Author Archives: Ralph Bullivant

Getting back to the Sheep’s Head Food Company – no end of regrets

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So before the course on Sunday I bought myself a new notebook and pen so I wouldn’t forget any of the pearls of wisdom being handed down.

The course materials suggested that what I needed to bring was pen and paper – although it allowed for the option of some kind of electronic notebook. There was an half day when I thought I could take this as an excuse to treat myself to an iPad but I put that idea quickly to bed and kept things simple buying myself a very smart bright red Moleskine notebook.

Armed with this, a pen full of ink, wearing a good hat and carrying around with me the faint remaining whiff of fermented mackerel I signed in for the course on Sunday morning.

The attendees were ushered into a large glass atrium lined with chairs down the side and we were given tea and coffee. As the place filled up it was apparent that I would not be one of the younger members of the audience. There was a certain amount of facial hair and lots of eager faces – young people anxious to something new with coffee or about to make their first small fortune selling a particular type of Vietnamese sandwich.

At 10.00 we were called into a lecture theatre with very comfortable seats and I settled down for the day.

During the day I heard a total of about six speakers talk for 40 minutes or so on their experiences starting in the food or drink business. They included one of the people behinf Higgidy Pies, two brothers who had started making and selling pizzas from the back of a van and had just opened a pizza restaurant in Soho (and I think another in Clapham), Jimmy of Jimmy’s Chilled Coffee, a lady who had started a business selling muesli called Rude Health and another lady who opened a small chain of organic supermarkets called Planet Organic.

In the event I didn’t take many notes- perhaps a couple of dozen words. Of course there were people with their smart-phones taking photos of the powerpoint and the apposite quotes that some of the speakers saw fit to share with us. Though quite why they thought we needed reminding that life was not a dress rehearsal escaped me.

We were also told that if we started our Monday morning looking forward to Friday evening then we needed to be doing something else. Of course we did – that is why we were there – looking out for the dream of doing something else – the speakers had done it of course – stepped over the line, happy with what they had done – so if they dropped dead tomorrow there would be no regrets. Great for them but not so good for the poor squirming members of the audience whose lives would be filled with no end of regrets if the grim reaper’s scythe were to come calling tomorrow.

The speakers were all different and came at it from different experiences and although parts of the day were given over to a slightly revivalist self help tone there were elements that could perhaps be picked out that might form a basis for moving forward.

I have made a list of them in the little red book and I will try over the next few nights to set some of them out and see where I get to.

 

Getting back to the Sheep’s Head Food Company

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If you are reading this full page open on the internet go to the top and open up the link that reads “A few words about the Sheep’s Head Food Company” and scroll down and see what it says.

The ideas set out there still colour my dreams and there are plenty of people who will tell me that I should be doing something else other than being sat at a desk trying to wave a magic wand over desultory disputes over property and the better thing I could be doing should be tied up with food.

With that thought a group of kind hearted friends clubbed together to buy me a ticket to go  on one of the Masterclass Courses promoted by the Guardian with a view to me toddling along and turning my life around.

I chose the course called “The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Food Business” and that was how I spent my last Sunday. Of course taking place on a Sunday and with the time of trains down to London I managed to find myself with an excuse to spend my first Saturday night out in London for about twenty years. Some of you may have read about that and the filthfully good mackerel curry that was had.

But the real meat of the weekend was had over the Sunday.

Ironically the course took place in Royal Society of Medicine on Wimpole Street. I had been there before a few years ago to attend a course on property litigation. The good news is that this time I didn’t fall asleep in the very comfy leather seats. Over the course of the next few posts I will try and set down some thoughts on the day.

But in the meantime be reassured I am gathering thoughts on how to bring some Irish cheese to Birkenhead!

 

Mackerel curry – a primordial soup

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In summer down the left hand side of the pier in Ahakista up against the wall the fishermen keep a couple of old rusty chest freezers which they use for storing bait for the lobster and prawn pots. The bait is the fish that has been caught that noone wants and if there has been an abundance of mackerel some of them to. In the sun a fetid brown liquid leaks from the bottom of the freezers and runs down across the width of the pier towards the water staining the grey concrete.

Walk down the pier and take in a deep breathe through you nose and the smell isn’t that of the sea but of fish that have have been left out in the sun, it is a deep thick smell that clogs at the sinuses and catches at the back of the throat. It is the smell that I got as I put my head down over the bowl of Mackerel Curry that came out of the kitchen at Jane-tira.

I wrote about this last week and part of me had half expected that when we found the place on Saturday night it would be full and we would have to find somewhere else to eat. But peering in through the windows there were a couple of free tables and so we found ourselves sat, tucked down at the back next to a rack of metal shelving filled with packets of rice and tins of Carnation Condensed Milk.

With the menu in front of me I hesitated again. There were so many things that looked good I was worried out going for something that was just going to too hot to eat.

I was particularly taken by the thought of a plate of Gai Yang Som Tum ‘North Eastern style dish to get your hands dirty! Chargrilled marinated chicken served with Jeaw sauce (roasted chilli and tamarind relish) comes with Som Tum Thai and sticky rice.’ There were no little chili signs next to it and the Mackerel Curry had six of them there. The most that anything else on the menu had was just two. Wouldn’t it be better to get my hands dirty with some chicken to tear at rather than dirtying my mouth with a dish of fermented mackerel guts.

But then when again would I have the opportunity to try it. I could have the dirty chicken when we came back but for now I was going to have the dirty mackerel. So it was ordered.

The waiter tried to persuade me against it. I said that I understood it would be hot and he confessed the cooking of the dish was so rank that he couldn’t stay in the kitchen whilst it was being made. I felt satisfied with this.

But before the curry we had starters; delicate vegetable spring rolls, Moo Ping and Morning Glory.

The Moo Ping were skewers of pork that had been marinaded in coconut milk and grilled. They were very good but the highlight was the Morning Glory. I had no idea what it was and ordered it just for the name. It transpires that Morning Glory is a type of vegetable, a sort of mixture of green bean and spinach. It was stir fried with smoked chillies and garlic and slathered in a deep brown sauce. There was no clean way of eating it.  The sauce and garlic was flicked over the table and caught in my beard as we slurped down the green foliage. They were very good.

Then the curry arrived. It looked just as it did in the photo that came with Jay Rayner’s review in The Observer, a few green beans floating on the top and a reassuring pile of thick sliced cucumber to the side. The sauce was a thick slurry brown and in it, along with the beans there were pieces of potato, bamboo shoot and pea sized aubergines.

Having taken in the smell I tucked in although it was not really a dish to tuck into. Each mouthful was a searing blast of heat mixed with the deep dark taste of fetid salt fish. Some of the eat could be dissipated with a forkful of rice or a piece of cucumber but just as it subsided it was time to have some more. There was no point in talking and it became a battle of wills – my mouth against the heat of the dish. The fermented fish hadn’t quite broken down and it thickened the sauce and gave it some bite,  like eating at a smooth plate of fiery mud.

After half an hour I had had my fill. There was still some of the sauce at the bottom of the bowl but most of it had gone. I had another beer and cleared my head, coming back into the real world and pulling myself up and out of the primordial fug of the dish.

Writing this now I can still feel the taste of it itching under my skin and despite all the other good food on the menu there is an urge to go back for another go at the dirtiest dish of them all.

There was an hallucinogenic quality to my dreams that night. I was back in the office sat at my desk and the most urgent instruction of the day was to write a letter on behalf the people who lived above the restaurant and wanted to complain about the noise we had made on Saturday night. In my dream there had been music and dancing with the waiters to celebrate my eating of the curry and we had kept the noise and music going until the early hours of the morning. No doubt the dream was a conflation of my thoughts on the Sunday ahead learning about starting in the food business and the reality of what would be my Monday morning.

As it was the waiters, including the one who had worried about me taking the order, told me I had eaten more than most and they all confessed they couldn’t eat it and so I tried to explain to them about the pier in Ahakista and the smell of rotting fish that comes from the rusty freezers in summer.

Looking forward to the ‘Super Duper Spicy’ mackerel curry

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So on Saturday I have a night in London and a need to find something to eat. I cast my mind back to whatever I might have read about over the last few months on good places to eat in London and all I could think of was a review that Jay Rayner had done for The Observer of a place that did an obscenely good mackerel curry.

Happily all I had to do was put into Google – Jay Rayner mackerel – and the review was in front of me in all its sweaty glory.

Here is a taster:-

Whether the mackerel curry at Janetira in London’s Soho is an experience you will wish to accumulate will be a judgement call. I’m glad I’ve done it. In the way of this particular dish I suspect I will be compelled to do it again, even though to the western palate it is more wrongness than you could find in the locked bottom drawer of a Tory MP’s filing cabinet. They make much of its heat. It is listed not just on the menu in the simple dining room, a vaguely gloomy modernist space of blocky dark wood tables, but also on a blackboard, where is written: “Super Duper Spicy – we dare you.” There are four chilli pictograms by it. You get the idea.

So that is where I will be heading on Saturday night. It will probably be a good thing I will be waking up alone on Sunday morning.