Length: < 1 min I first came across pictures of this “Anti-Gluttony Door”, rather charmingly called a porta pega-gordo (or “fat catcher door”) — located in Portugal’s Alcobaça Monastery — designed to shame their fat monks into dieting whilst they could eat nothing only, as the Latin title… Read More »Respicte quia peccata populi comeditis

Length: 3 mins I found this recipe in my drafts post folder, one first started it looks like, some 18 months back; ‘Rona brain fog means that I can’t now — for the life of me — recall where I originally found it… Read More »Brain & brawns

Length: 8 mins Well, strictly, they weren’t his… If you’ve kept up on recent posts here, you’ll know I’ve recently attempted to write some more personal history whilst mapping some of our childhood houses & experiences. For any of you obsessives out there… Read More »My Dad’s pigs

Length: 3 mins Did they wait for us to go? Escaping Deal more than 20 years ago & it was if the entire 30,000 population were just holding back, checking to make sure we had finally got onto the Bilbao-bound ferry at Southampton,… Read More »A Rose by any other name?

Length: 2 mins From the house-clustered North edge of Deal, starting below the sea-wall, starting below sea level, as is so much of old Deal, towards Sandwich, the grinding pebbles, rough grasses, wind-warped trees on the inward side of our path. Look across the… Read More »Liminal spaces 2

Length: 2 mins The Pfizer park. A modern citadel, old new rising from the marshes. Gouged out from inlets and outlets, from sea and mud and gravel and ooze and sand and catching bushes and branches. I think a lot of it was… Read More »Liminal spaces

Length: < 1 min Catching up after a couple of months off Twitter, HT @archreview whose “The Architectural Review” Oct ‘18 “Food” edition has pigs on the front cover. Finest kind. (HT @demarionunn for the pointer).    

Length: 7 mins Did we Westerners — at some point, back in the dim & distant — become too ‘timid‘ about our food? When did we start shying away from ordering anything to eat that may still be too recognisably the original, whether animal,… Read More »Textural tantrums

Length: 3 mins If similar words were to be contemptuously spat out by our own, in-bred, racist, parasitic, royals, they — hell-bent as they are on preserving the power & privilege of their anachronistic, aristo-oligarch group of fellow land-hoarders — would certainly opt to… Read More »Qu’ils mangent de la brioche

Length: 2 mins @demarionunn latest Vittles’ piece on food production name checks our friend Simon Fairlie at The Land magazine. You must of course read both writers. Simon’s article, in his usual quiet, measured and non-expletive laden way, absolutely — and totally righteously —… Read More »Where will we find our new “gong heads”?

Length: 2 mins Way, way back at the beginning of this century, in 2000, some years before Thatcher finally died but also before the rise of the Brexit fascists, so almost halcyon times indeed, along with some local friends from Deal — making… Read More »Stranger’s food

Length: 3 mins Via Ana Gonçalves and Zijun Meng of Tātā Eatery, ex-Nuno Mendes & the Great British Chefs site comes this is a really rather special recipe with added massa pimentão (fermented pepper). Place the peppers and 2 large cloves of garlic… Read More »Katsu sando

Length: < 1 min It’s obviously not of course; otherwise there’d be no book about it… Originally released in 1979, this paperback edition came out in 1994. Looking at the preface, it shows a lot of promise to be a very interesting read; not… Read More »Those ‘other’ cuisines…

Length: 5 mins I start this post with a thought from Jennifer McLagen’s “Odd Bits”: “Although we suggest that you clean the intestines before using, many ethnic cultures prefer them to be left alone. The undigested food within the intestines is regarded as… Read More »On why their intestines are other’s chitterlings…

Length: 2 mins I’m know I’ve mentioned “Vittles” by Jonathan Nunn before. Ostensibly, it’s simply yet another Substack newsletter. But calling it a ‘newsletter’, is the very least descriptive of what it actually is. “It” is everything that writing about ‘food’ should be… Read More »Vital vittles. Diaspora & ethnicity & belonging. Or not.

Length: < 1 min Via Au Pied de Cochon, Canada. It me! I think you’ll agree? I have the cookbook from Martin Picard and team which has been on the shelves now, somehow remaining unread for a looooong time. It came minus accompanying DVD… Read More »Trot along now, there’s a good chap…

Length: 2 mins If a menu isn’t in a language I’m able to — however slowly — stumble through, with at least a vague sense of how 3 or 4 words in the description sound maybe slightly familiar, how then to choose a… Read More »Handy with hanzi? What do those symbols, that writing, on the menu even mean?

Length: 5 mins Bear with me; there’s going to be a series of old Bulow family history pieces for the next few posts, with pretty scanty references to food, although some pigs do make an appearance every now and then. I was born… Read More »I commend Coopersale Pt. 1

Length: < 1 min By “pigs”, I mean the Tories. And all their enablers. The sociopathic Pritel, the moronic Truss, the sentient wet-wipes that are the rest of their cabinet. Off with them all. In response to the realisation that 100k pigs are set… Read More »Cull the pigs

Length: < 1 min Val is in Peterborough hospital as the previous op wasn’t successful in getting rid of the infection in her badly fucked up finger. She tested positive for MRSA. The tissue around the earlier splinter wound was necrotic. As I write,… Read More »Room with no view; but you’re fed