{"id":53,"date":"2009-07-04T12:34:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-04T12:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jamesramsden.com\/2009\/07\/04\/the-silk-purse"},"modified":"2009-07-04T12:34:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-04T12:34:00","slug":"the-silk-purse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jamesramsden.com\/2009\/07\/04\/the-silk-purse\/","title":{"rendered":"The silk purse [crispy pig’s ears with tartare sauce]"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a> Or was he? A particularly successful bit of poo polishing has happened only recently in my home town of Ripon. The area behind Philip Hall, “Ripon’s very own department store” (and somewhere that has to be seen to be believed), was, until a couple of years ago, the most desolate, depressing piece of land imaginable. Walking into that car park from the aforementioned retro (not in a good way) Philip Hall was like walking through the back of a wardrobe, but instead of walking into Narnia, you found you’d walked into Warsaw, c.1940. To say there were potholes would suggest that there were also areas of flat, solid concrete. Instead, the entire surface of this sump-cracking wilderness undulated with boulders and fractures, the aftermath of an earthquake so artfully recreated, if only it were intentional. Dead trees lined crumbling walls, cats scratched around the bins for last night’s pizza from the eternally moribund Italian restaurant, and the smell of smoke and nicotine drifted across the wasteland from the lung of William Hill in the south-east corner. It was an abject disgrace.<\/p>\n Fast forward to June 2009 and the years of closed roads, diversions and drilling seem worth it. The car park, for one, now has real bays and everything, and is flat and concreted and really rather smart. The seemingly recession-proof Philip Hall is somehow, impossibly, still there (though Ripon wouldn’t be Ripon without it), but across the concourse now stand our two newest imports – an Argos, that most surreal of shopping experiences, and the uber-fancy, up-yours-Waitrose northern supermarket, Booths. And it is<\/span> super. Sure, it’s expensive, but it’s big and light, and the jars are all shiny and contain stuff you’d want to eat. Even the ready meals look good. And – AND – the basket check out actually says “10 items or fewer<\/span>“. A grammatically accurate upmarket supermarket is exactly what we’ve been waiting for up here. I give it 6 months.<\/p>\n Perhaps a more elegant way of phrasing Aristotle’s somewhat crude version is the old adage “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”. Well I disagree. I mean, you can’t literally do this, sure, but the implication that a sow’s ear is a lost cause is a foolish one, a proclamation by somebody who clearly had no interest in food. The only bit of a pig that you can’t eat is its oink. A pig’s head, in all its various permutations, is utterly delicious – ears, tongue, cheeks, brain, snout, they all play an important role in the gastronomic tapestry and history of the world. One of the better things I’ve eaten lately was fried pig’s head in the Albion in Bristol, a breaded and fried pig cake of the most tender meat, singing with gribiche, topped by a less apologetic manifestation of pig’s head (in that it was just the meat, unadorned, unfussy, unbelievable), and then finished with a poached duck egg. It was perfection, and anyone squeamish about the idea of eating pig’s head would do well to try that dish.<\/p>\n Yesterday it was the ears I was after. Two quivering, pink, waxy (I know), hairy (yep), ears that I had swiped from Martin and Rachel (who run a forest garden at home) before they embarked upon their day’s butchery.<\/p>\n
\nYou can’t, as Aristotle once said, shine a shite. If a piece of fruit is rotten, let it rot; if a piece of meat has gone off, throw it away; and if you are Prime Minister and not a naturally handsome or smiley sort, well then so be it – wearing make up and a grin that makes you look like a bipolar Shrek is only going to frighten the children. But we are a nation of turd polishers, locked in interminable attempts to rebuild that which should be knocked down, tippex that which should be erased, justify that which should be forgotten about. Betjeman was dead right.<\/p>\n