The dishwasher is knackered so I have just completed my second round of washing up for the evening and the fourth of the last two days. Kids everywhere are burying their heads in revision and have no time to help.

By way of compensation another copy of The Compleat Imbiber arrived in this mornings post. One of the joys and great dangers of Amazon is having an impossibly large second bookshop at the end of your fingers and so I discovered there were a number of editions that could be had in good condition for £0.01p or thereabouts plus postage & packing. Let us see what arrives tomorrow.

This was the last edition published soon after Cyril Ray died. There is a great story on oysters some of which is worth sharing.

We came upon a place where the oysters grew, packed together close as grapes. My companion put the basket on the ground, and took out two bottles, two glasses, two plates and two forks. I produced nothing but a chisel. I broke the oysters off, one by one, chosing the big ones of tidy shape. The outsides of their shells were still wet from the sea. We prised them open, carefully, to save the liquor from spilling. Then we place them, eighteen upon each plate. My friend produced lemon and red pepper and I begun to eat.

‘Wait,” he said. He opened the bottles, one of champagne and one of stout, and filled the glasses. Thus I came to the pleasure of eating oysters with black velvet, sitting on a beach, with the blue ocean stretched before me.

It is easy to imagine all kinds of delight into a past experience, but I believe that my love of good food was awakened on that summer day: the love of good food, laced with good conversation.

Two thoughts on that.

I last ate oysters and stout over a long lunch in Davy Byrnes pub whilst in Dublin for an equally long weekend. The next day, a Monday, we went to a better pub, if not one of the best I have been to. There were the two of us and we had the place  to ourselves. There were two old men behind the bar and it took them both to pour my pint and get it right. There were leather seats in a great room and walls covered in faded mirrors. Although it was quiet the place was tight with the sound of a Saturday night and the noise and the drinking that went on in its four walls.

My love of good food could have started over a lunch whilst on a camping holiday in France. The other kids had burgers or chicken and chips but I wanted a plate of clams. They came in a special plate that had a series of hollows to hold each opened shell and they were slathered in butter and garlic. There were no chips but there was bread to mop up the juices.

Having a night in London and spotting that Dexys were playing a run of ten nights in The Duke of York’s Theatre was too good an opportunity to miss. So I bought my ticket last week and slipped out my hotel late in the afternoon to pick it up.

Having picked up my ticket I was told that the show would start at 8.00 rather than 7.00 which gave me a couple of hours to kill and get something to eat in and around Soho.

Last time I had been London I had tried to squeeze Kristen and myself into Barrafina for just one plate of tapas but we had been dismissed and told that the wait for a seat was at least 45 minutes.

I had better luck this time by myself and was able to sit myself down on one of the spare seats up at the bar. I then found myself being moved a few times so as to accommodate new couples coming in. This didn’t matter at all.

I started with a glass of Manzanilla and a plate of clams cooked in olive oil and garlic and a small basket of bread to mop up the juices. I was given a knife and fork but there didn’t seem much point and I slurped at the small nuggets of meat in each shell. Furtling the shells around the plate with my fingers to make sure nothing was missed.

Having whetted the appetite I started on a plate of prawns with garlic. They came so quick from the grill they were too hot to hold and in my eagerness to get into the first one a splash of juice squirted across the bar. The garlic was cooked to a crisp and just on the right side of not being burnt. All that was wrong was that I could have done with more than four of them.

Next up was a glass of red wine and grilled quail with more garlic. I started on this with the knife and fork but soon resorted to my fingers. Dipping the pieces of flesh into the yellow garlic mayonnaise and then chewing away at the small bones. I felt slightly scruffy all the way down from Liverpool compared to the rest of the people sat up at the bar. I am not sure too many of them were planning on making their way to Dexys once they had finished eating.

After the oil and garlic I felt like something clean and fresh so I had a plate of salad. Fennel and radish finely sliced and mixed with a light dressing and pomegranate seeds. It did the job perfectly.

Having wiped away the last of the grease from my beard I paid the bill and walked out into the early evening and made my way to the theatre.

Any complaints – well it was expensive and I could have done with a good plate of chips to fill me up a bit.

I tried to take my food stained paper menu away with me but they insisted on giving me a clean one.

There was time for a quick pint before I took my seat in the theatre. Dexys played for almost two and a half hours and at one point I found myself getting overwrought as they started on I Love You (Listen To This), one of the many highlights on Don’t Stand Me Down. The whole violin, trombone, redemption combination all getting too much for me on top of the good food and wine. Thank God they didn’t do Reminisce, Pt. 2 as I would have been left a blubbering mess.

Afterwards I walked back through the streets of London and then along The Embankment back to the hotel.

Another extract from The Compleat Imbiber. This time an essay by Hugh Johnson called Confessions of a Merman

Sometimes I think I must be a merman, and a half-cannibal one at that, to enjoy browsing on the sea bed as much as I do. I remember a particular plat de fruits de mer at Hornfleur which was quite simply that: a bare-handed predators’s banquet on all stony, scaly or limpid beasts that lie, crawl, or proceed in illogical little flicks among the wrack and the wrecks,  stirring up sand or disguised as pebbles.

There were shrimps and oysters, whelks and mussels, winkles and cockles and clams. The napkins were sea-green with crustaceous designs. The plate was virtually a bivale in pottery. The wine, palest from a dark green bottle, was as cold and as tangy, almost, as the sea itself.

The toss of a lobster pot from the harbour wall, where pyramids of tarry rigging were black against the moon, the cafe-restaurant Aux Deax Ponts was like an extension of the sea bed, with the only difference that the water boiled. I returned there with unabated appetite for grilled sole, steamed turbot, moules marinieres night after night.

This evening we ate out in New Brighton. We walked down from Vale Park along the Prom looking out with Liverpool at our back and forward to the Irish Sea. There were ships coming in and it felt good to watch them as the light shifted over the water. The ships and the great warehouses and buildings that run along the Liverpool shore line all seemed dwarfed by the river and the pull along of the tide.

Now making fish cakes for the family’s supper tomorrow and looking forward to seeing Dexys in The Duke of York’s Theatre all by myself!

One of the reasons for the trip to Cow & Co on Friday was to pick up a copy of a new food magazine called The Gourmand. Part of the reason for wanting a copy of The Gourmand was that it had in an article about a series of book/anthologies called The Compleat Imbiber. I had picked up a copy second hand a few years ago for £2.00 and was intrigued to learn more. In all there were 16 volumes published intermittently between 1956 and 1992. They were all  edited by Cyril Ray. I have volume 11 published in 1970. Its original home was in Walton Library and amongst other things it contains articles on the longest wine list in the world, the best restaurant, food in Marcel Proust and this poem by Adrian Mitchell. I am not sure that the poem lives up to the title.

GASTRONOMIC PORNOGRAPHY

Anchovies in aspic                                                                                                             With marinated aubergines                                                                                          Beetroot bellies in brandy                                                                                                  With a bucket of Heinz Baked Beans.                                                                         Alligator puree and I don’t care                                                                                               If you stuff it with reindeer rind,                                                                                             But gastronomic pornography                                                                                                Is booting me out of my mind.

Cavair and cakemix                                                                                                         Makes coriander chocolate cheese.                                                                               Chutneyed carrots and coffee-                                                                                        Won’t you slice me a doorstep please.                                                                               Pass me down a mousse with its antlers on                                                                         You can cook it in fairy snow,                                                                                                  For gastronomic pornography                                                                                                       Is dragging me down so low.

Gammon stuffed with garlic,                                                                                         Geraniums and gooseberry fool.                                                                                         Grouse, gazpacho and ginger,                                                                                               Burn your kitchen and leave to cool.                                                                                                I want Mrs Beeton to be my man                                                                                                 And Elizabeth David too,                                                                                                             For gastronomic pornography                                                                                              Makes my stomach feel like a zoo.

The Gourmand also has an article on Mark Hix’s library. One of the books featured is called Rude Food and is a series of glossy photos of half naked woman with items of food artfully draped around them. Mum and Dad used to have a copy. Do they still have it somewhere?

Saturday afternoon was spent shifting the grenhouse. The wind on Wednesday night had managed to move one side of it eight or so inches across the patio stones it sits on. Fortunately all the glass had stayed in although a couple of panes had buckled loose. On my knees trying to manoeuvre it back into position I was conscious of one of the loose panes of glass above me and had a brief vision of it slipping loose and taking my head off. It stayed in place and my head and neck remained intact. I then planted out some salad seedlings and spent the best part of an hour scrubbing out ground elder from all corners of the garden. It is almost time for me to dig out the recipe to turn it into soup.

In the evening we ate deep fried soft shell crabs with garlic, pepper and coriander followed by a seafood stew made with prawns and scallops.

The base of the stew was an intense tomato sauce made with fried garlic, white wine, stock, lemon peel and oregano. This all cooked down until it was thick and pungent. I then strirred in the raw prawns and scallops to cook through together with half a block of feta cheese.

It reminded me of a lunch I had one Sunday in Barcelona almost fifteen years ago. It was in a fish restaurant down by the harbour. When we got there at 2.00 the place was empty but over the next hour or so it filled up with families all gorging themselves with fish. I had monkfish in a tomato sauce that had some sort of creamy cheese stirred in.