This Week in Food Porn: Sweet Buns and Indian Pizza

‘Tis well to be bereft of promis’d good, that we may lift the soul, and contemplate with lively joy the joys we cannot share.

So said Coleridge when he was laid up with a broken leg and a tray of salty snacks, while his mates went off to a ramble. And so say we. For, while you may not be able to wrap your mouth around every delicious dish that makes its way onto the algorithms of Instagram, you may still contemplate with lively joy all the best of this week’s food, shared for you here, in one handy morsel.

Enjoy.

I don’t know about you, but I love nothing more of a drizzling winter morning than to eat my breakfast out of an assortment of desk tidies, or off a ping pong bat resting on an old pair of knickers. Really sets me up for the day.

One of the greatest pleasures afforded to us by cheap international air travel (“Sorry there’s no oxygen, kids! I wanted to spend the weekend in Zurich.”) is tasting what happens when one nation makes the food of another. Here is the Indian version of pizza and, good golly Miss Delhi, it looks fucking great. By which I mean weird. By which I mean cheesy. By which I mean like a freshly opened cyst. Frankly, I don’t know what I’m looking at but I know I’m tempted to catch the next train to the subcontinent and have a bash.

So Kendall Jenner’s heart hair selfie was the most-liked photo on Instagram over the last entire year. Big fucking woo. Can you eat hair? Would you want to eat off Kendall Jenner’s floor? Have you ever coughed up a heart-shaped hairball? Exactly. Stick to the berries, friends. They won’t wrap themselves around your colon and make a haystack.

You would pluck out the heart of my mystery … ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me. That’s Hamlet. I think he’s making a wanking joke. And that is the heart of a pomegranate. And it makes me want to lie down.

Are you choosing somewhere to sit on the bus? No? Then stop picking your seat. It’ll make your fingers smell.

Remember that film where Steve Martin falls in love with a brain? You know, the one that looks like a purple cauliflower in a jar? He takes her out on a lake in a rowing boat? Wearing a straw hat and, well, a jar? Yeah. Reminds me of something.

Sometimes the name does it all. Sweet buns, pal. Sweet hog bristle-brushed buns. Sweet, shiny doughbuns, balls.

I remember lying on my back in the Southern sun, staring up at the sky with stubbled grass biting against my back, screaming out the Latin names of clouds: “Cirrus! Nimbustratos! Cumulus!” we cried, waiting to brush our hands against each others’ thighs and turn our heads. I forgot aurantiaco fructum, of course. And so Rome fell.

You know at the end of a wedding? When the bride’s spray tan has started to collect around her ankles and in her armpits? When the groom is soft and limp with drink? When the greasy shine of marital celebration is all over their foreheads and across their upper lips? And the bride tries to pull her dress off, from the shoulders? To reveal, inch by tantalising inch, her breasts? But instead she gets caught on an elbow and ends up sliding—arse first—down the fitted wardrobe? That’s what we’re looking at, isn’t it? It’s that, in food form. Wonderful.

Sometimes toast is toast. And sometimes toast is that thing Sigourney Weaver is trying to run away from in Aliens, smothered in truffle oil.