Sell the wife at Smithfield instead of divorcing her

IF YOU WISH to see the meat market at London’s Smithfield in action, either you must go to bed very late or wake up quite early, because the market is only open between 2 am and 10 am. This April, we visited it at about 1.30 in the afternoon, and there was little to see and there was hardly any odour in the air.

Back in October 2017, I walked from Clerkenwell to Smithfield, and wrote about it in a blog I published (https://londonadam.travellerspoint.com/44/). Here is what I wrote about the meat market:

At Peters Lane, Cowcross street turns southward towards to meet St Johns Street, which commences at the north side of Smithfield Market, an indoor wholesale meat marketplace. Smithfield’s central Grand Avenue is entered through an archway flanked by two heraldic dragons and a pair of stone sculptures. The Avenue runs beneath a high roof supported by ornate painted ironwork arches. Side aisles are lined with the meat dealers’ stalls and glass-covered display cabinets. In 1852, London’s livestock market was moved from Smithfield to Copenhagen Fields in Islington (off Caledonian Road, where the Caledonian Park is now located). This cleared the area for the construction of the present meat market, which was completed by 1868. Constructed in an era before refrigerators were used, the market was designed to keep out the sun and to take advantages of prevailing breezes.

I continued as follows:

In mediaeval times, Smithfield had a bad reputation. It was known for criminal activity, violence, and public executions. In the early 19th century, when obtaining divorce was difficult, men brought their unwanted wives to Smithfield to sell them, then a legal way of ending a marriage (see: “Meat, Commerce and the City: The London Food Market, 1800–1855”, by RS Metcalfe, publ. 2015).

In relation to disposing of a spouse, I quoted the following verse by an unknown author quoted in “Modern Street Ballads”, by John Ashton (published 1888):

“He married Jane Carter,

No damsel look’d smarter;

But he caught a tartar,

John Hobbs, John Hobbs;

Yes, he caught a tartar, John Hobbs.

He tied a rope to her, John Hobbs, John Hobbs;

He tied a rope to her, John Hobbs!

To ‘scape from hot water,

To Smithfield he brought her;

But nobody bought her …”

What I did not mention in my 2017 piece is that John Ashton noted in his book:

Wives at the market did not fetch good prices; the highest I know of, is recorded in The Times, September 19, 1797: “An hostler’s wife, in the country, lately fetched twenty-five guineas.” But this was extravagance, as, with the exception of a man who exchanged his wife for an ox, which he sold for six guineas, the next highest quotation is three and a half guineas; but this rapidly dwindled down to shillings, and even pence. In 1881, a wife was sold at Sheffield for a quart of beer; in 1862, another was purchased at Selby Market Cross for a pint; and the South Wales Daily News, May 2, 1882, tells us that one was parted with for a glass of ale. Sometimes they were unsaleable …”

Fascinating, but horrific when you think about it. In any case, you will be pleased to know that although I visited Smithfield with my wife a few days ago, I had no intention of selling her! Instead, we enjoyed some liquid refreshment in the nearby branch of the Pret A Manger café chain.

Biryani in Bangalore, Calicut, and Surat

SO FAR – THAT is since January 1994, the very best biryani I have eaten was at Paragon in Calicut (Kerala) in 2006. It was a Moplah recipe – Arabic and Indian flavours combined most harmoniously. Last December, I enjoyed an almost as good biryani in the restaurant of the Sifat International Hotel in Surat (Gujarat).

Biryani at Bheema’s

When in Bangalore, where we find ourselves often, we like to visit Bheema’s restaurant on Church Street. It serves Andhra-style cuisine. I have never been disappointed with the biryani dishes served there. Although not as supremely superb as the two biryanis I have mentioned already, Bheema’s delicious biryanis are way above average – in my humble opinion.

A Turkish delight in London’s Dalston

KINGSLAND ROAD AND nearby in London’s Dalston area is rich in restaurants and other eateries serving Turkish food. Early in this century, “Time Out” magazine rated the Mangal Ocakbasi (now called ‘Mangal 1’) restaurant at number 10 Arcola Street as being one of London’s best Turkish restaurants. For those who do not know, ‘ocakbasi’ means ‘fireside’ and ‘mangal’ means ‘barbecue’ or ‘grill’. When we first went to Mangal, and for many years after that, there were tables alongside the long rectangular pit filled hot charcoal, upon which meat and vegetables are grilled. Recently, the restaurant has been redesigned and the grilling area is no longer alongside the tables.

Lokma

The meat served is top quality. It seems far better than that served in the many other Turkish restaurants we have tried in London. Although there is a wide variety of main courses on offer, the range of ‘starter’ dishes on the menu is not as great as at some other restaurants. If it is starters and meze that you are after, the nearby Umut 2000 (on Crossway) is worth visiting. However, their main meat dishes are not nearly as tasty as those at Mangal in Arcola Street. Having said that, Mangal does serve an excellent freshly grilled aubergine hors d’oeuvre. Desserts are not available, but there are plenty of places along Kingsland Road offering a wide range of very sweet but tasty confectionery.

Our favourite dishes at Mangal are lokma, which is grilled rolled fillet of lamb, and yorgutlu Adana, which is pieces of semi-spicy Adana kebab in a yogurt and tomato sauce with lumps of Turkish bread. The lokma and other kebab dishes are served with generous quantities of fresh mixed salad containing many ingredients. As for drinks, you can bring your own alcohol or buy it from the restaurant. If I order a drink apart from water, I always go for Şalgam, which is a purple-coloured drink containing fermented turnip. This has a deliciously sour taste.

We first ate at Mangal in the early 2000s, when we attended a play in which one of my dental patients was acting. The theatre, The Arcola, was across the road from the restaurant, but has now shifted to larger premises on nearby Ashwin Street (close to Dalston Junction station). We loved the food at Mangal from the very first bite. We have been eating there occasionally ever since then, and the quality of the food has never once faltered. We have been there so often that the older members of its staff recognise us, welcome us warmly, and remember what we like eating. Even though this Turkish delight, frequently patronised by the artists Gilbert and George, is far from where we live in Kensington, it is well worth ‘trekking’ across London to get there.

More than meets the eye on the moor

FROM OUTSIDE IT looked like a ‘bog standard’ pub on Dartmoor. The kind of pub in which you would expect to find weary walkers and cyclists, all dressed in appropriate outdoor gear splattered with mud. The sort of place where the customers wear walking boots and thick woolly socks that reach halfway up their calves. An old-fashioned country pub with a roaring open fire. You know the kind of place, quaintly decorated with folks objects such as horse brasses, copper bed pans, Toby jugs and so on. A pub where you would find sandwiches and chips as the only solid fare. However, despite looking like the kind of hostelry just described, The Dartmoor Inn Merrivale is  quite a different ‘kettle of fish’.

On stepping through its entrance door, the first thing you will notice is a large wooden butcher’s slap piled with raw steaks of various kinds and cuts: sirloin, rumps, chateaubriand, rib eyes, huge tomahawks, and other tasty chunks of meat. Behind this in what was formerly a fire place, there is a sophisticated charcoal grill for cooking these meaty offerings. A chef coats the meat with sprinkling of salt, oil, and herbs before grilling it. 

The pub’s decor is far from traditional.  It is simply decorated in a contemporary style with a few good artworks on the walls. The pub is owned by a local organic farm, which also has shops in Marlborough, Totnes, Tavistock, and London (in Selfridges Food Hall).

For our midday meal, we ordered a Ploughman’s Lunch contains amongst other things excellent cheddar and locally made ham, and a plate of superb barely cooked roast beef. The food could not be faulted. The staff were enthusiastic about food and were very attentive.

The Dartmoor Inn has reasonably priced rooms for overnight stays. We hope to return, spend the night, and sample the excellent looking steaks on offer.

Just as it is unfair to judge a book by its cover, one should not rate a pub by its external appearance.

Foot and mouth

Wales 1 SMALL

Before she died in 2012, we used to make annual visits to a dear friend, whom I had known since my childhood, in South Wales. She used to live in London, but when she retired, she moved to a village in the Brecon Beacons, near the River Usk. We stayed in her cottage but were encouraged to leave her in peace from after breakfast until about four in the afternoon. We did not mind this because there is plenty to explore in the area and often the weather was good at the times of the year that we visited her.

In 2001, disaster hit Wales in the form of a vicious outbreak of foot and mouth disease. In order to prevent its spread, all footpaths and many open spaces were closed to visitors. This and the appalling rain that fell relentlessly during our visit, restricted what we could do while we were allowing our guest a few hours relief from her guests. We drove around the countryside not particularly having much fun.

One day, we arrived at a small town with a name I am unable to pronounce correctly:  Llanwrtyd Wells. It was lunch time. We parked outside a hotel near the town centre. The floor of the lobby was covered with a grubby, well-worn carpet. We were shown into an unattractive dining room. Our hopes for having a decent meal fell as we surveyed the room’s dingy uninviting décor. The sight of incessant rain falling outside did little to enhance the dreary mood that this unappealing room was inducing.

The hotel’s owner brought us menus. We asked what he recommended. He said “steaks” and showed us the large range of meats listed in the menu. We asked his advice about which steak to choose. Then, he did something that transformed the dingy place for us.

He gave us a ‘tutorial’ about the relative merits of different kinds of beefsteak and their tastes. The least tasty, in his opinion, was the costliest cut, fillet steak. Sirloin steak was, he advised us, tastier and cheaper than fillet. However, he considered that the tastiest cut was rib-eye. He explained that the latter was marbled with fine streaks of fat, and it was this that gives it its superior taste. We ordered it and discovered he was right. He regretted that he was unable to serve the local, and in his view far superior, Black Mountain beef. This was because of the problems connected with the foot and mouth outbreak.

Whenever I buy steak, I look for rib-eye first, and if this is not available, I go for sirloin. Whenever I think of beefsteak, I always remember that dreary eatery in Llanwrtyd Wells and its helpful landlord. For a long time, I could not remember in which town in Wales, we were given our tutorial about steaks. Recently, I discovered some photographs I had taken there almost twenty years ago. In one of them, there was a pub sign that read “Neuadd Arms Hotel”. Seeing this helped me discover where we had been.

What is in a name

When I was a young child, I used to love eating slices of tongue. It was a cold meat that I really enjoyed. In those days, I never thought about the name of the meat, that is ‘tongue’.

When I was about 10 years old, I put ‘two and two together’ and realised that what I had been eating was once a living animal’s tongue. This realisation put me off eating tongue. I have hardly ever eaten tongue since that discover of what is in its name.

The curious thing is that, with plenty of knowledge of anatomy, I have no difficulties eating, say, liver or pancreas (‘sweetbreads’) or stomach (‘tripe’).

Picture from Wikipedia

Rice and meat

Hyderabad is justifiably renowned for tasty biryani although the very best version of this rice based dish that I have ever eaten was at Paragon in Calicut. There, they serve Moplah biryanis, which are both Arabic and Indian in taste.

The biryani we ate at the Café Bahar in Hyderabad was delicious. It was delicately flavoured and cooked with a light touch. To enter Bahar at lunchtime it is necessary to join a long queue that extends from the top of tje stairs at the doorway to the first floor dining room down on to the busy street outside. It is worth the wait.

The restaurant itself is very noisy and as busy as London’s Oxford Circus at rush hour. We shared a table with a charming couple, who let us try their ‘double masala’ chicken biryani which is richly laden with extra spices. I preferred the less spicy ‘special lamb biryani’. It is made special by adding hard boiled egg and meatballs made with minced chicken.

One should not visit Hyderabad without eating at least one biryani, but avoid the much advertised Paradise restaurant chain, which is ok but nothing like as good as Bahar or Shadab (near the Charminar)

Veggie burgers and other creatures

veggie

The popularity of vegetarianism and its relative veganism has greatly increased in the western world in recent years, and is still increasing. Popular reasons for abandoning the consumption of meat and/or products derived from animals (e.g. milk and eggs) include seemingly virtuous reasons such as love of animals and a desire to protect the world’s climate.

On the 23rd of July 1939, one world-famous vegetarian wrote a letter to another equally well-known vegetarian. Mahatma Gandhi wrote to Adolf Hitler. Here it is in a much abbreviated form (from: https://www.mkgandhi.org/letters/hitler_ltr1.htm):

DEAR FRIEND,
That I address you as a friend is no formality. I own no foes.

… We have no doubt about your bravery or devotion to your fatherland, nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents. But your own writings and pronouncements and those of your friends and admirers leave no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity, especially in the estimation of men like me who believe in universal friendliness

… I, therefore, appeal to you in the name of humanity to stop the war. You will lose nothing by referring all the matters of dispute between you and Great Britain to an international tribunal of your joint choice

You know that not long ago I made an appeal to every Briton to accept my method of non-violent resistance.

During this season when the hearts of the peoples of Europe yearn for peace, we have suspended even our own peaceful struggle. Is it too much to ask you to make an effort for peace during a time which may mean nothing to you personally but which must mean much to the millions of Europeans whose dumb cry for peace I hear, for my ears are attended to hearing the dumb millions? …

I am,
Your sincere friend,
M. K. GANDHI
The letter never reached Hitler; it was intercepted by the British in India.

I have no idea what the monster Adolf Hitler had to say about vegetarianism, but the saintly and peace-loving Gandhi wrote much about his abstinence from meat. For example, in 1932 he wrote:

I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to
kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants. The beautiful lines
of Goldsmith occurs to me as I tell you of my vegetarian fad:

‘No flocks that range the valley free
To slaughter I condemn;
Taught by the Power that pities me
I learn to pity them’

(see: https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/moralbasis_vegetarianism.pdf)

And at another time:

“It is very significant that some of the most thoughtful and cultured men are partisans of a pure vegetable diet.”“.

Maybe, he was thinking of the man of culture, Bernard Shaw, rather than Adolf Hitler!

Returning to the present day and the increasing appetite for meatless and dairy-free food, let us consider the current desire for vegetarian products to resemble meat products. Supermarket shelves are filling up with veggie burgers, meatless steaks, meatless meat balls, meatless shawarma, and many other products made to resemble meat without containing it. Recently, I was in a Chinese restaurant, which offered diners vegetarian chicken and vegetarian duck dishes. This yearning for vegetarian products to be named like and to look like meat products is absurd,

There are plenty of delicious vegetarian dishes that are not made to resemble foods that usually contain meat. Middle-Eastern and Turkish cuisine, for example, offer vegetarian eaters delights such as: humous, fattoush, Imam Bayildi, Mutabbel (an aubergine dish), falaffel, stuffed peppers,etc. Even the French, who until recently have not been overly attracted to vegetarianism, have a traditional dish perfect for vegetarians: ratatouille. As for Indian cuisine, there is a plethora of dishes that are vegetarian and do not try to appear like meat. In India, the land where Gandhi was born, vegetarianism is a way of life, rather than a changed lifestyle, for hundreds of millions of people. This has been the case in India for many millennia.

To conclude, what I am trying to say is that if you wish to abandon eating meat for whatever reason, then you might as well abandon the desire to eat things that look like meat, but are not. If you are adopting vegetarianism, then enjoy meatless dishes for their own sake, not because they remind you of meat! Bon apetit!

Picture source: tesco.com

Burgers

Everyone, who eats them, can reccommend a place that serves the very best beef burgers. Naturally, most people have their own favourites. So, it would seem that there are many places that serve the ‘very best burgers’.  I havetried a few of these highly reccommended places and have with one exception (Gourmet Burger Kitchen – a chain that originated in New Zealand) been disappointed. Most ‘very best burgers’ turn out to be ok (usually) but an anti-climax (mostly).

Now, I am going to seem very conceited. That is because I believe that I make the ‘very best burgers’ myself in our home, and so should you. My recipe is dead simple. I take minced beef with a lowish fat content (10% or less), add a pinch of salt and a small spoon of oil (sunflower or olive) and, after washing my hands, mush the three ingredients together before hand shaping patties of the  sizes preferred by those who will eat them. Then, I cook them on a griddle. That’s all. No egg or breadcrumbs are added.  Try this for yourself and you will no longer be wasting your money on overpriced, mediochre burgers.

 

ham burger with vegetables

 

A patty of minced beef 

Mould-ed by hand

Enjoy burger perfection

 

 

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