Prick With A Fork

Congratulations et felicitations to our Canadian Cordon Bleu blog-pal Le Canard Enchante!

Yesterday when asked if she had any requests for the evening meal, Mrs Prick replied, “Something healthy.”

Hrrrrm. Well, OK. This generally means no lashings of butter, béarnaise sauces, or deep-frying. With these possibilities exhausted, this is what hit the table in Stately Prick Manor last night:

Chicken with mussels, asparagus, sherry sauce, shellfish foam. It was a variation on a recipe in Heston Blumenthal’s excellent Heston Blumenthal at Home, which is a far more useful volume than anything else in his oeuvre, because, frankly, no one is ever going to make anything out of the Fat Duck Cookbook, and like hell he’s going to spill the secrets on how its really done.

The original recipe – chicken with clams a la plancha – called for, well, clams, but they were not to be had, so it was mussels instead. The sauce was lovely, a reduction of brown chicken stock doped up with some brown butter (it wasn’t entirely healthy!), sherry vinegar, thyme, and strained. Asparagus were an afterthought, for colour. And the foam, which didn’t quite come together as it should, was a bit of showing off.

The real revelation though was the chicken breasts, which were brined (60 minutes in an 8% solution) and then rolled and cooked sous-vide for 50 minutes at 60 degrees C and seared off in a pan. What came out was perfectly cooked throughout, tender, juicy, and actually tasted like chicken – in a good way. And because they held their ballotine shape, they presented nicely on the plate. We’ll be playing around with this recipe, and technique, a bit more over the winter I suspect.

So while the secular self-flagellants go the “Meat-Free Week” route (and just when the hell is “Free Meat Week”, we’d like to know!), good news for those of us who choose not to abstain:

Earlier this month, researchers announced the results of a big new nutritional study in Europe that seemed to yield more evidence that processed meats like bacon and sausage can lead to an early grave. The media responded with the usual “Death by Salami” headlines. What news outlets downplayed about the study, though, is that despite their best efforts, the EU researchers couldn’t find any evidence that red meat will kill you. In fact, the study shows that not eating red meat is a risk factor for an early demise.

News outlets? Downplaying the truth in service of an agenda? Why, I never! But wait, it gets better:

After correcting some measurement errors, the researchers in Europe had to conclude that not only was red meat intake “no longer associated with mortality” but “all-cause mortality was higher among participants with very low or no red meat consumption.”

The government, public health advocates, and the American Heart Association have long warned Americans that overconsumption of red meat can lead to heart disease and other ailments. Yet the scientific evidence supporting this hypothesis has always been weak. And in fact, this month’s study isn’t the first to fly in the face of these assumptions. A large study in Japan also found no increase in heart disease deaths from moderate meat consumption as well.

Moderation in all things. Including moderation.

So, hey, let’s try something different with this write-up. Our topic today is the Sydney Cove Oyster Bar (or SCOB, rhymes with Job from the Bible or GOB from Arrested Development, for short) and specifically their new after-work afternoon bar food menu, to which the Prick was introduced the other night in the grand company of a number of food bloggers and tweeters. And instead of loading up the post with five hundred or so introductory words musing on Mark Twain’s enigmatic, ICAC-prefiguring words about Sydney Cove (“God made the Harbour, but Satan made Sydney”) or whether the very post-modern nature of the food blogging community, where people become mates without ever necessarily meeting, is like something out of the first act of David Foster Wallace’s most amazing work or the final act of Michel Houllebecq’s most depressing, let’s just get into the food.

You see what I just did there, right?

I don’t normally eat cooked oysters. But when I do, they’re deep-fried with wasabi mayo.

Ah. Too clever by half, I know. Anyway, it was a bright late-late summer’s evening when a crew organised by Vanity Fare (this being the closest to a Vanity Fair party this Prick will ever get and with far better company) and including such luminaries as the Hungry Mum, Forking Awesome, Verandah’s Jonathan Ingram, Chew Town, Belly Rumbles, and many more I’m doubtlessly forgetting, gathered to check out SCOB’s new bar food menu.

Now SCOB has been perched on the water’s edge for nearly 25 years and has developed a quiet – too quiet, if you ask the Prick – following. Because even before we get to the food, SCOB should by all rights be the most popular place on the Harbour. It’s not owned or run or affiliated with the Obeids. It’s not the over-priced, over-rated, and over-run Opera Bar. Nor is it a certain eponymous family-run joint on the other side of the Quay which once, before I knew better, served my father and me a meal so awful in its tourist-trap pedestrianness that we silently agreed to never speak of it again, like a drunken relative’s embarrassing rant at Christmas dinner.

This is “saltbush”. Who knew?

SCOB Chef Rhys Ward put together a bit of a tasting menu (note we were not lured in with freebies, and the Prick paid for all his own food and drink including a lovely bottle of Sancerre and an utterly gratuitous cognac at the end of the night) and festivities kicked off with a lovely salmon tartare, light and refreshing though more refined than what one normally thinks of as “bar food”. Just-opened Sydney rocks needed no dressing at all and were gone in sixty seconds: plump, steely little creatures that rewarded chewing with briny creaminess. This site claims some credit for the next course, deep-fried Coffin Bay oysters with a wasabi mayo, but really, how can you go wrong? We didn’t.

Shiny, happy fishies on my plate…

Somewhere in the mix was some lightly-battered deep-fried saltbush, which the Prick has never had before (considering, perhaps unfairly, that anything that smacks of “bush tucker” is just pandering) but which turns out to be delicious, the outback’s quite convincing answer to zucchini flowers. Calamari were there as well. Salads, and some lamb skewers, rounded things out for those who had their fill of Nemo, but the winning course was a John Dory ceviche which, again, was very refined, and showed the kitchen’s light touch with great ingredients: If this is bar food, make mine a double.

SCOB’s bar food menu is a great idea and a tops alternative to the obvious choices when looking for a snack and a drink in that part of town. At some point, the Pricks will have to drop in for a proper meal. Word on the street is they do a mean brekkie on the weekend as well. Check it out. Tell ‘em the Prick sent ya.

Want to make big bucks in the cookbook game? Don’t bother winning MasterChef or leveraging a long and successful career in restaurants. Snaffle a government tender instead!

Thanks to a tip from the eagle-eyed folk at the CIS, the Prick notes that the very Orwellian-sounding Australian National Preventive Health Agency has just awarded a tender – worth $189,200! – to Bauer Media (formerly ACP) for … wait for it … “the development of a health meals cookbook”.

Details are scant but this seems a very odd piece of corporate welfare indeed. Bookstore shelves are already positively groaning under the weight of various diet and “health meals”, so presumably there’s a market for this sort of thing that doesn’t need to be goosed along by a six-figure gift from the Australian taxpayer. But then again, it also appears that the Preventive Health Agency also has $83 million to get through by the end of this fiscal year (and the tender times out at the end of June) so perhaps nearly two hundred grand is a bargain.

First it was Palings, which took out a 13.5 from the shaggy one. Then Albion Street Kitchen pulled a 14.5.

And this week we flip open “Good Living” to read that mejico, Sydney’s latest corporatized white boy Mexican hot spot, pulled a measly 12.5.

Credit to Durack for, for a moment at least, resisting the hype machine around mejico, but what the hell does a “.5” mean? The out-of-twenty scoring system means little to nothing already and the addition of these half-steps only confuses the matter.  Already here’s not really much room between “reasonable” (12) and “good if not great” (13), so why toss out a 12.5 unless as a sop to the restaurateur: I really hated this joint, it seems to say, but I can’t bring myself to cane it completely with a 12. Either way the Pricks won’t be turning up anytime soon.

Regular readers of this site know that, along with hipsters and Terry Durack, nothing offends the Prick like the near-Freudian obsession governments, bureaucrats, and “public health academics” have with what we mere mortals put in our mouths.

If you’re in Sydney, or will be on the weekend of 6-7 April, and likewise get offended by all the (largely taxpayer-financed) tut-tutting and finger-wagging endemic to Australian society, come by the First Australian Libertarian Convention. I’ll be on a panel Saturday morning (don’t worry, it’s not ’til 11) with such luminaries as ALP staffer-turned-author-turned-FBi Radio founder-turned-politician Cass Wilkinson and the IPA’s Tim Wilson. We’ll be kicking around the rise of the nanny state and, hopefully, coming up with some ideas for what we can do about it. See you there.

Ron Rosenbaum in the Wall Street Journal takes a big ol’ swing at the anti-fat crusaders who have become the mutaween of the American (and, by extension, Australian) palate:

Fear of fat has become a national sickness, an all-American eating disorder: Call it fatnorexia. Where is Uncle Toby from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” lamenting that, under the oncoming reign of Puritan strictures, “there shall be no cakes and ale”?

Something deeper than concern for nutrition and cholesterol is going on here. You don’t have to be a Freudian (I’m not) to see in the antifat crusade a cowering fear of sexuality. The evil of oral pleasure as Satan’s tool of seduction, dating back to Eve, is deeply embedded in American culture. Recall Cotton Mather’s denunciation of the hell-bound wickedness of the pleasures of the flesh and his call for self-mortification (anticipating today’s egg-white omelets).

We live in a culture where food has become a symbol of imminent mortality, where Zagat reviews of high-end steakhouses tediously joke about the need to have “your cardiologist approve in writing,” variations of which are repeated practically every time a piece of meat is mentioned anywhere (“a heart attack on a plate,” “adding insult to arteries” and other super-clever jests).

Indeed. Rosenbaum goes on to suggest we ignore these ninnies and instead go roast a goose. Sound advice.

While we’re on the subject of vice, artist David Hockney has put pen to paper for the Guardian of all places, and produced a wonderful anti-anti-smoking rant which has some currency here in Oz, land of the plain-packaged ciggie:

The aim of the professional anti-smoker is to get rid of it. The press tells us “it’s not acceptable”. Well, it is for 10 million people, who probably don’t all read newspapers and have little to do with the political and media elite. So how come the professional anti-smoker is now an expert in packaging? Have you noticed that marijuana has quite good sales (they tell me) with no packaging whatsoever? Tobacco will be the same. Why does the government only listen to the anti-smokers who obviously natter and natter about it? My father was one of these anti-smokers, and they won’t be happy until it’s gone.

And once it is gone, they’ll come after something else — indeed, they already are, as anyone who likes a good steak or a drink knows. The Prick is not a smoker, and smoking is one of the few activities barred for life to the Little Pricks (the others being tattoos, motorcycles, and voting Green). But when it comes to fighting these modern secular Puritans, we’re all in it together.

For indication of just how far down the social ladder Australia’s foodie revolution has penetrated, look no further than this report in the Albury-Wodonga Border Mail. Apparently the local junkies and meth-heads have given up exchanging cold sores and crumpled-up fivers for drugs in favour of eye filet steaks and other gourmet cuts of meat:

Police raiding homes of suspected dealers have found freezers full of meat and one officer recalled a man who had two roast beefs stuffed down his pants at Coles in Wodonga about a year ago, to pay for his addiction…

It’s difficult to quantify how much meat can be exchanged for what kind and what quantity of drugs but investigators estimated two scotch fillets could be exchanged for a stick of cannabis while a roast beef could return two ecstasy tablets.

Ignoring the obvious civil liberties dangers – how long before hungry coppers start seizing Herefords as proceeds of crime? Will good steaks join spray paint and cold medicine in the annals of perfectly legal consumer products one has to show ID to buy? – this sort of thing has the tendency to ripple upwards as well. What are the upwardly-mobile and status conscious to do when even a fridge full of fine meat is not enough to distinguish one from the common street druggo? A realignment of status symbols is in order, and indeed is already happening. Just head down to the new corridor of “small bars” along – or more properly, underneath – Sydney’s York Street and you’ll see what I mean.

At that price, I shoulda kept the flask …

For it was on this strip, down a non-descript flight of steps at the base of an office block at the Stitch Bar to be precise, that the Prick found himself Friday night, drinking a $38 (!) double-serve Rittenhouse Rye Manhattan served up in a cheap steel flask while a bunch of good-lookin’ and lookin’-good thirty-something mid-career professionals chatted and bopped their heads as the stereo pumped out, sans any hint of irony, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”. Remember that great article in The Onion a few years back, “Affluent White Man Enjoys, Causes the Blues”? Yeah, it was a bit like that.

Not that this was a bad thing, necessarily. The barmen here know what they’re doing. Sydney’s bars were a great disappointment when the Prick picked up and left New York and it is great to see so many interesting drinketerias opening up around town. Stitch is a lovely joint, all little rooms and nooks, and if you get there early enough you can get a table without too appalling a wait. Which you will want to do, because they also have a fine little kitchen turning out gourmet hot dogs and burgers and tacos, all cutely named and well-prepared (the “French Poodle”, a Toulouse sausage with melted brie, was delicious, as were the pulled pork tacos, which were intelligently spiced and made themselves heard without screaming to palates numbed slightly by the booze).

Haute dog.

And as tiresome as the whole “dude food” thing can be, this was well-executed. But more to  the point, the reasons for its longevity are made clear by the above tale. If Albury junkies are going to shoot up with chateaubriand then it is only logical that Sydney yuppies now get pissed on ridiculously expensive cocktails while eating hot dogs (albeit of the fancy-pants gussied up variety). Because a status marker means nothing if everyone can have it, the democratisation of “gourmet” food – the whole MasterChef/Coles tie-in being the most obvious manifestation of the trend – has left those at the top grasping for new ways to set themselves apart. Like geomagnetic poles reversing themselves, what was once top-end fare is now povvo, and vice versa. It’s happened before (oysters used to be peasant cuisine in America) and will surely happen again. Here’s hoping Australia’s deadshits never discover veal demi-glace. This status-conscious Prick could never bring himself to do without it.

Seen on Facebook, at least one Brooklyn eatery is doing its part:

There’s a joke somewhere in here about methane and renewable energy.