To put away childish things #21

There was this incident.

It's a long time ago and I suppose one shouldn't bear a grudge but, nevertheless, there was this incident.  I was in my late teens and on the bus on the way home from school. My friend Pete was with me. As was my habit at the time I was sucking on a glacier mint. We had boarded the stop, as usual, at the end of Cumberland Road. Two stops later, at Bilston Clinic, Pete's nephew got on the bus. When he saw me eating he asked me for a sweet. Of course, given our local dialect what he actually said was probably, "giza suck" - something that could well be misconstrued nowadays but an innocent enough remark round here meaning nothing more than "please give me a sweet" (That's "please give me candy" if you are American).

Pete instantly chimed in with "he can't, he only ever carries one in case he gets mugged".

It was so unfair, and so untrue. In the first place I always started the day with two - one for going to school and one for going home. And apart from that the reason that I carried so few was that I liked them and if I'd carried six I'd have eaten six. If I carried six whole bags I'd have eaten them all too.

I've never forgiven him for such a calculatedly offensive remark.

I haven't eaten a glacier mint for years now but I think I may buy a bag on the way home. At two a day they should last me a month or so of journeys too and from work and that's quite enough nostalgia for anyone.

To Put Away Childish Things #18

I found myself the other day getting all nostalgic about the most unlikely thing - school dinners. Back in my day we had no Jamie Oliver to get all righteous about nutrition and vocal about the evil turkey twizzlers, so we were spared the sight of overweight mums feeding salt and sugar laden snacks through the railings to their equally overweight children. As another plus we were also spared the endless bleating on about UK obesity rates by the Daily Mail.

We didn't have a cafeteria style system where we could choose from a wide variety of healthy, nutritious, balanced foods. We couldn't opt for any one of a dozen different meals and snacks. We had what was cooked and we ate it. Never mind that it was often unidentified, and unidentifiable,  brown goo or green goo accompanying a piece of something that might or might not have been meat. Never mind that the dining room always smelled of sprouts - whether they were on the menu or not. Never mind that the gravy for the main course and the custard for the dessert* were served in metal water jugs and were largely indistinguishable except by colour. Never mind any of those things. We queued up with trays and plates and the kitchen staff dolloped it onto the plates and we sat down at tables of eight and ate it. Or possibly left it. That was what passed for a choice back then. 

Ah, how fondly I remember the spotted dick - a suet and currents concoction that made everyone glad that swimming lessons were before lunch. After lunch, with that sitting like so much ballast in the stomach could have proven fatal. 

And who could ever forget the mashed potato with its wallpaper paste consistency - and a taste to match or the peas that came in two varieties - pellets resembling green lead shot or a processed paste of a neon shade unknown in nature.

It was probably passably nutritious - after all we all ate it with no long-lasting ill effects - but by no stretch of the imagination could it ever have been called appetising. And by and large I feel a warm glow of pride that somehow I managed to go through seven years of school dinners without ever once being sick.

What prompted this particular recollection was watch an episode of M*A*S*H where the medics of the 4077 regularly queue up in a very similar fashion to eat what appears to be very similar food. The difference is only in the quality of the scornful sarcasm they heap upon it. And the fact that they are eating it in a battlefield, though, now I come to think of it, school wasn't that unlike a war zone.

Today's kids, with their plethora of healthy options and their tasty wholesome menus don't know they're born. I wonder if anyone has ever thought of appealing to the nostalgia market and opening a restaurant that serves the kind of food my generation grew up on. Probably not. And probably just as well. Nostalgia would be unlikely to survive the reality.

It's been fun, Guy!

Every year I come down for my summer school in Harrow filled with optimism that this will be the year that the chef retires and is replaced by someone who has less of a  fondness for the dreaded mushroom. Every morning I walk into the dining room and find my skin prickling in allergic reaction to the steam from them. I suffer for as long as it takes to eat some breakfast and then depart. I scrutinise the lunch and dinner menus in detail to identify anything that might conceivably contain them. This year is harder than usual as my recently diagnosed gout means I am, by and large, also trying to eat a more vegetarian diet. Yesterday's menu contained, I thought, the ideal thing. I was looking forward to it but now I find I have another question.

What kind of maniac puts mushrooms in macaroni cheese?

Would you like sugar with that?

Today's Calvin And Hobbes strip reminded me that there is a game you can play when you eat out in America. The concept is really easy but it’s almost impossible to win. The idea is to order your food without the waitress asking you a single question. I had been in America for a couple of weeks but hadn't eaten out much and I wasn’t up to speed on it yet so I approached the counter and asked,
“A coffee and a Bacon Lettuce and Tomato sandwich please.”
Without looking up the waitress asked,
“Wheat, white or rye?”
Nonplussed I paused and when she looked up at the delay I asked for wheat.
She nodded and wrote it down.
“Miracle whip or mayo?”
I was getting the hang of it now and unhesitatingly asked for mayo.
“Toasted or plain?”
“Plain”
“And would you like latte, mocha, espresso or regular?”
Unfazed by the switch to discussing my coffee requirements I went for the Latte.
“Small, regular or large?”
“Large”
“With or without sugar?”
“Without.”
“Cream, milk, non dairy creamer or black?”
“With milk please”.

Clearly I should have asked for ‘an untoasted BLT sandwich on wheat bread with mayonnaise and a large Latte coffee with milk but no sugar.”
If I had then it’s a sure bet that she would have come back with
“Will that be cash or charge?”

(This annecdote can be found in my other blog where I posted my entire unpublished book about my travels in North and South America.)

A traveller's guide to eating out

I ought to apologise for the recent dearth of entries in this blog. I could claim that it's pressure of work but I'd be lying. The truth is that I just haven't had anything very much worth saying. I shouldn't let that stop me though,should I? After all I know that the more I post the better the chances that someone may stumble on the blog and like it.

So, I'll try to post more this week. If I can think of anything to post.

Over on my photoblog, I've started a series of entries that just illustrate, without comment but in order, the places that I visited during the year and a half I spent travelling around the world. So far I've posted pictures from New York to Niagara, a tiny fraction of what is to come. You might disagree but I think it's worth a look.

Anyway, I shall begin with recourse to the old trick of reposting something I wrote years ago but which I don't think I've ever posted in this blog. Here then is an old essay about food.

A few years ago I had a week in Catalonia.
It wasn't one of my more adventurous trips, just a humble package tour but as package tours go it was a pretty good one. I visited the Picasso Museum - which by sheer good luck had, in addition to its regular collection, a splendid exhibition of Picasso caricatures. I pottered around Barcelona looking at the weird and wonderful architecture of Anton Gaudi, a man whom many consider to be a true architectural genius but others regard as a raving lunatic. I went to the house of another barking mad genius, Salvador Dali, in Figueras and spent half a day studying the great man's work. I went hiking around Olot, taking in some incredible views and relaxing on the terrace of a marvellous little bar in the picturesque village of Besalu. In short I had a terrific time. I don't want to talk about any of that though. What really stood out though, what was remarked on more than anything else was the Catalonian attitude to food. It's not that the food is bad - far from it, I had uniformly excellent meals - it's just that the menus tend to an obsessive literal-mindedness that is quite startlingly unexpected.

As package groups do we ate together most of the time in a variety of restaurants from the plain but adequate dining room of our hotel in Olot to the hole-in-the-corner cosiness of one of the many restaurants in Girona's old Jewish Quarter to the baroque chic of a restaurant a little way off Las Ramblas in Barcelona. All of them exhibited one trait in common - to steal a phrase, "it does exactly what it says on the label".

That first restaurant in Barcelona had been quite an upmarket place, the sort of place where you can easily imagine celebrities might just drop in, if any of them ever visit the city. While I waited for my meal I scrutinised my fellow diners very carefully in the hope of seeing someone famous but to no avail. I had ordered duck with apple more or less at random from the extensive choice available. And duck with apple is what I got. I'd expected to get a few slices of pinkish meat in some kind of apple sauce with some side helpings of vegetables, perhaps a few potatoes, perhaps a little salad. What I got though was half a roast duck and an apple, unpeeled and cut into quarters. There were no side dishes, no salad, no chips just the duck and the apple. I got quite a good deal out of it though by comparison to others. Those sampling the peas and ham got a ten inch plate of peas with bits of sliced ham scattered throughout, as for the spinach eaters... well two pounds of unaccompanied spinach would probably be more than Popeye could polish off comfortably.

It rapidly became a theme for mealtimes. In Girona my roast lamb was a piece of meat that represented a fair percentage of the animal's total body weight. It was of course served entirely untainted by contact with vegetables. Steak was steak - admittedly in a rather nice Roquefort sauce but otherwise rather lost and lonely on its oversize plate. Turbot was turbot. The crowning glory of this obsessiveness came for those who ordered the "fruit salad" in Olot. It was an apple, an orange and a banana - whole, unpeeled, virgin fruit.

But if there is one lesson I have learned when travelling it's that it doesn't do to be too picky when eating abroad. With the exception of scrutinising absolutely everything for mushrooms which make me violently ill I have one simple rule which has served me well around the world even when the waiters haven't.

"Eat what comes when it comes."

It doesn't matter if it's what you ordered, it doesn't matter if it's what you expected, it doesn't matter if the dessert comes before the starter or everything arrives on your table simultaneously. Just keep quiet and eat.

I recall sitting in a restaurant in a small town in Mexico. At another table was an elderly man, also clearly a tourist, who had ordered whitebait for a starter followed by fajitas for his main course. The sequence of events was really quite comical to watch.

The fajitas arrived. He sent them back as the starter hadn't come.
Fifteen minutes passed.
The whitebait arrived. He took one small forkful, spat it out, said they were overcooked and sent it back.
The fajitas were bought out.
He sent them back and demanded properly cooked whitebait.
The same whitebait arrived. He sent it back and said he would do without a starter.
The fajitas - by now stone cold - arrived. He sent them back because they were cold.
The manager arrived and demanded payment. He refused.
The manager threatened to fetch the police.
Almost apoplectic with rage the man paid up and left.
Meanwhile by simply being prepared to eat my main course before my starter I had not only had a very nice meal but also forty five minutes of priceless entertainment.

Back in Catalonia though there is another quirk of the cuisine. In a word, "pig". Basically, every part of the pig seems to appear somewhere on the menu from the commonplace cuts of pork and pork sausage through to pigs' trotters, pigs' snouts and pigs' cheeks. This combined with the lack of vegetables means that if you are a Moslem or a Vegetarian it probably shouldn't be top of your holiday destinations list unless you are really determined to lose weight. Even for a dedicated carnivore like me the preponderance of meat - especially pork, which I rarely eat at home - gets a little much. By the time I was ready to leave I estimated that if I had kept the food uneaten I'd have had almost enough to assemble a Frankenstein porker, possibly with enough left over for a couple of BLT sandwiches.

There was a short coda to this anti-vegetarian dietary experience. When I got home I called my father from the airport. He promised to have something waiting for me when I reached home. I'd have settled happily for a nice bit of cheddar but he'd cooked me a fry up of sausage and bacon. It would have seemed churlish not to eat it after he'd cooked it but the next day in the supermarket when he placed a shoulder of pork in the basket I waited until he wasn't looking I put it back on the shelf and replaced it with a chicken.
There's only so much that a man can take.

Gotta Take Care

I've just come back into the living room to find my father cursing me in between washing his mouth out with cold water. The trouble is that he rarely listens to things I tell him. Things like "DON'T PUT THIS CHILLI SAUCE ON YOUR SANDWICHES."
There are two bottle of chilli sauce in the cupboard. One, at the front, is a lightly spiced barbecue sauce that is for sandwiches. The other, tucked away at the back is a small bottle of Dave's Insanity Sauce. For those who don't know this is a sauce for cooking. One small drop is enough for quite a large pot of chilli.
His sausage sandwich had a good tablespoonful of the stuff on it.

Fortunately he spit it out without swallowing and only burned the inside of his mouth so there's no permanent harm done but I don't suppose it's a mistake he'll make again.

Mushrooms

There are many (very many) who will say that this is not a poem.

To them I say "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberry!"

I wrote it, I meant it as poem. It's a poem, get over it.

What it isn't, is a NEW poem. I wrote it at about this time last year. It is however very apposite for reasons I will explain after the poem.

The Chef’s obsession with mushrooms.


Menu du jour.

Breakfast
Sautéed mushroom savours

Lunch
Mushroom pâté
Mushroom tartlets with mushroom sauce
Mushroom cannelloni

Dinner
Mushroom soup
Peppers stuffed with mushroom rice
Risotto champignons

Dessert
Ice cream (mushroom flavour)

The reason it is apposite? The chef here still has an obsession with mushrooms. I reacted very badly to the steam from the cooking mushrooms yesterday morning and was truly astonished to find them in the Minestrone soup last night. I like minestrone and it's fortunate that someone noticed and warned me. Who on Earth puts mushrooms in minestrone?

Here's a recipe. And another. And another. And another.
Notice what's missing?
Mushrooms, that's what's missing. Mushroom minestrone. I ask you!

Ten 100-word annecdotes involving food

I don't do lists. They are too trivial and pointless. Waste of space. So this isn't a list of ten one-hundred-word anecdotes involving food.

Definitely not.

1.Kyisimoss Dinner

Panchase Ridge, Nepal, Christmas Day 1993

The locals were preparing Christmas dinner for us. One of them accidentally kicked over the basket that the chickens were under and spent an hilarious fifteen minutes chasing them across the hillside before returning them to their prison to await dismemberment.
I looked away again, to stare at that view across the valley – at the twin peaks of Machapuchare.
I looked back. They were killing a goat for the curry.
And away. And back. They were baking a cake in a round iron pot in a hole in the ground.
They "iced" words onto it with jam.
"Happy Kyismoss 25thDac1393"

2.It's What Flavour?

Beijing, China, 1992

A hint for those travelling in China – don't eat the ice lollies.
Why not? What can possibly be wrong with an ice lolly?
At the delightful Yonghegong temple, I found out. After queuing for tickets in the blazing hot sun, I decided to buy one and cool off. From the selection, I chose one with a green wrapper, expecting it to be apple or kiwi fruit flavour. It wasn't. It was chopped green beans frozen in sugar water. It tasted disgusting. I gave it to a passing ten-year-old, who evidently didn't agree with my assessment, and went into the temple.

3.Just For The Tourists

Somewhere on the Amazon, Ecuador, 1999

Look! Absolutely no one really does this, right? It's like the sheeps' eyes thing. Made up to gross out the tourists. So here we are, a day out in the Amazon Jungle. See, there's our guide, over there, breaking a branch off that tree.
Urgh. It's covered in ants. He wants us to do what? No way! Wait. Dave's taken the stick. He's licking them off.
Why did he have to do that? No we all have to do it or look like wimps. I like fresh food but this is ridiculous.
No, I don't think they taste of lemons.

4.I've Had This Before

Austria, 1989

The morning, billed as a strenuous hike, was in reality a gentle, albeit uphill, stroll. Nevertheless we were ready for lunch and grateful to find such a delightful Alpine bistro. Now Donald was studying the menu. Most of us played safe with the easy translations. He declared loudly
"Ah, I think I've had this before." and ordered something unrecognisable before starting lecturing us on haut cuisine.
Fifteen minutes later a plate containing several pounds of almost raw, quivering white fat was placed before him.
"Oh," he said "That's not at all what I was expecting."
Everyone tried not to laugh.

5.A Smell Of Water Bug

Vientiane, Laos, 14 February 1998

Translated menus should be approached carefully. Things are not always as they seem. We sat in the restaurant. We ordered. The waitress brought food. My beef and peanut curry was bright red, astoundingly hot and very tasty. David's sticky rice was rice. It was sticky. Warren, more adventurous, ordered "Chilli with smell of water bug". A translation problem, he assured us. It was a plate of vegetables with little unidentifiable black things. One of them turned over, grew legs and escaped over the side of the plate. Translated menus should be approached carefully. Things are sometimes exactly as they seem.

6.Frankendeer

Inari, Finland, 1995

I hadn't fancied the boat trip and that left me at a loose end in an especially uninteresting town. After a little desultory exploration I decided on a whim to try reindeer for lunch. It came as shapeless lumps of unappealing grey meat served with about two kilos of mashed potato. It was deeply unimpressive.
Afterwards I explored the shops which seemed to contain every conceivable reindeer part fashioned into every conceivable souvenir. If I'd bought them all I could have probably reassembled a complete animal.
Later, back at camp, Herman had prepared a treat. Reindeer stew. With mashed potato.

7.Hotpot?

Chengdu, China, 3 August 2001

Misled, perhaps, by having already found a café that did bacon sandwiches, I felt optimistic about dinner. Hotpot. It conjured images of steaming potato-topped stew.
It was an upmarket restaurant but I was puzzled by the polo-mint-shaped tables. We were quickly seated and gas burners, built into the table, lit. A put was suspended over it, divided into two sections. One contained bubbling red lava, the other bubbling green slime. We were given plates of unidentifiable shredded meat.
"Drop them in," said my guide," "Then take them out with the chopsticks and eat. Be careful. The red one is hot."

8.A short treatise on literal-mindedness

Barcelona, Spain, 2004

Catalonian restaurateurs must be trained in literal-mindedness. Menus deliver precisely what is written on them in black and white. In a chic restaurant I ordered duck with orange, expecting perhaps duck in an orange flavoured sauce and a few accompanying vegetables. What I got was half a duck. And an orange. Whole and unpeeled. Others ordered peas and ham, which was a large bowl of peas and a slice of boiled ham. I was sorriest for the man who ordered the spinach. Two kilos of boiled spinach, unsullied by contact with other foodstuffs, would be more than Popeye could manage.

9.Keep Your Hands Off My Sausages

Various locations, South America, 1999

There are two main varieties of vegetarian – moral and practical. The practical ones don't eat meat because they don't like it, the moral ones because they prefer a more ethical treatment of animals. I don't understand either of them but I respect their views. The trouble is the third kind – the part-time vegetarians. When you are cooking at the campfire and you've prepared, at their request, a separate meatless option, it's annoying to have them nick your sausages because they "look nice". I'm sorry but vegetarians are like virgins. You is or you ain't. And keep away from my sausages.

10.As Sure As Eggs Ain't Eggs

San Jose, Philippines 22^nd December 1995

There is something important that you need to be told,
So listen, listen well now, I beg.
Though it may look like one on the menu
"Balut" simply doesn't mean egg.
Oh, it's true it's an egg in most senses.
It came from a hen, can't deny it,
But you need to delve closer and deeper
If you think, "That looks great! Think I'll try it."
For a "balut", though an egg is quite fertile
And if it's closer to hatching that's more tasty.
It's a "boil in the shell" baby chicken,
So when choosing your lunch, be less hasty.