It's here to ensure the perfection of your soul.

It only works in summer when you have access to fresh seafood, fresh tomatoes and basil but what a recipe!

If you don't understand why tomatoes, you should read this.

The CC is also assuming that you have made the tomato sauce ahead of time. It's always there in the CC's kitchen in summer but if not you will need to make that as well.

So get cranking!


Stracci con ragú di pesce

(serves 2)

Note: This is the rare recipe that pairs fresh pasta with seafood and tomatoes. It's the exception that proves the rule. The idea is that both the tomatoes act as an accent. They are definitely not the main show here. The fresh seafood is.

Ingredients

Fresh Pasta

1 cup 00 flour (substitute by sieved all-purpose)
1 egg
salt

Ragú di pesce

6 scallops
2 squid
12 clams

8 cloves garlic
1 dried red chili
16 cherry tomatoes (half yellow, half red — cut in half)

1/3 cup white wine
1/2 cup tomato sauce

2 sprigs basil

pinch of saffron

olive oil
sea salt
black pepper

few basil leaves (cut into thin ribbons with scissors)
basil (ripped by hand into rough shreds)

Recipe

First, make the fresh pasta. (If you don't know how, you're probably going to need something a little more precise than the instructions below. Ironically, it's one of those things that's trivial to demonstrate and hard to write about.)

Dump the flour in a bowl. Make a well. Crack an egg into it. Add some salt. With a fork whip the egg, incorporating the flour as it goes by. Do NOT add water. Use your hands when it looks mixed in. Knead the dough to a silky mass adding only the tiniest amount of flour to make your hands not stick.

Set aside for at least 20 minutes.

Using a pasta maker, crank the dough repeatedly through all settings down to 5.

(Pasta machines have a scale from 1-8. One is coarsest and eight is finest. The reason to not crank it down to 5 straight away is that each pass through "kneads" the dough correctly to make it smooth and uniform. So you need to go through 1-2-3-4-5. Experienced chefs even repeat the 1 and 2 folding the dough into "threes" if they want a particularly refined pasta.)

Do not make it too thin. Cut into long thick ribbons and lay out on a tray to dry for at least an hour or even more in summer if it is humid. Two to three hours is preferable. The dough must dry out substantially otherwise it will fall apart.

(Yes, the CC knows that this is not stracci which refers to "rags" — irregularly cut pasta. You can cut the thick ribbons into irregular pieces. To make a true stracci, you'd have to hand-roll the pasta. If your spirit is willing and your flesh not weak, go for it!)

Then make the fresh seafood ragú.

Put the clams in a pot with half a cup of water. Heat them at high heat till they open. Fish out each one as it opens. Shuck them making sure to retain the liquid. Pass the liquid from the clams as well as the liquid from the pot through a paper towel (to eliminate the sand) and retain the liquid.

(The reason to shuck the clams is so that the shell doesn't tear the delicate pasta. With dried pasta, the clams are tossed with the shell to good effect but here we're working with fresh pasta and the clam shells would tear the pasta into shreds which we don't want.)

Heat up some olive oil in a pan. Add the garlic and red chili and let it fry for about 6 minutes at low heat. Make sure the garlic doesn't burn. Add the white wine and the clam juice from above and let it reduce a bit.

Toss in the cherry tomatoes and let cook for 5 minutes. Add the tomato sauce and basil strips and let cook till it is reduced somewhat.

Now make the pasta. When the water is boiling, add the pasta and let it cook. 3 minutes no more.

While the pasta is cooking, add the raw seafood, cooked clams and the saffron to the hot ragú. Do not overcook. You can even turn off the heat if the sauce is hot enough.

Drain the pasta and toss everything together. Add the torn basil and black pepper. Serve at once.

Sinigang na halaan

This is a Filipino meta-recipe.

You can have Sinigang na X where X can be a large variety of different kinds of meats and seafood. The three classic versions for the X would be pork, chicken and bangus respectively.

A word about bangus (milkfish). It's a fish that was traditionally found in the sea but can grow in brackish water. It's one of the older examples of aquaculture — at least 800 years old in the Philippines. The fish are bony — very bony and it's a skill to eat them.

Sinigang is a sour clear broth with one or more sources of meat and/or seafood, a ton of vegetables, and one souring agent. There is a purity of flavor coming from one very clear-cut souring source which neatly dovetails into the umami of the broth from the meat/seafood.

It is traditionally eaten with rice. The rice is frequently topped with fried garlic and/or fresh scallions but these are all details.

There are traditional recipes but there are clearly two dimensions to the dish — what meat/seafood you choose and what souring agent you choose.

Filipinos love sour food. This is a necessity forced by a tropical climate and a few millennia of no refrigeration turned into a cultural trait. It's one of the few ways to preserve food in a tropical climate so that there is no wastage. There is a difference though. The souring agents are cooked through. It gives them a "rounded mellow" flavor rather than the aggressive hit of acidity that you would get without cooking. There has to be enough sourness to wake up the taste buds but not so much as to make it pucker and inedible.

The list of souring agents is endless — vinegar made from all sorts of sources (coconut, palm, sugarcane, pineapples, etc.), tamarind, calamansi, kamias, santol, green mangoes, green guava, star fruit, green pineapples, even leaves of various plants, etc. This list barely even scratches the surface of this subject. The Philippines probably has the longest list of souring agents of any culture that the CC knows about.

Needless to say the souring agents are not substitutable for each other. It does matter whether you are making a sinigang with a hearty ingredient like pork or delicate ones like seafood. Santol which has an astringent tannic component would be most inappropriate for a seafood sinigang while almost all delicate fruit-based versions would work wonderfully.

There are also some classic touches about the choices of vegetables in a sinigang — a starchy root (taro, banana hearts or "New World" potatoes), some "green protein" typically long beans, and some greens in many many different forms — everything from sili (chili leaves) to bok choy, kang kong, and malunggay. Needless to say once tomatoes were discovered and transferred to the "Old World", they became irresistible additions for reasons we have covered on the blog before.

The ingredients are rotated with the combinatorial game that we have talked about extensively on the blog — you will see corn, carrots, radishes, eggplants and all kinds of other vegetables in there. There's a pairing bias though. You see lighter vegetables with seafood and more aggressive ones like eggplants with meat which makes logical sense based upon the palate profile.

Make no mistake though. The star is the sour broth.

One last word about the use of Filipino-style fish sauce called patis. It's basically the same concept as the Roman garum or the Thai nahm pla but it's arguably different. The CC would have no trouble distinguishing it in a blind tasting. You could substitute but it won't be the same.

Just like in Thai recipes, you don't add salt to the dish. The salt comes via the addition of the patis. Additionally, for this recipe with clams, they will give off plenty of salty liquid. Traditionally, the patis is always added towards the end where you can control the level of saltiness. (It also adds substantial umami to the dish.)

This makes a perfectly good soup even in the absence of rice which is heresy as far as the Filipino world is concerned but the CC can live with that.

After all this long explanatory buildup, this is not a difficult recipe. It's what Filipino moms make when they are too lazy to make something. It's really so simple as to defy its excellence.

Sinigang na halaan

Ingredients

1 large onion (sliced)
1" ginger (chopped thinly)
2 pieces ginger (chopped thinly)
1 chili (sliced lengthwise - optional)

2 small tomatoes (chopped into large pieces)
24 clams
2 cups tamarind water (read below)
2 cups water

1 lotus root (cut into 1/3" slices)
2 cups long beans (sliced into 2" pieces)
4 pieces baby bok choy (tough bottom parts cut off)
2 sprigs chili leaves (sili leaves)

patis (to taste)
vegetable oil

Recipe

Note: Various markets (Filipino, Indian, Thai) carry frozen "green fruits" and both fresh and dried tamarind. They are perfectly excellent in making the various sour broths because the textural component is not important in the least.

First make the tamarind water. Heat up 2 1/2 cups of water with tamarind pods and bring to a boil. Simmer for 10 minutes. Let it sit in the cooling water. When it has cooled down, separate the water from the pods using a strainer. Discard the solids. Retain the tamarind water.

Heat up the oil in a sturdy pot. Add the onions, ginger, garlic and chili (if using) and fry for a bit till soft. Roughly 6 minutes.

Add the tamarind water, the water and bring to a boil. Add the lotus roots and let cook for 3 minutes. Add the long beans and let cook for 4 minutes.

Add the clams. Let them cook till they open. Roughly 8 minutes.

Turn off the heat.

At the very end, add the tomatoes, the bok choy and the chili leaves and let them sit for a few minutes to wilt. Add the patis to taste.

Serve immediately with rice (or not.)

Food Storm

Apparently, we're stormed in.

However, the CC had two food shopping trips organized on Friday and Saturday. Long before he had heard of this pesky little problem that seems to be imminent.

Friday consisted of some wonderful shopping at the Indian and Korean markets in Jackson Heights.

Saturday consisted of some wonderful shopping at the Greek markets in Astoria.

The latter was followed up by some wonderful Japanese ramen in Astoria. (Those Japanese hipsters! They can't quite resist those cheap rents, can they?)

This (storm) too shall pass.

Tapas en España : Part 3

Cañaillas

Tapas en España : Part 2

Pulpo (Galician style)
Boquerones
Gambas al ajillo

Tapas en España : Part 1

Salpicón de mariscos
Pan con gambas y ajillo

Food in the Bay Area : Part 1

Yep, the CC has a new toy! The pictures are better.


Seafood Paella

Reheating Seafood

In general, reheating stuff is hard.

The microwave, while ubiquitous and convenient, is overall pretty much an agent of disaster. Let us first recall what the microwave does. It fires radio waves that are absorbed by water, fat and sugar, and just like a baseball being thrown to an stationary ice-skater, this is turned into motion which at the molecular level is the same as heat.

But there are consequences attached to this. You are effectively only heating the water, fat and sugar portion and depending on statistical mechanics to transmit that energy to the other molecules. It works well enough for many things but not for all. For example, the surface tends to get crusty, or the fat and sugars start to caramelize around the edges, and seafood gets both nasty and tough.

Well, when that happens, it's back to being ol' school. Put up a double boiler. Underneath a bubbling pot of water, and on top a heat-resistant glass bowl with the food. Takes longer to heat but you are guaranteed great results.

The Rialto Market

Pictures from Venice courtesy a friend who's currently visiting. Clearly identifiable are the cuttlefish (seppie), octopus, bronzini, flounder, clams, pilgrim scallop (ventaglio), various kinds of prawns and crabs.

Sea Urchin

It looks like "baby poo" but it tastes like the sea, all iodine-y and squishy. A completely acquired taste (which you may have encountered by its Japanese name, uni.)

It is totally necessary to first appreciate the role of texture as a primary determinant of culinary excellence. The Chinese capture the notion best by calling the idea of texture as kou gan or "mouth feel". Not a whole lot of prizes for guessing which side of the divide the CC comes down upon.

Just for the record, what you're eating are the gonads of the creature, and that's the only edible part. That it was considered an "aphrodisiac" by parallel association should be obvious.

Day Blooms Agen

Once again, on Bloomsday, an excerpt from the CC's beloved Ulysses. This time from Joyce's wonderful take on the Lestrygonians.

After all there's a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour of things from the earth garlic, of course, it stinks Italian organgrinders crisp of onions, mushrooms truffles. Pain to animal too. Pluck and draw fowl. Wretched brutes there at the cattlemarket waiting for the poleaxe to split their skulls open. Moo. Poor trembling calves. Meh. Staggering bob. Bubble and squeak. Butchers' buckets wobble lights. Give us that brisket off the hook. Plup. Rawhead and bloody bones. Flayed glasseyed sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling nosejam on sawdust. Top and lashers going out. Don't maul them pieces, young one.

Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline. Blood always needed. Insidious. Lick it up, smoking hot, thick sugary. Famished ghosts.

Ah, I'm hungry.

He entered Davy Byrne's. Moral pub. He doesn't chat. Stands a drink now and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.

What will I take now? He drew his watch. Let me see now. Shandygaff?

-- Hellow, Bloom! Nosey Flynn said from his nook.

-- Hello, Flynn.

-- How's things?

-- Tiptop... Let me see. I'll take a glass of burgundy and... let me see.

Sardines on the shelves. Almost taste them by looking. Sandwich? Ham and his descendants mustered and bred there. Potted meats. What is home without Plumtree's potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad! Under the obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree Dignam's potted meat. Cannibals would with lemon and rice. White missionary too salty. Like pickled pork. Expect the chief consumes the parts of honour. Ought to be tough from exercise. His wives in a row to watch the effect. There was a right royal old nigger. Who ate or something the somethings of the reverend Mr MacTrigger. With it an abode of bliss. Lord knows what concoction. Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced up. Puzzle find the meat. Kosher. No meat and milk together. Hygiene that was what they call now. Yom Kippur fast spring cleaning of inside. Peace and war depend on some fellow's digestion. Religions. Christmas turkeys and geese. Slaughter of innocents. Eat, drink and be merry. Then casual wards full after. Heads bandaged. Cheese digests all but itself. Mighty cheese.

-- Have you a cheese sandwich?

-- Yes, sir.

Like a few olives too if they had them. Italian I prefer. Good glass of burgundy; take away that. Lubricate. A nice salad, cool as a cucumber. Tom Kernan can dress. Puts gusto into it. Pure olive oil. Milly served me that cutlet with a sprig of parsley. Take one Spanish onion. God made food, the devil the cooks. Devilled crab.

…

…

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Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish cheese. Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I'm not thirsty. Bath of course does that. Just a bite or two. Then about six o'clock I can. Six, six. Time will be gone then. She...

Mild fire of wine kindled his veins. I wanted that badly. Felt so off colour. His eyes unhungrily saw shelves of tins, sardines, gaudy lobsters' claws. All the odd things people pick up for food. Out of shells, periwinkles with a pin, off trees, snails out of the ground the French eat, out of the sea with bait on a hook. Silly fish learn nothing in a thousand years. If you didn't know risky putting anything into your mouth. Poisonous berries. Johnny Magories. Roundness you think good. Gaudy colour warns you off. One fellow told another and so on. Try it on the dog first. Led on by the smell or the look. Tempting fruit. Ice cones. Cream. Instinct. Orangegroves for instance. Need artificial irrigation. Bleibtreustrasse. Yes but what about oysters? Unsightly like a clot of phlegm. Filthy shells. Devil to open them too. Who found them out? Garbage, sewage they feed on. Fizz and Red bank oysters. Effect on the sexual. Aphrodis. He was in the Red bank this morning. Was he oyster old fish at table. Perhaps he young flesh in bed. No. June has no ar no oysters. But there are people like tainted game. Jugged hare. First catch your hare. Chinese eating eggs fifty years old, blue and green again. Dinner of thirty courses. Each dish harmless might mix inside. Idea for a poison mystery. That archduke Leopold was it? No. Yes, or was it Otto one of those Habsburgs? Or who was it used to eat the scruff off his own head? Cheapest lunch in town. Of course, aristocrats. Then the others copy to be in the fashion. Milly too rock oil and flour. Raw pastry I like myself. Half the catch of oysters they throw back in the sea to keep up the price. Cheap. No one would buy. Caviare. Do the grand. Hock in green glasses. Swell blowout. Lady this. Powdered bosom pearls. The élite. Crème de la crème. They want special dishes to pretend they're. Hermit with a platter of pulse keep down the stings of the flesh. Know me come eat with me. Royal sturgeon. High sheriff, Coffey, the butcher, right to venisons of the forest from his ex. Send him back the half of a cow. Spread I saw down in the Master of the Rolls' kitchen area. Whitehatted chef like a rabbi. Combustible duck. Curly cabbage à la duchesse de Parme. Just as well to write it on the bill of fare so you can know what you've eaten too many drugs spoil the broth. I know it myself. Dosing it with Edwards' desiccated soup. Geese stuffed silly for them. Lobsters boiled alive: Do ptake some ptarmigan. Wouldn't mind being a waiter in a swell hotel. Tips, evening dress, halfnaked ladies. May I tempt you to a little more filleted lemon sole, miss Dubedat? Yes, do bedad. And she did bedad. Huguenot name I expect that. A miss Dubedat lived in Killiney I remember. Du, de la, French. Still it's the same fish, perhaps old Micky Hanlon of Moore street ripped the guts out of making money, hand over fist, finger in fishes' gills, can't write his name on a cheque, think he was painting the landscape with his mouth twisted. Moooikill A Aitcha Ha. Ignorant as a kish of brogues, worth fifty thousand pounds.

Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.

Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth. Below us bay sleeping sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by the Lion's head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton. Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities. Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs In the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you'll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky grumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her; eyes, her lips, her stretched neck, beating, woman s breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

Me. And me now.

Alan Davidson's Seafood Trilogy

Completely indispensable. For seriously whacked-out food geeks only.

Line diagrams (!) not pictures. All good academics understand why, of course.

Many moons ago, the CC knew a wonderful line artist who was fought over by both the Paleontology and Egyptology Departments(!) She could go places in Egypt that few others were allowed to. Eat your heart out, Indiana Jones!

The CC bonded with her on the obvious need for line art (you can "highlight" certain details and "suppress" others in a way that a photograph cannot because it gives equal importance to everything.) We bonded over the obviousness of the argument, and that it didn't matter that the world refuses its obviousness as long as she gets paid a lot, and tons of ice-cold Polish vodka.

But back to the trilogy. Completely indispensable guide. Everything you ever wanted to know about edible seafood.