John Wesley Harding knows when he gets an email, phone message or a piece of postal junk addressing him as “John,” it’s coming from someone who’s never met him. He’s known to friends as “Wes,” since his real name (the one he uses in his second career as an award-winning author) is Wesley Stace. Harding’s 15th album, Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead, depicts an artist well aware of what he does best: marvelously witty lyrics delivered in an emotion-wracked singing voice. Harding will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.
John Wesley Harding: When I was young and beginning, I rented a room in Brixton and fell in with a friendly bunch of New Zealanders. One of these, Margot, was married to a young cook called Fergus Henderson. My best friend, Mark, had his wedding meal at Fergus’ relatively new London restaurant, St. John. Mark and his wife, Franny, to whom I had introduced him, died in a plane crash on their honeymoon two weeks later. Because of this association, I haven’t set foot in the place since, despite the fact that I think it’s the greatest restaurant in the world and that Fergus, whom I barely knew and met on probably two occasions, is the greatest chef. I didn’t know him at the time, but I feel like I know him very well now, purely by cooking from his two cookbooks, The Whole Beast: Nose To Tail Eating and Beyond Nose To Tail. And this is why I found myself, the day before yesterday, buying six pig’s trotters, boiling them, shredding them, then watching them set into what Fergus calls “Trotter Gear”: “nudgels of giving wobbly pig’s trotter captured in a splendid jelly.” (It’s the jellied base of many of the meals in Beyond Nose To Tale.) And why we found ourselves eating beef and pickled walnut stew last night. And it was good. These cookbooks are wondrous to hold (and behold) and quite beautifully written: “There we go, frail no longer,” after eating a chicken and ox tongue pie, which we have simmered “until the word ‘silky’ comes to mind.” We placed the beef stew in “a gentle oven,” and (as advised) drank a martini, while “sniffing the musk of [our] braised beef.” We didn’t manage to make the “dish that could be accused of being a salad.” You could cook from the book or recite it—either way. Man can not live by trotters alone. Not when, on page 50 of Beyond Nose To Tail, there is a recipe for braised squirrel.
