LOVE MINUS ZERO - NO LIMIT. DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW.
GAYCHURCH NEWS
THOSE WHOM GOD HATH JOINED TOGETHER,
GAYCHURCH NEWS
THOSE WHOM GOD HATH JOINED TOGETHER,
LET NO MAN PUT ASUNDER.
YOU MAY NOW KISS THE DOGBRIDE.
On Newsnight, last night, an angry dog lover insisted that he had the absolute right to marry his partner, Rover.
Why should a filthy old pervert like Archbishop Nonce tell me who I can and can't marry? Rover and I are perfectly happy, we live together as man and wife, just like any other man and wife, or husband and husband or wife and wife or whatever floats your boat and all we want is to have our union solemnised in the way that uptight, straight people do. You know, vicars and bells and confetti and a disco afterwards. And then a fight.
Why should a filthy old pervert like Archbishop Nonce tell me who I can and can't marry? Rover and I are perfectly happy, we live together as man and wife, just like any other man and wife, or husband and husband or wife and wife or whatever floats your boat and all we want is to have our union solemnised in the way that uptight, straight people do. You know, vicars and bells and confetti and a disco afterwards. And then a fight.
Shrieking gay activist, Rhona McDick, shrieked that it was absolutely intolerable the way that some people weren't gay. I mean, she howled, where would the world, where would humanity be if everybody was straight, Shut up! Shut up! Listen to me, I demand that you listen to me. I'm a comedian.
Gorgeous, pouting Rhona McDick, alternative comedian,
the alternative bit relates to her not being funny.
Like most of them.
Interviewed by the BBC's in-house grunting, hunchback transsexual,
the alternative bit relates to her not being funny.
Like most of them.
Interviewed by the BBC's in-house grunting, hunchback transsexual,
Krusty Wank, Professor Dame Germina Streuth, wretched old bully and famous star of early 'sixties magazine, Legs Wide Open,
Life down under.
Streuth explores feminist issues
back in the nineteen-sixties.
said Well, cobber, I'll fuck anybody, man, woman or child, and I have, long as they're a bit famous or rich or somethin' but I must say I draw the line at fucking a dog. Unless it was Art. And I was really well paid. But no, as a sociologist and a sex therapist and an author, broadcaster, journalist, pornstar and gardener, I do believe we are staring into a bit of a cultural abyss, here, mates, or a fairy dell, if you like, all the old certainties not so certain anymore, the underpinnings being undermined, the lunatics taking over the bleedin' asylum. Society's all over the place, like a mad woman's breakfast.
It's like that bloke, Ishmael, says, there's all the difference in the world between procreation and loving, meaningful, monogamous and profound arse-banditry. Doesn't matter how you dress it up, sport, fishing from the other bank's fine but it ain't fucking natural. I mean, Fair Dinkum, mates, but if God hadda meant for blokes to charver each other up the shitpipe, there wouldn't be no need for KY Jelly now, would there? Know whaddamean? Your Sheila, now, she comes equipped with her own internal lubetube. And I know, cos even at seventy-four I can't turn the bastard off, wet and stinking like a four-day old mackerel I am, down there, some days. But yer bloke's arsehole, it's not, how shall we say, naturally lubricated, in fact it's whachamightcall, if you was of a religious persuasion, dry as a nun's nasty, and that means it's not designed to accommodate another bloke's donger. But that's poofters for you. And anyway, they only wanna get hitched, a) so's they can get divorced in a big fucking drama and b) to draw fresh attention to themselves because nobody any longer gives a rat's ass about their filthy practices, 's a busted flush, now that it's virtually on the school curriculum. Proper queers don't wanna get married. These gobby bastards are just like normal people, apart from all the endless whining and sticking their fists profoundly and meaningfully up each others' arses, that is. There isn't a Christopher Isherwood or a WH Auden amongst them. I mean, who the fuck do they think they're kidding? Do I look like Shirley fucking Bassey? And the reason that so many straights are supporting this shit is because they all want life to be just like some continual twenty-four/three-hundred-and-sixty-five orgy, and if they let the poofs pretend to be normal why then it'll be ok for them to go gangbanging the local teenagers right in front of their parents or dragging their wives around municipal carparks on the end of a leash with their tits hanging out. This is what the liberal consensus is all about, mates. Ain't nothing to do with nice, and everything to do with ugly. Nothing to do with Freedom, this is all about the tyranny of the phallus; mark my words. Wasn't it that evil old bastard, Crowley, who said that headline of mr ishmael's ? Do what thou wilt shall be the whole fo the law? Satanist, wasn't he?
He'd be well pleased with all this stuff. Cheers, Krusty, mine's a case of strong lager and a packet of Bensons
I'm the Urban Titman, baby.
Streuth poses with wacky, zany, irreverent and utterly pointless 'sixties icon, the late Mr Vivian Bonzo-Dog.
That was Krusty with Professor Streuth.
We are joined now in the studio by Archbishop Beard of Canterbury.
Dr Rowan Atkinson, Archbishop of Canterbury.
You're jacking it in, then?
Well, the Lord moves in mysterious ways, Jeremy, but I'm fucked if I know what He's up to this time. I mean, clearly, there are challenges in this modern world. And clearly they face anyone doing God's work. But fuck me, Jesus, I have had ten fucking years of warfare between on the one hand an army of angry, hissing gay vicars and vicaresses who just wanna be able to bumfuck and carpetmunch each other all around the high altar and on the other hand the Anglican cannibal bishops out in BongoBongo land who wanna burn gay clergy at the fucking stake. Or boil them up in the Headman's cauldron. I mean, Jeremy, what the fuck would you do? The Anglican church in the States is just a branch of Stonewall and now I'm expected to turn a blind eye to poofmarriage, here, in Britain, just as though the word of God was a fucking rap single, capable of endless re-mixing, or a fucking LibDem manifesto promise. For six days God laboured and on the Seventh he changed His fucking mind. All these bumbandits, all wanting to be normalised by Holy Sacrament, it's like God saying, Oh, no, My children, all that Ten Commandments shit, I didn't actually mean that, what I meant was Thou SHALT steal, thou shalt murder, thou shalt bear false witness, and thou most definitely shall covet thy neighbor's ass. I meant what I said yesterday but today I am wrestling with an unholy mess given unto me by the heathen bastard Brown, woe unto him, but quiet thanks, too, for he maketh even the abominable seem just and necessary, as long as he be spunneth as the Anti-Christ.
Now hold on. Are you saying, Archbishop, that this is all Gordon Snot's fault?
Well, he's one of them, isn't he? Woulda married a man if he could.
The last unelected prime minister,
Gordon Snot.
I am very busy, here in Fifeshire,
playing with myself.
It is the sol-you-shun. And the right thing for the country.
So, Archbishop, are you saying you haven't the stomach for the fight?
It's not a question of stomach; it's just that what with the Internet and skymadeupnewsandfilth and now the brownhatters demanding to be married, well, It's Sodom and fucking Gomorrah we're talking about here. Clearly, Jeremy, the last ten years have been trying for the worldwide Anglican community. So much so that I betcha my celestial homecoming that our brother in Christ, Pope Nazi, the Nonce-Protector-General, is creaming himself over there in the Vatican, rubbing his shriveled old nonceballs in glee.
Arbeit macht frei.
Zey vill not be married in mein church, ze dirty fuckers. Not in eine hunderd tousand ov years. God's army ov men in black haff all learned to sublimate ze nancyboy side ov zemselves into ze proper abuse of der kinder and haff no need to play hussband und frau mit one another, like zat Steven fucking Fry und his bumboy partner, mit whom he iss living in mortal fucking sin.
Bless.
Popular TeeVee personality and heterophobe
Stephen Fag, of Direct Line.
Before he turned into an elephant.
Und any bastard say different und I just snap my finger und Whoosh! is excommunicated bastard und going straight into Hell, along mit all ze childen vot makes ze false allegations against mein Holy Up-Ze-Arse Stormtroopers. Same sex marriage? Ze very idea, is fucking abomination.
And so it is.
-----------------------------------------------------------
THE FOOD SECTION “MY HAUTE CUISINE SECRET : THE LIQUID OXO CUBE”
MARC-PIERROT GOB
The Michelin Guide to restaurants has been around since 1920. Before that, it was a genial motorists’ guide for les Frogs - routes and maps, the locations of garages and breakdown services, handy maintenance tips, like the old AA handbook used to be.....
When I worked in a five-star hotel you made stock, in a big higher-than-a-man, free-standing, double-skinned, steam-heated stockpot; huge, it was. Monday mornings you’d throw in a sack of halved onions, browned on the range-top, a sack of carrots, a box of celery, a big tray of eggs, a big tin of tomato puree and the burnt bones of a couple of cows. And anything else beefy or lamby or chickeny that you had hanging around. Waste not, want not, when all else fails throw it in the stockpot and wring out whatever good-ness lies in this old bone.
After a day or so, via the tap at the bottom, you could fill a jug or a pan with the most potent and beautifully clear stock imagin-able. Some of it would go in the walk-in fridge to set as consommé gelée, some of it would make soups, some of it would make a basic brown sauce to sit in a bain marie and form the basis of all sub-sequent brown sauces, bolognese, chasseur, Rossini and so on; some of it would be added to thickened roasting-pan juices for gravy.
The stockpot was never turned off, we just kept it topped up with water and fed it more beef bones as they appeared; wherever, these days, we use a stock cube, we, then, drew off a pint of beef stock from the stockpot. Sunday nights the kitchen porter would climb up a side-ladder and into the stockpot - the liquor all having been drawn off and the steam shut off - and empty the mother with a shovel.
There was a pair, actually, of these monsterpots and the other one was for a vegetable stock - celery, leeks, carrots, onions, turnips, parsley and all the trimmings from the legumier’s table - stalks, leaves, pods, skins. This was ready in an hour or so and was used mainly for vegetable soups. Sometimes the secondary stock pot would be brought to the boil with nothing but water and a dozen or two prime brown lobsters flung-in, to scream and turn pink. Fish stock was made more or less to order, skins and bones, onion and bayleaf, a dash of white wine. The idea of using a stock cube never entered anyone’s head.
And then Harold Wilson’s govament, friend to the working class, brought in the Selective Employment Tax, which taxed employment in service industries and hotel and catering staff numbers were slashed - not, as we now so stupidly say, decimated, hoping that we mean nearly wiped out but actually meaning cut by only ten per cent - and kitchen brigades were more than halved, dining room staff, too, were sent down the road, muttering.
Before SET commis chefs and commis waiters would spend the first part of their (split) shifts fine-chopping parlsey into green dust, or with wickedly sharp knives slicing toast through the centre and toasting the exposed surfaces to make that wafer-thin, curly Melba toast which adorned every table, and in curling pounds and pounds of butter into neat, corrugated, little rolls which would sit in gleaming, stainless steel buckets of iced water before being placed on the dining tables. In the kitchen proper, on the fish table, determined and competitive young improvers would carve boxes of lemons into fantastical shapes to adorn grilled salmons and halibuts, cucumbers would be cleverly scored lengthwise with a neat little canal knife, tomatoes cut in alternating short diagonals around their centre; all, then, as now, was adornment. In the larder, wielding saws and cleavers and boning knives, chefs would bone and roll and shape legs and crowns of lamb, fillet chicken breasts for a score of chicken dishes, skin and prepare Dover Soles for poaching or grilling or deep-frying; saw and chop and slice beef sirloins into T-bone and fillet and entrecote steaks; in various side-pantries and in the Still-room - so-called because Stills manufactured the gleaming stainless steel boilers and steamers
and espresso machines which fed the silver tea and coffee pots - waiters would daily finely chop capers and hard-boiled eggs and call on the kitchen staff for mayonnaise with which to combine eggy-bitterness into Tartare Sauce; Sauce Marie Rose was made daily for the newly popular Prawn Cocktail - or Crevettes Marie Rose, as it was known then. Cutlery and crockery and glass were all hand burnished and the hotel housekeepers had starched and ironed the linen table cloths and napkins. The grand hotel was like the country house, labour was plentiful, cheap and by today’s standards very highly skilled. Overnight, Wilson’s taxation policy changed all that.
Overnight, standards fell through the floor, the hotel trade, like so much else, was ruined, the Grand Central became Heartbreak Hotel, the proper people simply weren’t there to do the jobs properly, so they stopped being done properly; this heralded the arrival and the colonisation of cuisine by multi-national food-bandits like Knorr. It’s wrong to call them food-bandits, really, because in my opinion they don’t make food, they package chem-icals; Knorr food products all seem to consist of salt, emulsifiers, monosodium glutomate and the dehydrated sweepings-up from the slaughterhouse floor; their soups, stocks, sauces and flavourings are shit. But hotel managers had to do what they had to do, the stockpots were turned off because there wasn’t the power to man them and powders took their place, neat little wrapped butter portions replaced the hand-curled dishfuls; frozen and dried vegetables replaced those bought daily by the head chef himself in the Belfast market just around the corner, frozen fish poured in from Youngs and other maritime vandals, Duck à l'Orange from boil-in-the-fucking-bag manufacturers, Alveston Kitchens of, I think, Stratford upon Avon; you simply drop our product, still in its plastic bag, into boiling water for fifteen minutes and Voila! shite à la mode.
After the SET blitz I worked in a seaside hotel in Ballycastle under a once-famous European master chef, Henri de Tour; he was past his best, in his late sixties and like every senior chef I ever knew he was a pisshead. One of my tasks was to slip out up the road to an offy and buy him his daily half-bottle of vodka, the management having instructed the bar staff not to serve him. Anyway, my abiding memory of Henri is wonderful. He was a small man and he wore this great big chef’s hat, starched to stand upright on his head, about eighteen inches high, I think he glued it on, for it never fell off, despite his uncertain deportment, and I can picture him now, stood over a large dustbin and with deft strokes of his filleting knife slicing open dozens of bags of the then-novel Surprise! Freeze-Dried Green Beans and philosophically - for he knew he would be dismissed - watching them cascade drily into the bin. They were part of a management-ordered consignment of labour-free foods which also included Maggi and Knorr dried soups and stocks; Henri wouldn’t use them and nor, ever after, have I. The soups and the stocks were, with equal solemnity, consigned to the bin and soon Henri - and I - were gone.
Belfast’s Grand Central Hotel declined and became a barracks for those troops set wastefully against Marty Kneecaps and his Torturing Freedom Fighters, the site is now a shopping experience of some sort, although hard-faced, goon taxi drivers congregate, still, around Royal Avenue, longing for their recent glory days as racketeers and extortionists. An establishment, renowned for over seventy years for the excellence of its service became, like British ships and engineering and steel, a notch on the cost-cutter’s gun.
But M-P Gob and the Michelin men; thereby hangs a tale. Gob was one of the early celebrity chef-restaurateurs employing, in his day, many of teevee’s most repulsive, including the fuckwit Blumenthal, of bacon-and-egg-flavoured ice-cream fame. Marky was one of the first and one of the youngest to win two or was it three Michelin stars and so up-his-own-arse did he grow that anyone daring to complain about his food was confronted by the angry, sweating chef himself, raging at them and throwing them out of his gaff; how fucking dare they criticise his raw lambs kidneys on a bed of quick sautéed dandelion leaves? Man was and remains an
utter cunt. Just the sort of character beloved of the Michelin men. And he was the sort of cunt beloved also by that most irrelevant of creatures, the gossipy restaurant critic, and with the imprimatur of some worthless piece of shit like AA Gill, Gob’s pretentious greasy spoons were all fully booked; rich foodies wetting themselves as they stood in line at his door, some hoping, maybe, like some deranged, overweight self-flagellant, for a good public bollocking from the young maestro himself. No Business like Showbusiness.
The Michelin business is a bit like the Baftas and the Oscars, it shouldn’t mean anything but it does and every braying, illiterate celebrity cook yearns to have a Michelin star. Like the grizzly Meryl Streep with her Oscars, some cooks are just always going to win and retain a Michelin star and the gullible will flock to eat beneath it, as they flock to see Streep playing Whisky Maggie - because the industry tells them to. Gob is far too dirty and unwholesome-looking for your correspondent, who is funny about such things as hand washing and cross contamination. I share Christopher Walken’s incredulity at the fact that otherwise sensible people will let complete strangers, whom they cannot even see, handle their food and Gob’s contempt for his customers seems so ingrained and bloated that it is probably de rigeur in his kitchens for him to shove his manky fingers - as well as his head - up his arse. I am sure that the explosion in ItchyBums, the epidemic of Irritable Bowel Syndrome which started in the eighties is due to filthy conceited bastards like Marc-Pierrot Gob and his imitators as they peddled eating-out as a form of rough sex.
A former inspecteur from Michelin spilled the beans a few years back, revealing that the firm only employs a handful of insp-ectors to cover the whole of Europe and, like the British Health and Safety Standards board, is laughably incapable of monitoring even the establisments to which it has awarded stars, much less the establishments which - in not recognising - it has sent to foody-purdah.
I don’t know if any of the Arabian-owned grand hotels cling, still, to freshly-made Tartare Sauce, to double-skinned, steam-pow-ered stockpots but I doubt it. And hotels, anyway, are no longer the foodies’ Mecca. It is the celebrity cook who makes the running now, festooned not just with Michelin stars but a teevee series, too. Mee-shell or Al-bare, one of those fucking intolerable Roux brothers was on recently, ohh-la-la-ing all over the place about Alsatian Apple Pie or Roast Pork or some such. And, as though he was Margaret Thatcheur, ‘e was banging on about ‘Ow-You-Say, le threeft an’ le ‘ard work, and, and I’m not making this up, about ‘Ow very sad eet all ess, Ooh-la-fucking-la, zat we are employing so many eemigrant in ze Breetish kitchen, the cheeky, fucking Frog bastard. Since when have we given a fuck about what some jumped-up Frog cook thinks about anything? Stick to your snails, m’sieu, and your bouilla-fucking-baisse.
But it’s not just him. Look at the whining little shit and seedy shoplifting poltroon, Wobble-Thompson, look at the utterly, incurably self-worshipping Jamie Wotsit; the two, beardy gay bikers; the list is endless and constantly updated as another brain-dead celebrity cook or baker explodes onto the screen of public consciousness.
Once, in Britain, if we celebrated people at all, we celebrated worthies, unassuming non-millionaire sportspersons like Roger Bannister and Duncan Edwards, inventors, like Whittle, designers like Issigonis; proper musicians and proper actors, Julian Bream, Laurence Olivier. Now, here in Ruin, on page and screen, we sanctify and mimic dirty, greasy cooks.
Marc-Pierrot Gob’s typically bombastic advertisements for the Knorr semi-liquid Stock Cube are a milestone on Ruin’s Highway. Like himself, they are fucking rubbish; salty, dark and overwhelming of any native goodness. Don’t bother with them. I tried one recently, the rest are going in the special Ruinbin
That was Krusty with Professor Streuth.
We are joined now in the studio by Archbishop Beard of Canterbury.
Dr Rowan Atkinson, Archbishop of Canterbury.
You're jacking it in, then?
Well, the Lord moves in mysterious ways, Jeremy, but I'm fucked if I know what He's up to this time. I mean, clearly, there are challenges in this modern world. And clearly they face anyone doing God's work. But fuck me, Jesus, I have had ten fucking years of warfare between on the one hand an army of angry, hissing gay vicars and vicaresses who just wanna be able to bumfuck and carpetmunch each other all around the high altar and on the other hand the Anglican cannibal bishops out in BongoBongo land who wanna burn gay clergy at the fucking stake. Or boil them up in the Headman's cauldron. I mean, Jeremy, what the fuck would you do? The Anglican church in the States is just a branch of Stonewall and now I'm expected to turn a blind eye to poofmarriage, here, in Britain, just as though the word of God was a fucking rap single, capable of endless re-mixing, or a fucking LibDem manifesto promise. For six days God laboured and on the Seventh he changed His fucking mind. All these bumbandits, all wanting to be normalised by Holy Sacrament, it's like God saying, Oh, no, My children, all that Ten Commandments shit, I didn't actually mean that, what I meant was Thou SHALT steal, thou shalt murder, thou shalt bear false witness, and thou most definitely shall covet thy neighbor's ass. I meant what I said yesterday but today I am wrestling with an unholy mess given unto me by the heathen bastard Brown, woe unto him, but quiet thanks, too, for he maketh even the abominable seem just and necessary, as long as he be spunneth as the Anti-Christ.
Well, he's one of them, isn't he? Woulda married a man if he could.
The last unelected prime minister,
Gordon Snot.
I am very busy, here in Fifeshire,
playing with myself.
It is the sol-you-shun. And the right thing for the country.
So, Archbishop, are you saying you haven't the stomach for the fight?
It's not a question of stomach; it's just that what with the Internet and skymadeupnewsandfilth and now the brownhatters demanding to be married, well, It's Sodom and fucking Gomorrah we're talking about here. Clearly, Jeremy, the last ten years have been trying for the worldwide Anglican community. So much so that I betcha my celestial homecoming that our brother in Christ, Pope Nazi, the Nonce-Protector-General, is creaming himself over there in the Vatican, rubbing his shriveled old nonceballs in glee.
Arbeit macht frei.
Zey vill not be married in mein church, ze dirty fuckers. Not in eine hunderd tousand ov years. God's army ov men in black haff all learned to sublimate ze nancyboy side ov zemselves into ze proper abuse of der kinder and haff no need to play hussband und frau mit one another, like zat Steven fucking Fry und his bumboy partner, mit whom he iss living in mortal fucking sin.
Bless.
Popular TeeVee personality and heterophobe
Stephen Fag, of Direct Line.
Before he turned into an elephant.
Und any bastard say different und I just snap my finger und Whoosh! is excommunicated bastard und going straight into Hell, along mit all ze childen vot makes ze false allegations against mein Holy Up-Ze-Arse Stormtroopers. Same sex marriage? Ze very idea, is fucking abomination.
And so it is.
-----------------------------------------------------------
THE FOOD SECTION “MY HAUTE CUISINE SECRET : THE LIQUID OXO CUBE”
MARC-PIERROT GOB
The Michelin Guide to restaurants has been around since 1920. Before that, it was a genial motorists’ guide for les Frogs - routes and maps, the locations of garages and breakdown services, handy maintenance tips, like the old AA handbook used to be.....
When I worked in a five-star hotel you made stock, in a big higher-than-a-man, free-standing, double-skinned, steam-heated stockpot; huge, it was. Monday mornings you’d throw in a sack of halved onions, browned on the range-top, a sack of carrots, a box of celery, a big tray of eggs, a big tin of tomato puree and the burnt bones of a couple of cows. And anything else beefy or lamby or chickeny that you had hanging around. Waste not, want not, when all else fails throw it in the stockpot and wring out whatever good-ness lies in this old bone.
After a day or so, via the tap at the bottom, you could fill a jug or a pan with the most potent and beautifully clear stock imagin-able. Some of it would go in the walk-in fridge to set as consommé gelée, some of it would make soups, some of it would make a basic brown sauce to sit in a bain marie and form the basis of all sub-sequent brown sauces, bolognese, chasseur, Rossini and so on; some of it would be added to thickened roasting-pan juices for gravy.
The stockpot was never turned off, we just kept it topped up with water and fed it more beef bones as they appeared; wherever, these days, we use a stock cube, we, then, drew off a pint of beef stock from the stockpot. Sunday nights the kitchen porter would climb up a side-ladder and into the stockpot - the liquor all having been drawn off and the steam shut off - and empty the mother with a shovel.
There was a pair, actually, of these monsterpots and the other one was for a vegetable stock - celery, leeks, carrots, onions, turnips, parsley and all the trimmings from the legumier’s table - stalks, leaves, pods, skins. This was ready in an hour or so and was used mainly for vegetable soups. Sometimes the secondary stock pot would be brought to the boil with nothing but water and a dozen or two prime brown lobsters flung-in, to scream and turn pink. Fish stock was made more or less to order, skins and bones, onion and bayleaf, a dash of white wine. The idea of using a stock cube never entered anyone’s head.
And then Harold Wilson’s govament, friend to the working class, brought in the Selective Employment Tax, which taxed employment in service industries and hotel and catering staff numbers were slashed - not, as we now so stupidly say, decimated, hoping that we mean nearly wiped out but actually meaning cut by only ten per cent - and kitchen brigades were more than halved, dining room staff, too, were sent down the road, muttering.
Before SET commis chefs and commis waiters would spend the first part of their (split) shifts fine-chopping parlsey into green dust, or with wickedly sharp knives slicing toast through the centre and toasting the exposed surfaces to make that wafer-thin, curly Melba toast which adorned every table, and in curling pounds and pounds of butter into neat, corrugated, little rolls which would sit in gleaming, stainless steel buckets of iced water before being placed on the dining tables. In the kitchen proper, on the fish table, determined and competitive young improvers would carve boxes of lemons into fantastical shapes to adorn grilled salmons and halibuts, cucumbers would be cleverly scored lengthwise with a neat little canal knife, tomatoes cut in alternating short diagonals around their centre; all, then, as now, was adornment. In the larder, wielding saws and cleavers and boning knives, chefs would bone and roll and shape legs and crowns of lamb, fillet chicken breasts for a score of chicken dishes, skin and prepare Dover Soles for poaching or grilling or deep-frying; saw and chop and slice beef sirloins into T-bone and fillet and entrecote steaks; in various side-pantries and in the Still-room - so-called because Stills manufactured the gleaming stainless steel boilers and steamers
and espresso machines which fed the silver tea and coffee pots - waiters would daily finely chop capers and hard-boiled eggs and call on the kitchen staff for mayonnaise with which to combine eggy-bitterness into Tartare Sauce; Sauce Marie Rose was made daily for the newly popular Prawn Cocktail - or Crevettes Marie Rose, as it was known then. Cutlery and crockery and glass were all hand burnished and the hotel housekeepers had starched and ironed the linen table cloths and napkins. The grand hotel was like the country house, labour was plentiful, cheap and by today’s standards very highly skilled. Overnight, Wilson’s taxation policy changed all that.
Overnight, standards fell through the floor, the hotel trade, like so much else, was ruined, the Grand Central became Heartbreak Hotel, the proper people simply weren’t there to do the jobs properly, so they stopped being done properly; this heralded the arrival and the colonisation of cuisine by multi-national food-bandits like Knorr. It’s wrong to call them food-bandits, really, because in my opinion they don’t make food, they package chem-icals; Knorr food products all seem to consist of salt, emulsifiers, monosodium glutomate and the dehydrated sweepings-up from the slaughterhouse floor; their soups, stocks, sauces and flavourings are shit. But hotel managers had to do what they had to do, the stockpots were turned off because there wasn’t the power to man them and powders took their place, neat little wrapped butter portions replaced the hand-curled dishfuls; frozen and dried vegetables replaced those bought daily by the head chef himself in the Belfast market just around the corner, frozen fish poured in from Youngs and other maritime vandals, Duck à l'Orange from boil-in-the-fucking-bag manufacturers, Alveston Kitchens of, I think, Stratford upon Avon; you simply drop our product, still in its plastic bag, into boiling water for fifteen minutes and Voila! shite à la mode.
After the SET blitz I worked in a seaside hotel in Ballycastle under a once-famous European master chef, Henri de Tour; he was past his best, in his late sixties and like every senior chef I ever knew he was a pisshead. One of my tasks was to slip out up the road to an offy and buy him his daily half-bottle of vodka, the management having instructed the bar staff not to serve him. Anyway, my abiding memory of Henri is wonderful. He was a small man and he wore this great big chef’s hat, starched to stand upright on his head, about eighteen inches high, I think he glued it on, for it never fell off, despite his uncertain deportment, and I can picture him now, stood over a large dustbin and with deft strokes of his filleting knife slicing open dozens of bags of the then-novel Surprise! Freeze-Dried Green Beans and philosophically - for he knew he would be dismissed - watching them cascade drily into the bin. They were part of a management-ordered consignment of labour-free foods which also included Maggi and Knorr dried soups and stocks; Henri wouldn’t use them and nor, ever after, have I. The soups and the stocks were, with equal solemnity, consigned to the bin and soon Henri - and I - were gone.
Belfast’s Grand Central Hotel declined and became a barracks for those troops set wastefully against Marty Kneecaps and his Torturing Freedom Fighters, the site is now a shopping experience of some sort, although hard-faced, goon taxi drivers congregate, still, around Royal Avenue, longing for their recent glory days as racketeers and extortionists. An establishment, renowned for over seventy years for the excellence of its service became, like British ships and engineering and steel, a notch on the cost-cutter’s gun.
But M-P Gob and the Michelin men; thereby hangs a tale. Gob was one of the early celebrity chef-restaurateurs employing, in his day, many of teevee’s most repulsive, including the fuckwit Blumenthal, of bacon-and-egg-flavoured ice-cream fame. Marky was one of the first and one of the youngest to win two or was it three Michelin stars and so up-his-own-arse did he grow that anyone daring to complain about his food was confronted by the angry, sweating chef himself, raging at them and throwing them out of his gaff; how fucking dare they criticise his raw lambs kidneys on a bed of quick sautéed dandelion leaves? Man was and remains an
utter cunt. Just the sort of character beloved of the Michelin men. And he was the sort of cunt beloved also by that most irrelevant of creatures, the gossipy restaurant critic, and with the imprimatur of some worthless piece of shit like AA Gill, Gob’s pretentious greasy spoons were all fully booked; rich foodies wetting themselves as they stood in line at his door, some hoping, maybe, like some deranged, overweight self-flagellant, for a good public bollocking from the young maestro himself. No Business like Showbusiness.
The Michelin business is a bit like the Baftas and the Oscars, it shouldn’t mean anything but it does and every braying, illiterate celebrity cook yearns to have a Michelin star. Like the grizzly Meryl Streep with her Oscars, some cooks are just always going to win and retain a Michelin star and the gullible will flock to eat beneath it, as they flock to see Streep playing Whisky Maggie - because the industry tells them to. Gob is far too dirty and unwholesome-looking for your correspondent, who is funny about such things as hand washing and cross contamination. I share Christopher Walken’s incredulity at the fact that otherwise sensible people will let complete strangers, whom they cannot even see, handle their food and Gob’s contempt for his customers seems so ingrained and bloated that it is probably de rigeur in his kitchens for him to shove his manky fingers - as well as his head - up his arse. I am sure that the explosion in ItchyBums, the epidemic of Irritable Bowel Syndrome which started in the eighties is due to filthy conceited bastards like Marc-Pierrot Gob and his imitators as they peddled eating-out as a form of rough sex.
A former inspecteur from Michelin spilled the beans a few years back, revealing that the firm only employs a handful of insp-ectors to cover the whole of Europe and, like the British Health and Safety Standards board, is laughably incapable of monitoring even the establisments to which it has awarded stars, much less the establishments which - in not recognising - it has sent to foody-purdah.
I don’t know if any of the Arabian-owned grand hotels cling, still, to freshly-made Tartare Sauce, to double-skinned, steam-pow-ered stockpots but I doubt it. And hotels, anyway, are no longer the foodies’ Mecca. It is the celebrity cook who makes the running now, festooned not just with Michelin stars but a teevee series, too. Mee-shell or Al-bare, one of those fucking intolerable Roux brothers was on recently, ohh-la-la-ing all over the place about Alsatian Apple Pie or Roast Pork or some such. And, as though he was Margaret Thatcheur, ‘e was banging on about ‘Ow-You-Say, le threeft an’ le ‘ard work, and, and I’m not making this up, about ‘Ow very sad eet all ess, Ooh-la-fucking-la, zat we are employing so many eemigrant in ze Breetish kitchen, the cheeky, fucking Frog bastard. Since when have we given a fuck about what some jumped-up Frog cook thinks about anything? Stick to your snails, m’sieu, and your bouilla-fucking-baisse.
But it’s not just him. Look at the whining little shit and seedy shoplifting poltroon, Wobble-Thompson, look at the utterly, incurably self-worshipping Jamie Wotsit; the two, beardy gay bikers; the list is endless and constantly updated as another brain-dead celebrity cook or baker explodes onto the screen of public consciousness.
Once, in Britain, if we celebrated people at all, we celebrated worthies, unassuming non-millionaire sportspersons like Roger Bannister and Duncan Edwards, inventors, like Whittle, designers like Issigonis; proper musicians and proper actors, Julian Bream, Laurence Olivier. Now, here in Ruin, on page and screen, we sanctify and mimic dirty, greasy cooks.
Marc-Pierrot Gob’s typically bombastic advertisements for the Knorr semi-liquid Stock Cube are a milestone on Ruin’s Highway. Like himself, they are fucking rubbish; salty, dark and overwhelming of any native goodness. Don’t bother with them. I tried one recently, the rest are going in the special Ruinbin
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FROM THE SUNS ARCHIVE.
A YOUNG POLISH PLUMBER'S CHRISTMAS.
A FEAST OF JAMIE
Try and have right good fucking English Christmas round here. Watch Jamie Bloke on telly and copy everything just right. For soup is surprise a la Jamie. Go in garden pull up handful of weeds from ground, is ok leave some dirt on weeds, is organic soup, innit, go back in house and kick oven for good luck and get half kilo of garlic and smash up with dirty old brick. Have a break and pick nose for a minute, tell cockney joke about My Old Mum.
Mmmm, smell all that lovely garlic. And then get some red hot chilli and smash with brick, not too much, just enough. And then get ten pounds per litre olive oil off Sainsbury shop and pour some in jug. Assemble all ingredients and season all up with half pound of cayenne pepper and half pound of vindaloo curry powder off Sainsburys. Take weeds and oil and garlic and chilli and anything else you got lying about and throw in machine and give good fucking blitzing for minute or two till is right sloppy - everything, weeds, garlic, oil and curry powder is one delicious and appetising grey-green mixture. Wipe finger on arse of jeans and stick in soup. Mmmm, is fucking miasma of friendly flavour and texture, 'Strewth, fair leaps up from bowl and tickle under fucking chin, eh.? Pour in bowls and serve cold with handful of weed ripped up and thrown on top. Mmmm, is delicious and is guarantee family will go mad for it. Can make six month in advance and store in garage with coal. Season to taste.
Mmmm, smell all that lovely garlic. And then get some red hot chilli and smash with brick, not too much, just enough. And then get ten pounds per litre olive oil off Sainsbury shop and pour some in jug. Assemble all ingredients and season all up with half pound of cayenne pepper and half pound of vindaloo curry powder off Sainsburys. Take weeds and oil and garlic and chilli and anything else you got lying about and throw in machine and give good fucking blitzing for minute or two till is right sloppy - everything, weeds, garlic, oil and curry powder is one delicious and appetising grey-green mixture. Wipe finger on arse of jeans and stick in soup. Mmmm, is fucking miasma of friendly flavour and texture, 'Strewth, fair leaps up from bowl and tickle under fucking chin, eh.? Pour in bowls and serve cold with handful of weed ripped up and thrown on top. Mmmm, is delicious and is guarantee family will go mad for it. Can make six month in advance and store in garage with coal. Season to taste.
Next up is turkey. Jamie Bloke says go down local turkey farm and kill bastard with own hands. Is right organic. Meaningful, like in fucking Guardian. First chase after turkey in mud and shit and grab bastard by legs. Mrs get one end and stan get other end and twist like fuck, pulling like tug of war, knack is to twist and pull just right and snap turkey neck. Often bastard break free and bite and fucking squawk and shit and run around and is back to square peg one. Stanislav make rugby tackle on fucking turkey and bastard still won’t stop still and get killed. Go back in van and get biggest in set of Stilson wrench and chase turkey bastard all around, land blow on bird now and again but often is just fall on arse in mud and turkey shit. Go back in van and start up engine.
Not much damage in the end, is just bumper and headlight and radiator all smash up but turkey is good and fucking dead, crush between van and wall; not bite no other bastard. Pay farmer hundred quid for turkey and hundred quid for wall and hundred quid for field all ploughed-up and hundred quid for not phone cops and hundred quid for RSPCA. Fuck me, thought plumbers was bad. But five hundred quid for smelly old turkey about ten years old and made from leather and most is all fucking claws and feathers and shit. And have to pay cousin small fortune to fix up van with iffy parts off eBay. Still, organic make better citizen, like Mr Blunkett wants. Only not take turn with Mr Hoggart off Guardian and fuck other bloke Mrs and get kid. Too fucking organic for most folk.
Anyway, get turkey up on table and splash liberally with white spirit off Sainsbury or petrol from Sainsbury garage will do if not got any spirit and set on fire until feathers is all burn off. Is best open windows. If no spirit and no gas is best cover with grated firelighter and light from other room . No need for too fussy. Is Christmas and feather, like run out of money, is Xmas custom. Rub both hand vigourously down jeans and slap dead turkey on breast and stroke, going, mmmm just look at that, mmmm, just look at that. Only lightly season - put few handful of black pepper and couple of kilo of rock salt up turkey jacksie and pound or two of ripped up weeds from garden, hedge clippings from summer will do, and few tube of squeeze garlic paste off Sainsburys. Not bother with pull insides out. All adds to great organic flavour.
Now is best part. Go in garden with wheelbarrow. If poor and not got garden, never mind, go down park, is open at Christmas, full of wino and incognito crack prostitute from Cabinet and children shoot and stab each other but never mind, is Christmas, eh, in prosperous, cautious, prudent Britain. Anyway, make plenty shovel of dirt in barrow and mix in smooth paste with couple of gallon of water from pond and season with several kilo of garlic smash with brick and few jar of strawberry jam from Sainsburys. Is good friends, garlic and strawberry, reassures Jamie. Make delicious mix of flavour on top of dead turkey.
Go back in house and prepare turkey for oven by putting in big fuck off dish and pour over tasty and flavoursome mud crust . Get brother-in-law, Waldemar, away from Christmas with Clarkson Video - Oh, this car go so fast my hair catch fucking fire, Oh, this car so slow get overtake by fucking glacier; Oh, Birmingham is shithole; Oh, you might think I am fat useless repetitive overpaid BBC cunt. But you’d be wrong. And so on - to help shove in oven, kick door with foot and weld-up tight with gear fron van and roast at five hundred Celsius, Gas Mark 20, for several days. Maybe a week. Maybe fortnight. Remove when cooked.
Unfortunately, family say not eating that shit, Stan. You can be organic as fuck, we is off down McDonald, get decent, honest fucking mechanically reclaim turkey burger made of eyeball, foreskin, arsehole, beak and fucking feather and come with salty, powdered chip with large Coke and apple pie to incinerate fucking gob, complete with have nice day greeting off poor fucking miserable pimply bastard wish he was fucking dead, roasting in Hell, rather than togged-up in stripey shirt and cap on head. Even with howling smelly regiment of spoiled little bastards all having birthday party and poor old cripple mopping fucking floor McDonald is better. Fuck this organic shit. Is not fit for decent person. Only for cockney ponce on fucking TV
Must admit Turkey en croute with dock leaf and Bisto sorbet not best ever family Christmas dinner. Maybe next year take advice from fish and chip bloke in Cornwall. Dig big fucking hole in garden, throw in firelighter and stick and coal and roast alive some poor fucking crab and lobster and eat with fingers. Dance about singing I do like to be beside the seaside
Always assume of course that there is fucking Christmas next year and not all in fucking NewLabour workhouse, nation of fucking homeless, vagrant dossers, line up for free soup off Salvation Army U Like. Economic miracle, Phase 2.
je touch le chapeau a M le Suisse Bob
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