On eels + mash and contemporary dining culture

You say eels and mash, I ask if you’re ready for lunch. We better hurry because this once-ubiquitous meal is disappearing faster than you can say ‘coals and coke’.

It’s understandable. A monochrome plate of stewed eels and mashed potatoes swimming in parsley liquor the color of hospital walls can hardly compete with photos fluffy bagels oozing bright orange cheese. No, stewed eels just melt-in-your-mouth, leaving you with a thorny spine to dispose of. They taste of porridge overcooked in the microwave and cross lunch ladies and drafty boarding school canteens

Shops serving eels once dotted the streets in London’s cockney communities and offered a cheaper alternative to meat pie. The few that remain each present a distinct vision of the past. M. Manze in Southwark—a new location, the original is in Peckham—caters to gastro-tourists from nearby Borough and Maltby Markets. You order at the counter before lugging your plate to a distressed wood booth and perhaps buying a souvenir mug after you finish. It’s an Experience. You eat at Manzes to not-order from the old school menu and to admire the tiled walls and wood fixtures while chewing through your single-textured food. By denying the tropes and symbols of the contemporary dining experience, Manze’s defends tradition.

Other pie and mash shops twist their history to appeal to eaters looking for an affirming nostalgia. Stop by Goddard’s at Greenwich or G. Kelly and you’ll have to order eels as a side. This separation defines eels as a taste and pie as a food. By guiding the diner away from a meal entirely of eels and potatoes, the restaurants imply that eels are a product not fit for eating. Meat pies and potatoes are the foods that nourish us. These restaurants play the parent directing us to make smarter food choices—only in this case, the smart food choice is the modern one.

Although it’s unlikely that eels and mash will ever recapture its central point in the British diet, the dish’s changing fortunes offers valuable lessons about contemporary dining culture. Eels and mash remind us that society constructs our expectations of a meal. Marketers have taught us to demand certain textures, cookbook authors urge us to beg for diversity and restauranteurs push us to crave story-filled dining rooms. Eels and mash negate these forces. With a uniform texture, boring color and standard presentation, eels and mash defies our expectations. And we should keep eating them.

On Sunday mornings, melting butter, and Jean-etienne Liotard

I wish Sunday mornings still tasted of butter. As a kid, I anticipated its rich sweetness from the moment I woke up. To distract my impatient stomach while my parents slept in, I memorized the print of a Jean-Etienne Liotard painting that hung next to the TV. The sitter wore a dress made from a flower-printed fabric that I imagined felt as soft as a golden brown pancake. The kind that they served at IHOP, which didn’t exist in New York and which I begged my parents to let us visit when we went to see family. My dad made thick, dimpled pancakes but he dropped chocolate chips in if you asked. It was a consolation prize I readily accepted.

But he cooked pancakes only on special Sundays. Otherwise, he took me to the local bagel store before morning soccer games. This was Brooklyn so the line was long, but this was Brooklyn so the line moved quickly because Brooklynites are more familiar with their bagel orders than they are with maximizing vertical storage. The orders cascaded like couplets at a poetry recital. Sesame with cream cheese. Tuna salad on pumperknickel. Everything with lox. And plain, toasted with butter, for me. The bagel came wrapped in white parchment paper that felt as scratchy as my polyester soccer jersey. I didn’t know how to improve the jersey, but I did know how to fix the packaging: devour the gobs of melting butter and pretend like they made soccer interesting.

Giving up soccer solved the soccer conundrum and I moved from bagels and bodegas to toast and breakfast with my parents at a nearby Latin restaurant. Forget brittle slices tossed on a grubby plate. These grilled quadrilaterals of spongey loaf bread came sandwiched together in wicker baskets lined with burgundy paper napkins. They had less butter than bagels, but sometimes you’d pry apart two pieces and find piles hidden inside. Opening those pieces was more exciting than coming home to discover the book you’d ordered from Amazon had arrived.

Then the neighborhood changed, rents increased, and Duane Reade replaced the restaurant. Simultaneously, I realized croissants epitomized Sunday morning butter, though they needed help. Straight from the pastry case at our local café, they tasted like Halloween spider webbing. After being wrapped in foil and blitzed in the oven, the plasticine texture loosened into waves of silk. I rode these waves across the city. To my neighborhood’s newly-opened French bakery, to City Bakery’s Pretzel croissant and to Whole Foods for pain au chocolat. Whereas I had once craved the uniform surface of IHOP pancakes, I relished the variety of texture the croissant offered. From crunchy to chewy and soft, each bite reintroduced me to my long-time friend. Butter wasn’t just an ingredient, but an experience that changed according to circumstances.

I still love butter but eat less. Sometimes I bake it up as shortbread or use it to scramble an egg. But whenever I detect its sweet aroma—of cookies baking or pancakes sizzling—I remember those Sunday morning soccer games, crumbs, and that Liotard dress. And all is right with the world.

An Amateur Discovers Georgian Wine - Pheasant's Tears Saperavi

I bought an Argentinian Malbec the day before and had two bottles of Il Censo’s 2012 Praruar chilling in the refrigerator. But this label promised woody tannins mellowed in clay pots. Seduced like a kid by the December Toys R Us catalog, I sprinted to the checkout.

My seducer was a Georgian wine, specifically Pheasant’s Tears Saperavi, which seemed as rare as a crisp autumn morning. You can swing by your local bar for a Spanish Rioja but ask for something from Georgia and the bartender is more likely to serve you sickly-sweet sweet tea. That’s a shame because Georgia has been producing wine since roughly 4000 BC. Back then, Georgians poured their fresh-pressed grape juice into large amphorae, called qvevri (kwev-ree), and buried them underground to ferment for up to 50 years. Although modern production techniques now dominate, several producers continue to age their wines in the traditional manner. UNESCO deemed this process an intangible cultural heritage in 2013.

But say your bartender doesn’t bat an eyelash when you request Georgian wine. Instead, they offer you a choice between Tavkveri or Mtsvani — if you’re okay with a white wine this evening, that is. Rather than be surprised, you could ask if they had a Shavkapito or even a Rkatsiteli (one of the oldest grapes on earth!). Still, these indigenous varietals offer only a small sip of Georgian wine culture.

If you came to my house that Sunday, we’d have taken our first sip. First I’d apologize for the too-small glass (no chance of aerating the wine). But we’d stick our noses in anyway and inhale the wood like we were supposed to. I also detected alcohol-spiked Ribena or prune juice (not that I’d admit to the latter). You’d laugh and then describe a head of oak and a retro-aroma of black pepper. Who’s laughing now?

Then we’d drink. You’d snigger again when I said the wood smell was definitely oak. But that wouldn’t stop me from telling you how this oak got cloaked under a velvet parachute of blackcurrant and had the texture of fruit punch left out of the fridge overnight, but without the cloying aftertaste. I knew it sounded ridiculous but it felt true. You were no better. You described an inky violet cloud that overshadowed a bunch of margiolds crossing the Black Sea on a raft made from smoked cedar!

We sipped through half the bottle revising our descriptions along the way. If someone barged in on us, they’d have cringed and begged for a Coors Lite. But we’d keep drinking, pleased that we could glimpse the truth of Pheasant’s Tears Saperavi and, with it, Georgian culture.

How to make a crayfish and rocket sandwich, American style

If you lined up Pret-A-Manger’s worldwide outlets, they’d resemble a Twinkie production line, each one eerily identical including the plastic aroma. But unlike Twinkies, which taste just as bland purchased from Selfridges as when snagged from a Brooklyn bodega, the food at Pret varies. Take their crayfish and rocket sandwich. I discovered it while living in London and soon found it in refrigerator cases everywhere from Morrison’s to Marks & Spencers. Don’t look for it in US sandwich cases, just settle for the strangely saccharine spicy shrimp and cilantro wrap. Crayfish and rocket’s popularity in the UK is as understandable as its absence in the US is baffling. Crammed full of mini-chewy shrimp, peppery arugula (rocket), and a thick smear of mayonnaise, the sandwich removes its crusts when showing up for a sophisticated tea-time, then dons a paper box for an al-desko lunch (just be sure to brush the crumbs off your keyboard). In England, most cafes will use a soft granary bread, but I enjoy the structure a nubbly whole-grain loaf provides. That way more crayfish end up in your mouth than on your pants.

Crayfish and Rocket Sandwich

Ingredients:

• 2 slices of medium-thick wholegrain sandwich bread, untoasted
• 1 tablespoon Greek yogurt
• 4 shrimp, peeled and cooked
• ¼ cup arugula, roughly chopped
• Black pepper

Place your sliced bread on a buttering or cutting board. Spread one slice with greek yogurt in an even layer, just to the edges of the crust.

Chop the shrimp into small cubes, about the size and shape of your finger nail. You want them small enough to fit inside the bread without creating lumps, but not be so small that they become a squishy mess. Scatter them in an even layer over the slice of bread with yogurt. Season with a generous grind of pepper.

Cover the shrimp with the chopped arugula and pat down. Place the remaining slice of bread on top and press down gently so the layers together hold together. You can cut it on the diagonal like they do at sandwich chains, or you can just eat. I prefer the latter.