eggbaconchipsandbeans

commerce

Exclusive ebcb t-shirts are now available. There's only 20 of them. Blue and black. Nice quality. M, L and XL. £18 inc postage in the UK. (Outside the UK email me first and we'll work out a reasonable postage charge.) Any profit goes to Oxfam.

T-Shirts are sold out. Everyone who's got one, you're in a very small club. Thanks for buying.

chips with everything

Here's another bit that didn't make it into the book. Well, some of it did. But most of it didn't. Which may be a sign that it's not worth bothering with. But that's up to you.

Enjoy. Or not...

Chips With Everything

Can anyone tell me why this has been the hardest section of the whole book to write? It’s been a real struggle and I don’t understand why.

Some sections have been easy. You know how authors, when they’re being interviewed, say stuff about the way the characters took over the book and started doing things the author didn’t expect. I always thought that was pretentious authorly nonsense until I started writing this. But now I know what they mean. Beans really took me over in the bean section. I was channelling beans. Beans flowed through me. (ha!) I am become beans, the accompanier of toast. It was a spiritual experience. But it didn’t happen with chips. Chips has been difficult.

A friend suggested that maybe I needed to find some distance; in the same way that Hemmingway needed to go to Cuba to write about Paris. (is that right? Or is it the other way round? Or was he just a big blagger who liked to travel?). Maybe I needed to put some emotional distance between me and chips in order to write about them with conviction. And he added, rather cruely, that that was unlikely to happen given how addicted I am to chips. Cruel but fair. Like penalties with the Germans.

Because chips are extraordinarily delicious. One of the most compelling and bewitching substances known to man. It’s such a beautiful thing (and perhaps evidence of the existence of God) that the humble, tedious potato can be transformed, by the simple addition of heat and fat, into this delightful piece of sensory heaven. And that’s a mystical process yet to be adequately explained by human science.1 Let’s face it, if fat and heat normally made for bewitching beauty the beaches of Benidorm would be very different places.

However you don’t need me just telling you that chips are delicious. You know that. What you want is a detailed and rigorous analysis of the role in the chip in the complex culinary-cultural construct that is the ebcb. (Don’t you? You don’t? Then you’re reading the wrong book pal. Can I perhaps refer you to one of my esteemed colleagues in the ‘real books about stuff that matters’ section?) So let’s think about that for a minute, and let’s see if we can squeeze in any torturous analogies with pompous rock ensembles.

Imagine your ebcb is made up of the members of Queen.

Roger Taylor (the drummer) is your bacon. Essential. Got to have it. Makes a difference if its bad but even brilliant drumming (or bacon) will only get you so far. You can appreciate a drum solo for about 30 seconds after that it goes rapidly downhill; likewise a meal that’s entirely bacon. (I know, I’ve tried the Atkins diet.)

John Deacon (the bassist) is your beans. Again, essential. Again, it’s got to be right; but it’s hard to screw it up and even a magnificent contribution is only so good.

Brian May (the guitarist and Anita Dobson spouse and look-alike) is the egg. It’s a bit flashy. It can do a lot of different things, and for a while it can make a real difference, but it can’t sustain your attention for long. Man cannot live on eggs alone. (I know, I’ve tried the Atkins diet.)

Freddie Mercury is the chips. Or was. He made the difference. He made them sound like Queen. Queen with George Michael sounded mostly like George Michael. Queen with that new old bloke from Free just sound like a band with some bloke from Free. The chips make the difference.

That’s the first Essential Law Of Chip Contribution To The EBCB Experience. Chips add variety. Chips make the difference. Chips help you tell one ebcb from another. And with familiarity and practise you’ll soon be able to work out where you are if you’re ever kidnapped, held in a darkened room and fed fry-ups from a local café. A good knowledge of chips, in that scenario, could lead to your rescue and the successful prosecution of your kidnappers. So it’s worth taking the time to copy this chapter onto rice paper and secrete it in your underware.

Personally I embrace almost every chip varient I’m presented with. I think the infinite variety is a testament to nature’s bounty; like all the uncategorised insect species in the amazon or the number of ringtones your children can download from the internet. But you will find Chip Fundamentalists all over the country telling you that some particular method is the one true method and all other chip techniques are a Path Of Evil which will inevitably lead to Some Non-Specific Badness. I don’t care though, I think there’s good in every chip. Microwave, oven, fried in fat, fried in oil, not fried much at all. The trick is to look for the positive and not dwell on the technology. Because chip variety is what keeps the ebcb fresh and we should cherish that; always looking for new chip variants, like Victorian explorers looking for new species to drive into extinction.

publishing

The more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed this in Esquire. Or this on Amazon. And it's true. This strange little site has morphed into a strange little book. Due out the middle of Octboer and already being discounted by Amazon. Which may not bode well.

(I should point out that the synopsis on Amazon bears little relation to what's actually in the book - it's publishing blurb which I'd never seen before. Oh well.

I should also point out that the book on Amazon lists, and the cover shot above shows, my name as Russell Davies - which is unfortunate because there's another Russell Davies who's written more and better books than me and there may be some confusion. When the book comes out it'll actually be by Russell M. Davies. Is that less confusing? Probably not.)

Anyway, I'm currently persuading the publishers to let me publish the whole thing on here under a Creative Commons licence. But in the meantime I thought I'd bung up some of the stuff I wrote that didn't make it into the finished product.

Here's the first bit:

What’s that in your tines?

A good ebcb experience is about much more than food. It involves all thirteen of our senses. So here’s a comprehensive list of all the best sensory bits of a good café experience.

Top Ten Cafe Sounds

1. The distant sound of drilling. There’s nothing like the sense that hard manual labour is happening somewhere else to make you appreciate sitting on your arse, enjoying a fry-up.

2. Frying-up. Obviously.

3. That terrifying scream of steam you sometimes get from the espresso machine – like The Flying Scotsman was trying to excrete all its awesome twentieth century power into a tiny Italian cup.

4. A badly tuned radio. Ideally something nostalgic and poppy. (Though the New Piccadilly always used to put The Archers on which was a splendid idea.)

5. The brushy scrunch of man-made fibres on formica. Nylon anoraks, high-viz jackets, messenger bags, nothing natural here.

6. The quite chatter of traffic wardens comparing mornings. (A traffic warden is a sign of a great café. They know the best places.)

7. The repeated flushing of a loo. Someone’s in the basement trying to get the toilet to clear. He’s pulling the lever again and again, but never has the patience to let the cistern refill properly and so never achieves sufficient thrust. We’ve all been there.

8. The headsplitting scrape of metal chair on tiled floor as a larger gentleman tries to find a comfortable position abutting his butty.

9. That really annoying Nokia ring. The one everyone has. So it’s always accompanied by the rustle of pockets being investigated and bags being unzipped.

10. The innocent laughter of tiny children. Outside. Not bothering you in here.

Top Ten café smells

1. Bacon. Obviously.

2. Coffee. Equally obviously.

3. Ammonia. Less obvious, but it suggests that someone’s done some cleaning at some point. Which is good.

4. Mouldy foam seat stuffing.

5. A moist Daily Express

6. Thai food wafting from the restaurant next door.

7. That slightly disturbing chemical smell you associate with the killing of insects on an industrial scale.

8. That manly mix of day-old beer-breath, cheap aftershave and nicotine chewing gum.

9. A suggestion of urine from the loos – or is that the kidneys?

10. Cigarette smoke – endlessly recirculated by a creaky old fan.

Top Ten Cafe textures and feelings

1. Dried egg between the tines of your fork.

2. The slight give of an orange plastic seat accommodating the contours of your bottom

3. The crunch of sugar under your tea spoon, especially those lumps you find in the sugar bowl clumped together with drops of tea.

4. The smooth, smooth rub of a chair-arm burnished by decades of sleeves.

5. The bundled-up comfort of eating your food with your big outside coat on. (When will they turn the heater’s on?)

6. That glorious equilibrium point where your chair’s tipped back perfectly.

7. Squeezing the farty ketchup out of a large plastic tomato.

8. A dribble of vinegar on your fingers, slightly burning the exposed skin around your cuticles.

9. The smoothness of a formica table top, with the little cracks and blemishes that your fingers find and pick away at without you noticing.

10. The thin, thin yellowy paper your order gets written on.