First things first: here is a link to my weekly London Confidential column. If it was a pie chart it would be 1/10th advertising, 3/10ths looking for a boyfriend, 2/10ths not quite settling for a dog, and 4/10ths Battersea Dogs Home.
And now for something completely different.
This being a food blog of sorts, I’m cheek-reddeningly aware that food doesn’t actually make much of an appearance. To make amends for that here is a picture of last night’s supper: tripe with coriander, chilli and spring onion. I’d be telling a porkie if I said I’d be upset in a Meryl-Streep-being-kicked-out-of-Downing-Street sort of way if I never ate tripe again. It’s not quite up there with roast chicken or something porkie, say, but it is intensely pleasing to me. For several reasons: its frugality, its ability to carry other flavours, the alien and mysterious textures it offers up, but above all its deep, unexpected and most satisfactory meatiness.
Cooking tripe is something I’ve only done half a dozen times and cooking is really what the stuff needs. Hours and hours of it. Anything other than very soft is most unappealing. Or so I thought until Henry Harris – my erstwhile partner on the Christmas Day edition of The Food Quiz on Radio 4 and more importantly resident wizard-in-chief at the wondrous Racine on Brompton Road – explained his tripe yearning to me on Twitter.
Someone, somewhere described Henry as the greatest French chef in London (or something equally swishy) but it interests me he wants to do something Asian with the stomach at his disposal. With the exception of Spanish dishes, the most enjoyable tripe I’ve eaten has always been from beyond Europe – most memorably in a soup in one of those Vietnamese places around Hoxton. For a while I was unable to pinpoint the ineffably delicious tiny frilly bits bobbing about the depths. Was it a type of mushroom? Some veg with which I was unacquainted? A delicious mistake? No, it was tripe. It being frilly is one of the reasons a lot of people don’t like the stuff. Well, not just frilly but its texture and look generally. The one I cooked yesterday had been sold to me by a butcher in Peckham and was, apparently, ‘lady’ tripe. It came in compressed layers which once separated had the curious look and spongy feel of fake grass and that I realise is something a lot of people might find off-putting. Meat should, many feel, be fibrous in one way or another, and flesh that doesn’t tick that particular box isn’t quite the thing. Well, what a lot of very nice treats those people are missing out on.
But is tripe gay? There’s no mention of tripe or indeed any other offal in Oliver Thring‘s Guardian piece about what constitutes gay food but I’d really like to know. Frankly there are other things you can put in your mouth which might give the game away more definitively but I may start to campaign for the consumption of variety meats to be the twenty-first century’s equivalent of the green carnation.
I may, but then again this time last year I thought I’d get myself a dog and that never came to anything either.
