Potato(e!) Stall in Sheffield

What a Wonderful Mess

A baked potato stall photographed in Sheffield on 24 March 2010. How not to present your product. But the visual image is terrific, complete jumble, right down to the shirt hanger lying on the pavement.

In more detail:

And two people march past on their mobiles, you can just see them in the original:

Two mobiles, two taxis and a posting box. There’s a way of walking with your mobile clamped to your ear. I’m almost sure that the two would not be walking with such a forward-leaning gait if they were not on the phone. More research needed on this.

Triple-Barrelled Puzzlement

Christmas Dinner in Ravenglass – December 2009

We are intrigued by who goes to an upmarket hotel for Christmas, what they do and what they are thinking – in a hotel owned by the triple-barrelled Gordon-Duff-Penningtons.

On Christmas Eve we had booked for dinner in the hotel in Ravenglass, quite an upmarket hotel, called the Pennington Arms. Much of the area around Ravenglass is owned by the Gordon-Duff-Pennington’s (triple-barrelled) who live at Muncaster Castle. Muncaster Castle is their ancestral home and a very fine castle it is, in very fine grounds ablaze with rhododendrons in the early summer, and even containing a small church. That I know all this about the Gordon-Duff-Pennington’s home is because straightened circumstances in the form of a crumbling, very expensive-to-fix building have obliged them to open their house and grounds to the paying public.

The Gordon-Duff-Pennington’s have also begun renting some of the houses on their estate to visitors, and it was one of these that we hired for a weekend last April for a family party. On the Sunday evening the boiler failed, and we called the help number and round came Iona Gordon-Duff-Pennington to try and sort it out, which she was unable to do so she called the local handyman and he couldn’t fix it either, so she opened up the adjoining letting property for us so we could shower. Dealing with household emergencies on a Sunday evening in April is one of the necessities of life, if you are a Gordon-Duff-Pennington whose fortune has its limits. Iona is probably in her early forties.

Anyway, the G-D-P’s have recently refurbished to a fairly high standard the long-closed pub in Ravenglass, called as it always was called, The Pennington Arms, and opened it as an upmarket hotel, which since they owned the building and the land it stands on, probably made sense.

We’ve looked into the dining room of the Pennington Arms on previous occasions and it has always looked rather empty, so we booked to eat our dinner in the bar, but when we arrived we could see that the dining room was fairly full, if not exactly jolly-looking, and the bar completely empty, and the manager lady suggested we eat in the dining room for extra ‘atmosphere’, so we agreed.

This was at 7.30, and to our surprise, most of the people in the dining room were onto at least their main course. In fact apart from two gay men who arrived shortly after us, we were the last in.

It became clear that most of these people were staying at the Pennington for Christmas, just one other table appeared to be solely diners.

So who is it that goes to the Pennington Arms in Ravenglass for Christmas?

Two couples there as a foursome, one of the men in a wheelchair, with little to say to each other and probably in their 60s.

One of the Kaczynski brothers (the twin brothers who were president and prime minister of Poland and who are famous for each being unkindly described as looking like a potato) and his wife – not him of course, just someone who looks like him – and these two, man and wife, had absolutely nothing to say to each other.

A couple in maybe their forties, he with a ponytail and she slim and dark-haired in high-heeled shoes, also with nothing to say to each other.

A sixsome, seventy years-old or more, one of the men dressed in a business suit and tie.

The two gay men, one in his fiftes the other possibly younger. In suits but no ties. Rather gangstery-looking.

A few other forgettable couples.

And no one very jolly.

The food was very good. Hilary started with a terrine (ie a forcemeat, or mixture of ground lean meat pressed together) of chicken and duck wrapped in bacon with an apple and pear chutney, and I started with scallops sitting on a slice of black pudding and that on a mound of pea puree (which all went very well). Then we both had lamb shank on colcannon (Irish mashed potato with cabbage), with an ‘anise and rosemary jus’ – actually there was a taste of star anise and of rosemary, which was nice, and then I had a well-made panna cotta and Hilary some chocolate and coffee ice cream that appeared to be homemade. All quite classy and with a bottle of Argentinean red wine and a bottle of Willow mineral water came to £72. Not cheap, but not absurdly expensive for what it was.

And, as with so many including the BBC website sometimes, they spelled panna cotta as panacotta, which for we congenital proof-readers and stern guardians of the language jars horribly. I don’t at all mind the words being run together, but I do mind panna being spelled as pana. Panna cotta is literally translated from the Italian as ‘cooked cream’, which is essentially what it is.

And not only a spelling mistake, but no discernable ‘atmosphere’ in the restaurant.

The following day, Christmas Day, we took a walk through the woods and circled back round by the Pennington Arms, arriving just as the diners were being served their turkey. We peered in the windows as surreptitiously as possible, being glared at by Lech Kaczynski so needing to be brief. The roast potatoes didn’t look all that appetising.

Did these people have a jolly Christmas at the Pennington Arms? What did they do? Did they ever manage to talk to each other? These things we shall never know.

We, meanwhile, ate well, drank well, walked well, got plenty of sleep and read lots. Maybe the people at the Pennington went home saying the same, though we didn’t see any of them out walking.

And by Boxing Day lunchtime, they all seemed to have disappeared. There was no one in the dining room when we passed at 1.15, and no one when we passed again at about 7.30 that evening.

I subsequently looked at the Pennington Arms website, which now wants to call the Arms the Pennington Hotel. The people we saw were, it seems, actually there on Boxing Day, they had gone to Muncaster Castle with a packed lunch for a ‘Festival of Lights’, whatever that is, and were due to eat dinner again at 8pm.

More about happenings in Ravenglass at A Railtour Comes Upon Us.

A Rainy Day

This page has now been moved to landofsomehope.blogspot.com.

Slop-Squelched Sandwiches

The Office-Worker’s Lunch – October 2009

Office workers’ eat the most extraordinary things for their lunch, or at least the shops give them the opportunity to. There is a serious academic study to be done.

I have alluded before to the way in which the lunch eaten by office workers in London changes with the times; it evolves, according to what is the current norm, what is available, and how the shops that sell a worker’s lunch can set up a USP, a Unique Selling Proposition. London will tend to lead the way where others come to follow not too much later.

In Strutton Ground market, Westminster, in October 2009 I was looking at what is on offer in Simply Sandwiches – a shop that is clearly owned by someone whose family originates from India, Bangladesh or Pakistan. Among the filled baguettes on offer are:

‘Chilli BBQ Egg Salad’ and

‘Falafel and Chilli Mayo’.

Both would be far too sloppy for my liking, but then I am not an Westminster office worker. The flavours sound a bit post-modernist, they may well be a portent of things to come. I shall keep my eyes peeled, whenever I can, for what the office workers are consuming, and to see whether, in terms of pure yeach!, Chilli BBQ Egg Salad can be bettered.

More on sloppy sandwiches at Squelch Up Your Lunch, Children.

A Wedding in West Cumbria

July 2007

Lunch in the café

Today we went over to Ravenglass. One of my pleasures when we go to Ravenglass (west coast of Cumbria, see www.visitcumbria.com/wc/raveng.htm) is to have lunch in the café on the station of the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway. The food is not what you’d call classy, in fact I always have the same thing: meat lasagne, chips and salad, and with the salad there’s always a tinned-pineapple ring, which I never eat, though Sam and Zoe were with us today and they fought over it, to go with the baked potato with cheese and coleslaw chosen by Zoe, and the baked potato with tinned tuna in mayonnaise and baked beans for Sam. That’s the food you can get in the station café. It’s not everywhere you can buy such vomit-promising nosh, and long may it survive.

The wedding breakfast – two-handed style

While eating my orange-coloured lunch, I enjoy overlooking the station platform where all manner of pot-bellied and limping people, dressed in the depth of fashion, come and go from and to rides on the steam trains. Today, as we’ve witnessed before, there was a wedding that had a ride on the railway as part of its schedule. The previous wedding we’d watched from our vantage point was notable mainly for the photographer who was dressed in a bright green tie and bright green shoes, which together with his lack of a chin made him look like a frog.

But today’s wedding was perhaps even more extraordinary. Two antique red buses brought the wedding guests, looking uncomfortable in their unfamiliar strapless dresses and sparkling high-heeled shoes, down from Muncaster Castle, where the wedding ceremony had evidently been held (I talk about the Muncaster Estate elsewhere; owned by the Gordon-Duff-Penningtons, yes indeed, triple-barrelled surname, for whom I feel rather sorry in many ways, but more of that on another page), the guests then boarded the carriages of the little train for a ride up the line. Nothing unusual in that. What was most unusual, however, was that each of the guests was handed a brown paper carrier bag containing a packed lunch, which consisted – for the bride and groom were sitting together in an open carriage right in front of us so we could see this – of two white baps with a filling that we couldn’t determine but seemed to be rather buttery. Both bride and groom ate and enjoyed their baps two-handed, that is, they each took a bap in both hands and chomped, massively. And then when they’d finished, and without wiping their mouths, they gave each other a kiss. Bleah!

English Country Restaurant

May 2006

We went out to dinner last weekend, to a pub with a good reputation for its food, in a village called Great Salkeld. All very peculiar and old-fashioned. We declined to sit in the deerskin-backed armchairs with a drink while perusing the menu – how passé that would have been had we done that! This was in contrast to the folks who arrived in their fresh-washed rugby shirts, their womenfolk in high-heeled shoes with straps up the ankles, who apparently treated this procedure as the norm. No!, we went straight to the table like urbane familiars, and sat under the disapproving eye of the stuffed head of a large Aberdeen Angus bull, and ate a rather old-fashioned meal of slices of duck with onion ice-cream. Now I know that onion ice-cream doesn’t sound old-fashioned but it really is archetypically that, it sounds like it’s supposed to be up-market but didn’t go with the duck at all, or at least none of our group thought it did. And the boss of the place who came to take our order said he could recommend the fish, which comes from Lake Victoria and is a river fish so is quite mild-flavoured and so large in size that we could be absolutely sure that the fillet we would receive was completely free of bones, this causing Hilary to exclaim with a laugh something to the effect that, Oh, we’re Cumbrians, we are!, we can’t be doing with bloody bones!; an observation on society that was apt, if potentially ill-judged. Quite why the fish has to be imported from Africa – ah well, we know the reason why. So I don’t think we’ll rush to go back there again. If only someone would open a decent restaurant round these parts.

P&O Ferry Rotterdam–Hull

January 2006

Social Research Before It’s Too Late

Travelling back from Holland on the overnight ferry we went to the cafeteria as usual and watched what everyone was choosing to eat as we always do – for the P&O North Sea Ferries are a source of social research that is possibly going to fade soon and then where will we be? The cafés on these ferries have a help-yourself buffet that you pay a fixed amount for, and you can then choose any amount from an immensely wide range of options, including roasts on a carvery, Indian or Chinese, salads etc etc.

A Pink Snowperson

On this particular trip I happened to decide on roast beef I think, or it may have been pork, anyway, I was at the vegetable counter and helping myself to some mixed mange-tout and red pepper, and I was carefully picking out the red pepper in excess of the mange tout, because I thought it looked to have been cooked less energetically, and I spotted a woman out of the corner of my eye who was regarding me with some disapproval, though this wasn’t, I think, because I was picking out the red bits but because I was choosing to eat any of this unspeakable red and green mixture at all; I could tell from the look which was a definite I-know-what-I-like one, so I kept an eye on what she was eating, which turned out to be two chunks of roast beef, roast potatoes, and chips. She then followed up with some cheese and biscuits, then a creamy sponge dessert, then ice cream. She was the shape of a globe, with another, much smaller, globe stuck on top, which was her head. She looked rather like a snowman, except not white, more a kind of blotchy pink. Her friend who was with her was not quite so large, though still immense by most people’s standards, and I noticed that she couldn’t finish her chips and declined the final ice cream. There’s a study to be done on the P&O ferries, before they turn into a pumpkin.

Or Not a Pumpkin

Or before they stop doing low-cost day-trips, or before they cease providing an all-you-can-eat-for-a-fixed-price buffet.

Valentine’s Day Dinner

The World Takes His Wife Out to Dinner – February 2004

A publicity leaflet plopped through the door and as a result we booked a reduced-price weekend at a hotel in Beverley, East Yorkshire. We looked up the decent restaurants of Beverley in the guide books and phoned to book for the Saturday night and they all said: no chance, mate, it’s Valentine’s night, we’ve been fully booked for months. So rather apprehensively we booked to eat in the hotel.

And thus did we experience a phenomenon unknown to us: on Valentine’s night, the world takes his wife out to dinner. The restaurant was heaving, no sooner was a table vacated than it was occupied again from the queue waiting at the door. They were nearly all couples, the wife had put on her high-heeled sandals and painted her toenails red. She’d also donned a dress of the type referred to in the song The Mountains of Mourne where it goes:

I believe that with writin’ thou’ve wished it expressed,

as to how the fine ladies of London are dressed.

We’ll if you’d believe me when aksed to a ball,

faith they don’t wear no tops to their dresses at all.

I’ve seen them meself and you could not in troth,

tell if they were bound for a ball are a bath.

Don’t be shtartin’ them fashions, now Mary Macree,

where the Mountains of Mo-ourne sweep down to the sea.

Ah, they don’t write them like that any more. And neither, I thought, do them wear them like that any more. But they do, and often quite inappropriately for the figure, so that they periodically have to hoik up the assembly to avoid the amply-veined boobs from falling out.

(Which reminds me of a joke. Q. Why should you not wear Ukrainian underpants? A. Because: Chernobyl fall out. (Needs to be spoken, to be got. Ah they don’t write them like that anymore)) Anyway . . .

And while the women are dressed in what they perceive to be their finery, looking quite ridiculous and uncomfortable and winding their legs around the underside of the seat, the gentlemen wear an outfit that depends upon their age. If they are over 50 and not me, they are dressed in a suit and tie, while if they are under 50, and obviously still not me, they wear an open-neck shirt that looks like it’s been bought by their mum from Woolworths. And the couples try, mostly without much success, to make conversation with each other.

Fortunately, as it turned out, it had been tipping it down with rain all day so Hilary and I had had to put some clean clothes on before dinner, otherwise we might have looked a bit out of place. Equally fortunately, we’d had a jolly and boozy lunch in a café talking to some people we’d met, so were not all that hungry and could forgo some of the mountain of mashed potato that other couples seemed to be ploughing through, to get their romantic evening in trim, that and a pint of lager for the men, a glass of medium white wine for the women. Romance with mashed potato, lager, and seatleg-wrapped legs. I’m getting quite excited at the thought.

Javoll sind wir noch ein und auch gedoppelt

June 2003

Our periodic trips to Westminster for meetings began last November when the leaves had long since left the trees and I was intrigued to find that in a public garden just off Horseferry Road there were some ginkgo biloba trees. These trees are associated with the name of Goethe, I think he had one or more in his garden in Weimar and he wrote a romantic poem associating his love for an 18th century muscular German matron with the double leaves of the ginkgo. As one we are doppelt, it ends, or words to that effect. Romantically-inclined Germans go all soppy over it, or did, I’m not sure they do still, though they might. You can also make an infusion from the leaves of the ginkgo that is said to ease muscular tension when consumed. Never tried it myself though will do when chance pertains.

Anyhow, during the winter, we were unable to identify which of the trees in this charming London public square was the ginkgo because they were all bare of leaves. But now, in the sunshine, we can see them shining out and so pay homage to the great man. There we were, Hilary and I, in our suits and carrying our laptop cases, saying: ‘ooo look, there it is, javoll sind wir noch ein und auch gedoppelt’, while the scantily-dressed office girls sat on the grass, wondering what the bloody hell these idiots were finding so interesting to point at. Then we got the number 88 bus to the next meeting.

Much as we were tempted, we did not have the courage to steal some leaves from said tree to make an experimental infusion, though might manage it one day, when fewer scantily-dressed girls are sitting on the grass pretending to eat their tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches, eyeing us so critically.

Have you noticed the change in office workers’ sandwiches over the years? Increasingly, they have become full of a whitish sloppy substance, to replace the smooth but not sloppy pink ham and fish paste of yore. We get these slop-filled sandwiches whenever a meeting we attend has sandwiches laid on. I find them not too bad but a bit overfull of ingredients that all taste pretty much as one. I’m not sure if I closed my eyes whether I could say if I was eating avocado, prawn and mayonnaise, or chicken tikka massala. Some of them have a bit of dried-up bacon in which acts as a variation on the texture, which can be a nice change. But every day? One must eventually turn into an homogenous white slop, based upon the theory that what you are is determined by what you eat. They’re popular though, so perhaps it’s me that’s out of line with what goes on in the world. White slop rules, OK. OK?

More on St. John’s Gardens in Westminster on my Ginkgo Biloba in London page.

More comments on the social history of office workers’ lunches on my Slop-Squelched Sandwiches page.

A Chic Wedding What We Hosted

We Host a Wedding, September 1998

This story dates from the time that we ran a country hotel. It describes a wedding where the food happened to do our street cred great wonders, and our stress levels even greater wonders as it looked like we might have a food refusal on our hands, but it’s all down to how you sell it.

Many hotels say they welcome weddings since weddings have the reputation of generating lots of income. Maybe they do, but we were less keen, since the amount of work they also generate seemed to us to offset the profits to too great a degree. The problem with a wedding is that too many people have too great a stake in wanting to ensure that nothing, absolutely nothing, goes wrong. And that is asking for trouble to occur.

We did a wedding for a local couple. The couple being local and paying for most of it themselves the wedding was on a very limited budget, and the bride-to-be had the bright idea of making the wedding breakfast consist of sausage, mashed potato and baked beans.

She knew, because we had discussed it with her at great length, that when we cooked sausage, mashed potato and baked beans, the sausage would be made by Garth the local butcher, and there would be a vegetarian sausage too, made by ourselves; the mashed potato would be Colcannon, made by Mark the chef who, as well as being an excellent chef, was also of Irish descent, so the Colcannon would be authentically exquisite; and the baked beans would not be taken from a can, we would marinade the white haricots in a trusted sauce of our own recipe.

The wedding breakfast, then, was going to taste delicious, but would the local populace, who were invited as guests, be impressed?

We hit a stroke of luck, because a famous actress, who had starred in an immensely popular film about the sinking of the Titanic, got married at about the same time, in Reading, of all places. The papers reported that the meal at this high-profile celebrity wedding was nothing less than sausage, mashed potato and baked beans. How chic! And a little bit of chic has been exported up here, well, what do you know? Someone must have been in on the famous-person gossip round. The locals suspected Hilary.

Whether the Reading version of the meal had anything approaching the high quality of food preparation and presentation as ours we have no idea, but we trust that the chef there had less of a heart-stop in the kitchen than we did. For, it being a wedding at a busy time of the year, Mark became a little overloaded with work, and we suggested to him that, to ease his load a little, if he gave Audrey the housekeeper his recipe for the baked bean sauce, together with a few tips, she could deal with preparing that more than adequately as she is experienced in commercial catering. So he did.

In our baked bean sauce we always put a little chopped red chilli. Not so much as you can taste it, but it gives the sauce a touch of a zing, livens it up a little. What Mark forgot to tell Audrey was that, before he chops the chillies, he de-seeds them.

The sauce was duly made and it looked fine, and then Mark made another mistake. For some reason, and being in a rush, he tipped the beans into the sauce to marinade, before first liquidising the sauce, so we had beans in among bits of tomato, onion, herbs, and unidentifiable stringy vegetation. Then Mark tasted the sauce, and aspirated, ‘hhhhhhhhhhh!’

‘Hot, this sauce’, he whispered, looking rather worried, ‘I’m not sure we can get away with serving it to the guests like this’. It was then that we discovered about the omitted instruction concerning de-seeding of chillies.

There was nothing else for it. It was all hands on deck, separating the beans from the multi-textured mixture in which they found themselves. Beans, red sauce, bits of tomato, the kitchen began to look like an operating theatre. Naturally, a guest knocked on the door and asked for a pot of tea at this point but fortunately we were moderately experienced by this stage in our career and so did not find this untoward or unexpected.

Eventually most of the beans were back in a pot and the lumpier bits of the mixture in another pot, and we were ready for liquidisation. We tried diluting the sauce a little, but it was still a fiery experience, whichever way you looked at it. What was to be done?

We decided to go for it, and if the guests found the beans hard to cope with, we would tell them that was how they were supposed to be, how they were served in the finest restaurants, when the finest restaurants served baked beans, we would tell them we knew these things because, well, remember Reading?

But no one complained. All the beans were eaten up with evident relish, by people who are proud never to have tried a curry or Chinese meal in their lives. People who are forthright steak-and-chips men, with a thump on the desk to prove it.

We had contemplated for a moment changing the menu, describing it as sausage, mash and chilli beans, and how fortunate that we resisted this temptation. Had we done so, no one would have touched them. As it was, they were baked beans. Baked beans are What We Eat. If they aren’t exactly the same as you get in the shops, well you expect some fancy cooking from these posh people. ‘To be expected, that, s’like anything, you can’t make it like the shops do.’

Sometimes, the things that go wrong can have a profound cultural effect on the world, like being pushed off the diving board when you are frightened to jump. The Titanic, and Mark’s errors through overwork, had moved the local people on in their experience of life, just one little bit. If only they knew.