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Daffodils and Go Back where you came from
The Restless Book Searcher ( part 1 )
By gerard oosterman
The Restless book searcher.
The sun was at its highest this time of the year. A man carrying a swag and back-pack was seen walking the deserted streets. His cattle dog cleverly walked in the limited shade that the walker was still casting. The merciless heat was parching the dust which was as much in need of water and as thirsty as the man and his dog.
He finally arrived at a small shop which had a ‘Tip-Top bread’ sign hanging from its awning. On the shop window there were plastered a variety of signs, including one on ‘Big Ben’ pies, also a poster of Camel Cigarettes featuring a goggled fighter pilot in his cockpit with ‘nerves of steel’ and a ‘Vincent’s APC Headache’ powder advertisement. Even though the torn and battered fly screen door was slightly ajar, it had a ‘closed’ sign facing any possible customer on the outside of it. The owner of this shop had lost the will to turn the sign around to ‘open’ a long time ago, and anyhow, with the fly-screen refusing to shut properly for some years, the shopkeeper reckoned people would guess the shop was open regardless of any sign. The few locals would know. It was just about the only ’mixed goods’ shop for the next fifty miles. The settlement still had a garage and a butcher shop, a left over from a gold rush mania long time gone.
The interior of the shop had a couple of tables and matching chairs, all from the same vintage with splayed legs. The tables had an aluminium strip screwed all round the sides and over the edge of the Laminex which had bubbled up here and there. The shop’s counter was levered towards the customer and made of a glass display cabinet which had a crack at the front, where at some earlier times, efforts had been made with tape to try and prevent it from falling either out towards the floor or inwards towards the listless display of custard-tarts, dry looking Lamingtons and some lonely mince pies. The tape was still holding on even if somewhat yellowed and curled. Against the back wall was another glass case with a bowl of floating beetroot slices and a plate holding sliced onions with next yet another couple of plates holding some limp artichokes with a hard boiled mess of what looked like chopped up eggs which had been sprinkled with Keens yellow curry powder. The Keens curry powder tin was still standing next to the plate, leaving open the optimistic possibility for future use.
will be continued.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Sorry I’m late in too Gez… been taking a break for a while but will get back into the swing of things over the next few days with any luck!
Agree with Emmjay; an excellent piece of scene-setting…
🙂
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Sorry I’m late, Gez. I’m in. though !
An excellent piece of scene-setting.
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Thanks Emm,
Better late than never.
For some reason this tale got most readers excited about curried eggs, chicken feet, yokes, egg whites enzofort. Perhaps many are dieting and hungry?
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Ayam is chicken in Indonesian Ato.
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Yeeeeeeees?
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Right! Finally, the internet is back! Been giving me pimples the last couple of months, with its indecision and frequemt walkouts and blckouts!
Voice, chicken feet -or chicken knuckles, as they were called around the table at the time- are now off the list. I have already tried them, along with raw chicken livers and I can’t remember what other culinary pariahs, under extreme duress, in Japan, back in ’09, I think.
So, thankfully, my duty to the chicken feet dish is done!
I know, I point my noise skywards at some dishes perhaps too rashly but I just can’t seem to see the gastronomic elegance in the concoction of mayo (one of its constituents being egg yoke) plus egg, then milk, then curry! My culinary imagination can’t seem to be able to conjure it up as worthy of my culinary palette!
And as for sandwiches! On white sliced bread!
I mean, paleeez! The Greeks have invented nectar and ambrosia! Are you asking them to defile their Temple of Taste with such irreverent substances?
I mean, paleeeez, Voice -and Vivie!
Paleeeeez!
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That puts you two ahead of me, ato, and I’m in no hurry to catch up, believe me. Have you ever had shark’s fin soup? I ate it once and the texture was vile. I don’t know whether that’s normal for shark’s fin soup, or whether it was poorly prepared.
You make the eggs sound a lot more exciting than they actually are. Think hard-boiled eggs sliced in half lengthways and sprinkled with paprika. Or cummin. Mashing the spice into the yolk is just one more step, with the milk (or mayonnaise) serving primarily as a binding agent as it does for mashed potato. It being inevitable that the English would eventually employ Indian spices. Maybe you don’t like hard-boiled eggs?
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I remember those stuffed halved eggs too Voice. I still hard boil some eggs every now and then and top with pretend caviar (stuff actually made out of seaweed). Nothing like a fresh cooked hard boiled home grown egg – with or without salt and pepper.
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I’ve just remembered the splash of vinegar. Proably redundant if you use mayonnaise instead of milk. To my taste, mayonnaise + curry is too much for a devilled egg, but good in a sandwich.
Of course, there are social considerations. My kids would never touch hard-boiled eggs due to their bad rap at school, and you wouldn’t neceassity want to share an elevator post consumption.
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No milk in my mixture Ato. You can use wholemeal or rye or any bread – it is just that for me it seems to be a tradition to use white bread. There is nothing wrong with white bread you know! If you haven’t tried it you shouldn’t be so condemning Ato ! Just say you don’t fancy the idea and leave it at that. I love lambs’ brains (usually crumbed) but it isn’t everyone’s idea of something to eat. Leftover from my grandmother’s cooking which got stuck in the Depression. We ate everything – offal, ox-tail etc – the only thing I never liked was bloody tripe. Do remember, it was in Greece where I was offered the speciality bulls’ balls (probably actually a virgin bull up till he lost the vital bits) – most people go ‘yuck’ at the mention of that delicacy.
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Ah, the humble, the very noble, the very versatile egg!
Granpa used to make me get up early in the morning to go and “steal” some eggs from the chook pen. Still warm, we’d dig a little hole on each end and suck it.
“Good for your voice,” granpa priest used to tell me. He was particularly caring about my voice because I used to sing solo in his church.
The eggs were the only plentiful food around. With war comes poverty and poverty means scarcity of food. Certainly of variety. So we got to love eggs.
Still do.
Mostly as an omelette, these days but at times, I’d toss a couple of hard boiled ones in the salad, with some olives and fetta. Accompanied by a shot of ouzo. Yummmmmmoh!
As for white bread. That’s all there was in Oz for the first -what?- fifteen years I’ve spent in Oz. That and it’s equivalent of a darker colour which was called “brown.” So, we had no choice but to eat white bread. Even breads which bakers called “pasta doura” was just a different looking version of “white” bread.
And to this day, one has to look hard to find a bakery that bakes something that doesn’t feel nor taste like the old “white” bread.
I think we’re all fairly conservative about food. Or perhaps, cautious. We dare go only so far but no further, particularly since great food is available in abundance here. Great food that we’ve tasted before and we know well.
Vivie, you’ve mentioned tripe and bull’s balls! Made me laugh that one because I immediately thought of our neighbours. Offer them anything beyond chips, pies and roast lamb cooked to cinders, with lashings of Heinz tomato sauce and a mountain of white bread and they’ll get angry! Oh, hang on, they accepted my kourabiethes… though I’ve no idea if they ate them and what they thought of them. My asian neighbours on the other side, however, not only did they eat them, the old lady came the next day with a bowl of dumplings! Full of smiles and thankses. They’ve never had them before. Oh, and they loved my olives, which the anglos don’t eat.
I ate crumbed brains a few times, not many and tripe often. In fact, Vivie, you might know that tripe soup is traditional on Greek Easter Saturday night, straight after the priest gives out “the light” to the people and they bring it home to light their “eternal” holy flames by their silly icons. Tripe and red eggs. Boiled. With just a bit of salt and pepper… and a shot of ouzo!
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I’ve got it! Substitute ouzo for the milk! Can’t quite see how to work in the curry spices though. Some things just weren’t meant to be. 🙂
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Yes, heard about Greek tripe soup. I do think tripe is aptly named of course – utter tripe to call it a food. The lining of a cow’s guts. Regarding bread – yes, it was white bread only for a long time. But I was lucky to have vegetarian neighbours and the mother always made her own wholemeal bread and it was heavenly. To get real bread you need to bake your own and I can do that. But I usually buy Helga’s wholemeal and just make the gluten free stuff for my daughter – it is very tasty. Omelettes or slow cooked scrambled eggs with crisp bacon and cooked fresh tomato for breakfast – yum.
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I am not usually here at this time of night – however ….. mayo is good and you don’t quite mash the eggs, rather chop them up finely. Ayam stuff would be stronger so I suggest you taste as you go. The thing to detect is the chili stength ……… do not butter the bread. Just use the egg mixture as the filling. Ato thinks it sounds awful but frankly it is quite yummy and I am surprised at the reaction. PS – a dash of black pepper too…..
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Vivienne. You are right the Ayam stuff has more of a bite to it, more chili. Of course the mixture is easily made by ground turmeric, chili, some powdered ginger, a bit of nutmeg and some star aniseed powder. Then for the really ‘keen’ ones there are all sorts of other herbs that can be mixed up in a curry powder. ( garam masala, cinnamon, cardamom,cloves etc.) The own mixture is often much better but for convenience sake I sometimes just buy the ready made and that is the Ayam brand.
.
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Gerard, I would have thought you knew that I do all my own curry mixes ! Also the best way to control the heat factor. I hope you enjoy your googy sandwich – you can of course also put a layer of shredded lettuce on the bread.
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Beautifully written
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Jules, I’ll be more generous and give Gez eight out of ten; I like this one more than ‘Beacause’ (the other story he wrote).
You have made me hungry for a good curry, I have to let my cook know. Hope he will not say: It’s your turn to cook.
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May I say H that I agree with you
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One just can’t give anyone 8/10…not even ‘your’ hubby!
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10/10 is Christopher Hitchens, Oh and possibly Ted Lapkin. It comes down from there.
Hitchens, incidentally, was born in Portsmouth. We drove through there this morning to get the car ferry to THE ISLAND (Isle of Wight), from gunwharf. I took some pics of The Harbour for The PAs, but of course we don’t have a foto page.
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Julian, I agree with you ,Ted Lapkin writes well, I just don’t agree with WHAT he writes. Bob Ellis can write too, sometimes I agree with his sentiments but not always…
Hitchins can put words together nicely too, but I got a shitty with him when in one interview he told us that his wife does not need to work; maybe not for money but for own her own satisfaction. He also put down some Muslim women on QandA, which was totally unnecessary, and plain rude
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Well written gerard. Good depiction and detail. 7/10.
Got a nice ‘Ruby’, take way to die for the other night. Many of the restaurants over here are run by Bangladeshis. It was orgasmic. And reasonably priced. Somehow they do the garlic naans, just perfek!
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Had a nice little nosh at The Hotel Du Vin, Winchester.
NOW, there really are some book shops there.
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Go on, run it in!
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Or, perhaps, ‘rub’!
Errata typographica!!
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I’m taking fotos Big.
When my feet stop. I’ll send some despatches.
Was on the beach today, with grandson. It is a beach that I put deckchairs out for an old lady who owned a beach business, many moons ago. It was wierd, unusual and satisfying.
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Anyway, Gez, like the story, more please!!
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Jeez, Keane’s Curry powder, made me hat curry fro the first 30 years of my life!
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Hate, not hat, I mean, a hat curry is really aweful, just ask Foodge.
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I thought that’s what hats are four: to eet curry fromme.
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Brilliant Big M.
A’ hat curry’ was always the result of ‘intestinal hurry’ after a night in town and the hat often ended up the receptacle for both upper and lower projectile emissions. Thanks for the memory.
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I have to confess that I went out with some paediatricians, and, after a coupla curries and some cleansing ales, I took the old porcelain bus for a drive. I think I’ve also reached that age where ‘hat curries’ should be a memory!
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Hey, we used to make curried eggs from it, mashing it into theyolks with a bit of milk. Yum. In those days of youth, no unwanted side effects. Wouldn’t want to risk it now though.
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Sounds bloody horrible, Voice!
Very… sort of Elizabethan English. Something Ophelia would have eaten when she went all funny.
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Used to be a favourite of mine. Yes, it does sound very Anglo-Indian, doesn’t it? I remember the finishing touch; a sprinkling of cayenne pepper on top.
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More Victorian than Elizabethan though.
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Yes, yes, Voice! I can just see Dr Jekyll gulping down some of this concoction before turning into a Mr Hyde… or pooor, young Jane Eyre given nothing but this stuff at Lowood! Oh, the horror, the horror!
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It’s a kind of devilled egg, atomou; there are many kinds. Hard bolied eggs take particularly well to that sort of thing. Go on … have a go.
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I’ll put it on the list, Voice but, let me tell you, the list of “must try recipes” is very, very long! I don’t know if I’ll get to it during this life time.
“Devilled egg!” What’s wrong with a bit of pepper?
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Sheeeeesh – I used to get Keens but now use Clive of India curry powder for curried egg sandwiches. Absolutely nothing wrong with it – mash the boiled eggs add mayo and a bit of salt and a fair whack of the curry powder – spread on fresh white bread, cut in two and wrap and place in brown paper bag for hubby to take to the motor races. I also make them for visitors who have to depart via train or bus and don’t want to starve. They get the curried egg and a ham/salad/mustard. They were standard fare for school sports days too and were usually devoured by 10 am.
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Agh!
“…mash the boiled eggs add mayo and a bit of salt and a fair whack of the curry powder – spread on fresh white bread…”
Agh!
I hope you’ve included copious volumes of ouzo with that lot, Vivie!
Instead of “Dancing with the Taste Buds,” it’d be “The Battle of the Bowel!”
Sandwiches: the spurning of civilization!
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Viv, I did not know that you use mayo when making curried sandwiches, I’ll try some tomorrow. Gerard bought some Indonesian curry powder called Ayam. I hope it will be suitable for this purpose..
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Where is it on the list par rapport aux chicken’s feet, atomou? 🙂
I used to enjoy it as buffet food, with the eggs cut in half lengthways and the curried mashed yolks refilling the hollow of the whites.
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The fish & chipperies sell scotch eggs here, probably bought at the local frozen wholesalers now. However, they can be a treat made with homemade bread crumbs and served with a variety of relishes.
Then there’s salad niciose, coddled eggs and soft boiled eggs (with soldiers), for culinary backstops.
Or for something ‘completely different’, there’s chinese old, in fact very old goose eggs; never seen the attraction myself.
Off to Ventnor today to try some crab & lobster, still caught by the Blake family out in the waters off The Bay & The Needles. A splash of salt and lemon OR local vinegar. brings it up to Michelin classification, IMHO.
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7:30 am here…Bright and sunny. I can just see the old church here. I’m looking out of the cottage window across The Big Mead.
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Yeah, Jules, but what about 7:31am? 🙂
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Just being friendly voice….No need for sarcasm 🙂
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Merely following time-honoured tradition, JL. You would have been disappointed had I failed.
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Touché …
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Voulez-vous toucher avec moi ce soir?
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Koochae, of course?
Back on the mainland now. Hasn’t rained this week.
I’m a bit disappointed, as I bought an oversized sports rain-jacket in a sale @ Marks & Sparks (I’ll assume Voice is familiar with the nickname), for ten quid….
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