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JOE BLOWS

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« on: April 29, 2020, 12:49:07 pm »


Did somebody mention Joe?



from The Press…

Joe Bennett's birthday-lockdown recipe:
Bacon, chips and glaucomic eggs


Fat is the point of bacon. If you don't want fat, eat tofu.

By JOE BENNETT | 4:45AM — Wednesday, 22 April 2020

This is not how Joe's birthday meal looked, but the ingredients are more or less right.
This is not how Joe's birthday meal looked, but the ingredients are more or less right.

I DOUBT I'm the first columnist to have received rat poison through the mail but I bet I'm the first to write back to say thank you. For last week I mentioned my lack of rat bait and two days later some arrived. And though my benefactor wasn't to know, her gift came just in time for my 63rd birthday.

As the rats tuck into the meal that betrays, my own thoughts turn to what to have for dinner. I am told that during the lockdown people have taken to high-end cookery. But now's no time for haute cuisine. Now is a time for cuisine basse. My birthday dinner will be bacon, chips and glaucomic eggs. It's food as food was meant to be.

You start with big, old, cheap potatoes. If they've got a name they're too fancy. Peel more than you think you need. Then peel more.

The chips should be as long as you like and three-eighths of an inch wide by three-eighths of an inch deep. And no, there is no metric equivalent. If you can't picture three-eighths of an inch you're “too young to cook chips”.

Soak the raw chips in cold water. I don't know why but that's what my mother did and her chips were chips as Plato would have imagined chips if the potato had reached ancient Greece.

Soak the chips for as long as it takes to drink as much as you need of whatever you like — beer, wine, creme de menthe, it doesn't matter; cuisine basse doesn't do food pairings. Let happiness be your guide.

Once you're in the mood to cook, put suitable music on — Carmina Burana is ideal — and heat some oil. Use a deep fryer if you must but it's a coward's gadget and you miss out on the Krakatoan thrill of an open saucepan.

When the oil swirls with menace drop a chip in. If the splash on your wrist makes you leap and scream the oil is hot enough. Drop the chips in one by one and enjoy the frothing. Cook them till they're about to change colour then haul them out with the slotted spoon you haven't got and put them aside.

Return to the creme de menthe while the chips cool, then assemble all the bits you need for the final burst because things are going to get dramatic.

Fire the oil back up and heat a frying pan and when both are smoking like schoolboys tip the chips into one and the bacon into another. Suddenly it will be the hot chaos of battle, all noise and smoke and fire alarms and fat that pings like shrapnel.

When the bacon has the texture of a Crunchie bar, pull it out and line a plate with it. Don't drain off the fat. Fat is the point of bacon. If you don't want fat, eat tofu.

When the chips are the colour you want in chips pile them onto the bacon and salt them. Use the salt from the sea that comes in chem lab crystals. Use far too much.

Crack three eggs into a bowl, fish out the bits of shell, then tip the eggs into the bacon pan and clamp a glass lid on them. The glass will be opaque in seconds. The eggs are done when the yolks have clouded like glaucoma. Slide the lot out to cover the chips. Salt them.

Take the plate to wherever you eat and plunge your knife into a yolk. It will bleed through the chips to the floor of bacon. Eat, be happy, cry, “Death to rats and viruses!” and raise a glass of creme de menthe to benefactors.


__________________________________________________________________________

• Julian “Joe” Bennett is a writer, columnist and retired English school teacher living in Lyttelton, New Zealand. Born in England, Bennett emigrated to New Zealand when he was twenty-nine.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/121133683/joe-bennetts-birthdaylockdown-recipe-bacon-chips-and-glaucomic-eggs



from The Press…

Bacon, egg and chips are boons to humanity

Bacon is nutrition. Nutrition is a good.

By JOE BENNETT | 5:00AM — Wednesday, 29 April 2020

The morality of killing and eating another species can be questioned, but the benefit to health cannot. Bacon is nutrition. Nutrition is a good. — Photograph: Kelly Hodel.
The morality of killing and eating another species can be questioned, but the benefit to health cannot.
Bacon is nutrition. Nutrition is a good. — Photograph: Kelly Hodel.


HOW DID it happen so fast? Four hundred years of wisdom reversed in a single generation, 4,000 if you discount the potato. But let me begin at the beginning.

Last week I wrote about bacon, egg and chips. My purpose was, well, let's not worry about my purpose. Let's look at the effect. And the only effect I have to go on is the response that reached me in the form of phone calls, emails and good old-fashioned letters.

My correspondents fell broadly into two camps. The first camp was nostalgic and dogmatic. They had fond memories of bacon and egg, and firm views on how to cook chips. All agreed that double cooking was essential. Several said the only proper cooking medium was lard. But a few confessed to having resorted to the frozen supermarket chip that asks only two things of the cook: a functioning oven, and spiritual death. You could sense from their tone that they hated themselves for it.

The other camp, though unfailingly polite, addressed me as one might address a disabled, solo round-the-world yachtsman. They combined a mild wonder at my courage with an utter disbelief at my stupidity.

For they shared a view you'll find expressed throughout the media, an orthodoxy that it is heresy to defy, which is that a plate of bacon, egg and chips, generously sprinkled, lest we forget, and they certainly did not, with salt, is, in and of itself, by definition — wait for it now, though surely you know the word that's coming next — unhealthy.

For somehow in the last 40 years food has been divided into two types, healthy and unhealthy, and bacon, egg and chips sits emphatically on the unhealthy side. To eat it is to commit a crime against one's wellbeing.

And if at this moment you are saying to yourself, well, yes, they're right, bacon, egg and chips are indeed unhealthy, then consider this: you're on your own — not now, of course, right now the zeitgeist's with you — but historically.

Let's start with salt. Salt has been traded and cherished since Noah was a boatie. No only does it enhance flavour, it also cures and preserves meats. Without salt there would have been no human civilisation. Salt is a gift to mankind.

So's bacon. It's the cured belly of a pig.  People have eaten pigs for ever (just as pigs, it should be noted, when given the chance, have eaten people.)  The morality of killing and eating another species can be questioned, but the benefit to health cannot. Bacon is nutrition. Nutrition is a good.

Ditto with eggs which we've been eating since we were hunter-gatherers. You can debate whether collecting eggs is hunting or gathering, but not whether eggs are good for us. Eggs are nutritive by definition.

And as for the potato, the Spanish brought it to Europe in the 16th century, and it's been popular ever since. So popular indeed that when Ireland suffered a potato blight in the 19th century, half the people starved and the other half emigrated.

All the ingredients then of bacon, egg and chips have been with us for millennia. They haven't changed. They remain the boons they always were. What's changed is us.

Just 50 years ago we saw food as food. Since then in the West we've got rich, fat and lazy, and increasingly terrified of dying. And we've transferred the blame for all this onto certain foods. It's that simple.

(Though I will concede, in the interests of fairness, that on its own a plate of bacon, eggs and chips cannot be said to constitute a full and balanced diet. It lacks a sausage.)


__________________________________________________________________________

• Julian “Joe” Bennett is a writer, columnist and retired English school teacher living in Lyttelton, New Zealand. Born in England, Bennett emigrated to New Zealand when he was twenty-nine.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/121311545/bacon-egg-and-chips-are-boons-to-humanity-says-joe-bennett

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