Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table

Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table Nigel Slater Like Nigel Slater’s multi-award-winning food memoir ‘Toast’, this is a celebration of the glory, humour, eccentricities and embarrassments that are the British at Table.The British have a relationship with their food that is unlike that of any other country. Once something that was never discussed in polite company, it is now something with which the nation is obsessed. But are we at last developing a food culture or are we just going through the motions?‘Eating for England’ is an entertaining, detailed and somewhat tongue-in-cheek observation of the British and their food, their cooking, their eating and how they behave in restaurants, with chapters on – amongst other things – dinner parties, funeral teas, Indian restaurants, dieting and eating whilst under the influence.Written in Nigel Slater’s trademark readable style, ‘Eating for England’ highlights our idiosyncratic attitude towards the fine art of dining. Eating for England The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table Nigel Slater Copyright (#u71f98430-ebbb-5586-a82d-18f9e893debf) Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2007 Copyright © Nigel Slater 2007 Nigel Slater asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Some Photographs were unavailable for the electronic edition. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780007199471 Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780007370047 Version: 2016-09-22 For D and P and in memory of M Contents Cover (#u87e728f5-e1a1-5897-bf4d-1795e06fe6e6) Title Page (#ue70726db-3f84-5914-a5d9-f20c32e49c93) Copyright Preface In a Stew Harvest Festival The Lunchbox Toblerone The Kitchen Fusspot Black Pudding Cake Forks and Sticky Fingers Shopping on the Internet – Couch Potatoes The Biscuit Tin The Digestive Bread and Butter Pudding Eating Soldiers Lunch on a Bench Combating that Sinking Feeling The Coffee Percolator Faggots and Gravy The Naked Cook Murray Mints The Farmers’ Market – An Allotment for Wimps Rhubarb and Custard Fruit and Nut The Setting of Jam Oxo Cubes Feeding the Elderly Custard A Custard The Economical Cook The Voucher Queen A Cake Walk through Britain The Gingerbread Wars Shopping for Meat Toast – The Story of a Nation’s Hunger Frogspawn and Nosebleeds Stirring Jam into Your Rice Pudding – Or Not The Nut Cutlet A Child in the Restaurant – 1964 Toffees The Midnight Feast Jacob’s Club Rubbernecking – The Lost Art of Celebrity-Spotting The Wind in Your Face, a Fish in Your Bag Summer Cooking The Jaffa Cake The Village Shop – The Font of All Knowledge and Fairy Soap Tripe and Onions Aga Toast The Chocolate Digestive The Rich Tea Fudge Ribena Filling Your Bag Old English Spangles Fry’s Five Centres Making Coffee Breakfast The Chocolate Bar – A Curiously British Obsession ‘My Name is Carol and I am a Chocoholic’ Your Life in Your Hands Chopsticks at Dawn Heinz Tomato Ketchup Kia Ora Tipping, as Only the Brits Know How Jelly Babies This Little Piggy The Tight-Arse Cook Washing Up Mashed Swede Ginger Cake Cream Sponge Eating in the Street – ‘I’ll Have That with Wings’ Throwing a Coffee Morning The Cadbury’s Flake A Teenager at the Table Scones and the Sultana Problem Bourbon Biscuits Dairylea Custard Creams Modern Shopping The Ritual of the KitKat The Slightly Grubby Wholemeal Cook Cyril’s Stew Dripping – The Heart and Soul A Taste of the Future Floral Gums Sherbet Lemons Fray Bentos Steak-and-Kidney Pie Eating Outdoors Eating Pomegranates with a Pin Mint Cracknel Winter Food The Jammie Dodger Liquorice Sticks Liquorice Wood The Chocolate Finger and That One with the Hole In A Good Roasting Boiled Brussels Sprouts Pontefract Cakes Bath Chaps Fancy Toast White Food Golden Mint Humbugs Lardy Cake The Expense Account Lunch The Suburban Day Out Lunch Quality Street Branston Pickle Paying the Price A Third-Generation Fishmonger The Work of Pixies Gravy The Extravagant Cook That Old Black Magic Brawn and Mustard Trifle – A Social Indicator The Best Biscuit of All? Chocolate Limes Sharing the Bill – The Weasel at the Table Sweetness and Light Scones on Harris PG Tips Robertson’s Golden Shred The Specialist Shop The Case for Clicks not Bricks Frying Tonight The Taste of the New The Grow-Your-Own Cook Pre-Jamie Man Post-Jamie Man If You Can’t Stand the Heat Scratchings Chocolate ?clairs The Sweet Shop The Berni Inn Lunch Crumpets, Pikelets, Muffins and Their Purpose The Death of the Chocolate Cake The Corner Shop – Our Little Life-Saver Carving Haggis, Tatties and Neeps Gilding the Lily Cake and Cheese Everton Mints Welsh Rarebit Junket – The Clue is in the Name Tunnock’s Teacakes Poaching The Cookery Hen The Oh-I-Never-Measure-Anything Cook How to Dress a Scone Bisto Colman’s Mustard A Day at the Market The British Lunch Out of Doors Then The British Lunch Outdoors Now A Litmus Test The Victoria Sandwich Gibbs After-Dinner Mints The After Eight Mint The Glorious British Chocolate Bar Rest in Peace The Supermarket Fish Shame The Greengrocer – A Local Hero A Nation of Old Boilers Hotel Toast Dick and Other Delights Dead Man’s Leg The Glue Factor The Gingernut Pear Drops Acid Drops Aniseed Balls Butterscotch A Drop or Two of Sauce Midget Gems Winter Teas – The Crumpet Season A Muffin Worry How to Open an English Muffin A Log Fire Tea – Some Suggestions Cupcakes at the Hummingbird High Tea The Packed Lunch Werther’s Originals The Polo Mint Camp Coffee Robinson’s Barley Water Out of a Net and onto the Net Marmite The Organic Box The Neat and Tidy Cook The Cool, Modern Shopper Cook ‘Hands that Do Dishes’ Things Move On The Death of the Cheese Board Thick Toast Best Friends Treacle Tart Coconut Ice The Cream Cracker Barley Sugars Nut Toffee Brown Sauce Eating with the Wasps A Summer Tea – A Few Polite Suggestions Seaside Rock A National Hero Sarson’s Vinegar The Pink Wafer Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author From the reviews of Eating for England Also by Nigel Slater About the Publisher Preface (#u71f98430-ebbb-5586-a82d-18f9e893debf) New York, late autumn, and I have just taken the short walk from Central Park to Carnegie Hall, where I am being interviewed for a radio show. It’s a bright, invigoratingly breezy day and I’m feeling confident. I know what I am to be interviewed about, and am pretty sure of my ground and even remain unfazed when, at the last minute, I find that the interview is going out live. As I say, I know my ground. And then comes the question, the one I wasn’t prepared for, the one where I am asked to describe British food to the listeners. Do I tell them about the meltingly tender lamb from North Ronaldsay, the famous apple hat pudding with its tender suet crust, or the northern teacake known as the fat rascal? Do I have time to enthuse about the joys of medlar jelly, damson gin and the unpasteurised cheeses made down long leafy lanes in Dorset, Devon and Dumfries? Perhaps I should wax eloquent about Wiltshire bacon, sherry trifle, Christmas pudding, or steak-and-kidney pie with its crumbly pastry and dark and savoury filling? Will there be time to get in name-checks for Scottish heather honey, toasted teacakes, gooseberry fool and Caerphilly cheese? And will they let me squeeze in the glory that is a decent haggis, Welsh rarebit or Cornish pasty? Or do I tell them the truth? That for every Brit eating our legendary roast beef and jam roly poly there are a million more tucking into Thai green curry and pepperoni pizza. That more people probably eat chocolate brownies than apple crumble and custard, and that it is now easier to find decent sushi than really good roast beef. Should I mention too that despite our love of all that is local, fresh, organic and ‘real’, we also have a list of edible icons more eccentric than anyone could ever imagine? It is well known that we have been arguing for years whether gravy should be thick or thin, if pickled onions should be part of a ploughman’s lunch, or whether or not jelly belongs in a trifle. I wonder what they would also make of the fact that different counties argue about whether the jam or the clotted cream goes onto a scone before the other, or that more of us apparently use gravy browning than wine to capture the heavenly pan juices of our Sunday roast. British food is, of course, about roast beef and Yorkshire pudding; it is about dressed crab, and roast chicken with nutmeggy bread sauce. It is about huge flakes of locally caught fish in crisp batter, eaten from the paper with the sea breeze in your hair, oysters from Whitstable as fresh as an icy wave, Eccles cakes with soft, flaky pastry, and the best bacon sandwich in the world. But it is also about Heinz tomato ketchup, brown sauce and Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut. The biggest names on the high street are not Betty’s tea rooms but Starbucks and Subway. There are more Pizza Expresses than traditional pie and mash caf?s, and more McDonald’s than fish-and-chip shops. Looking at some people’s supermarket trolleys (oh, come on, you know you have), I sometimes wonder how you could define this country’s tastes at all. The internet, by the way, gives approximately 375,000 entries for roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, but over five million for that other great British invention, the Mars bar. The fact of the matter is that our food culture is about both the gentle, buttercup-scented cheese made in a village barn the colour of honey, and the childish delight of unwrapping a foil triangle of Dairylea. It is indeed true that we make the most crumbly and agreeable oatcakes in the world, but it is the mass-produced cream cracker that has become the culinary icon. And despite producing some of the most delectable pork products in the world, we still love tucking into a bacon sandwich from a greasy-spoon caf?. We have a greater wealth of good food in this country today than ever before. When I go to the market at the weekend for my cheeses, vegetables and meat, I am spoilt for choice by the food we produce, and often come home with a shopping bag almost too heavy to lift. In that respect I think of myself as being truly attached to the locally-produced, the artisan-crafted and the handmade. So how come I also regard a plain chocolate digestive biscuit as one of the finest things this country has to offer? The British have a curiously broad culinary identity. Only the na?ve would now try to pin us down as a meat-and-two-veg culture. You could argue that ours is a rich and multiculturally exciting cuisine, reflecting a country of diverse tastes and open minds; but equally, it sometimes looks as if we are in a state of total culinary shambles. If we hold up a pot of tea with scones and jam as a national treasure (and I do), then why is it easier to find an Italian cappuccino and an all-American blueberry muffin on most high streets? And how is it that while the French almost called a national strike over any suggestion of using pasteurised milk in their cheeses, the Spanish all but went to war to protect their fishing, and Italy gave its Parmesan cheese internationally protected status, we British only truly went into meltdown over the repackaging of the KitKat? (And quite rightly, if you ask me.) What the French or the Italians may get excited about is very, very different from what most of us in these islands are likely to hold dear. We hold a candle for everything from black pudding to the Custard Cream, feel more fondness for Murray Mints than for a decent veal chop, and are rather partial to leaving our most famous food for the tourists while we ourselves tuck into something from another culture. This book is my portrait of this curious, often contrary culture, from our adoration of the kipper, the pork scratching and the Rowntree’s Fruit Gum to our inability to tip properly in restaurants. I feel that while the heroic efforts of our artisan food-makers have been well catalogued (though still far from well enough patronised), all too little attention has been paid to the food that most of us either actually eat, or at least carry a certain lingering affection for. Eating for England is simply a personal celebration of the food this nation cherishes, the rituals we observe, the curious and even eccentric thing that is the British and their food. Nigel Slater June 2007 In a Stew (#u71f98430-ebbb-5586-a82d-18f9e893debf) The British make an everyday stew with cubes of beef, carrots, parsnips and onions. They pour a jug of water over it, tuck in a bay leaf and leave it in the oven to do its own thing for four hours. What emerges is grey, meltingly tender meat and gently flavoured broth, comforting and unapologetic in its frugality. It tastes of nothing but itself. There are formal similarities between our national stew and those of Europe and its neighbours. The knee-jerk shopping list of onions and carrots; the introduction of some sort of benevolent liquid; the convenient habit of leaving the simmering ingredients unattended for an hour or more, are common to all. The southern French recipe will be made with beef rump, its obligatory onions softened in the bright, fruity oil of the region, and its seasonings of orange peel, mauve garlic, sun-scarred tomatoes and, possibly, lavender inevitably breathe sunshine into its soul. Further north, as you potter down the Rhone valley during the vendange in October, your day might be punctuated by a paper-tablecloth lunch of cubed beef that has simmered since breakfast with shallots, strips of unsmoked bacon, rosemary and mushrooms in an inky violet-red wine. The Italians, though less likely to use alcohol, will add body to the simplest stew of boneless brisket with the introduction of a whole, cheap tongue and a gelatinous, collagen-rich cotechino sausage. The juices that surround the meat may look more like ours than do the mahogany-hued French or the paprika-stained Spanish versions, but will be silkily limpid in the mouth because of the goodness distilled from both tongue and cotechino. If a British stew is rich at all, it will be because of the early addition of flour to the meat, the thickening qualities of which give the impression of suavity but add nothing in terms of flavour. And then, just as we Brits abandon our stew to the hungry hordes gathered at the table, the cooks of other nations will add a vital snap of freshness and vigour to lift it from its sleepy brown torpor: the French their persillade of vivid parsley, anchovy and lemon; the Moroccans a slick of tongue-tingling harissa the colour of a rusty bucket; and the Italians a pool of hot, salty salsa verde pungent with basil, mustard and mint. The Catalans, who, as history would have it, are unlikely ever to spend a penny more than necessary, will even so stir in a final topping of garlic, breadcrumbs, almonds and bitter chocolate fit for royalty. The basics are familiar in every place; it is only the details, or lack of them, that introduce into the British version the unmistakable air of culinary poverty. Their stews are the colour of mud, blood or ochre pigment, and taste of thyme and garlic, orange and almonds, basil and lemon. Ours is the colour of washing-up water and smells of old people. Harvest Festival (#u71f98430-ebbb-5586-a82d-18f9e893debf) Apart from Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, and the time the BBC came to film Songs of Praise, my family never really went to church. Yet my father and stepmother always attended harvest festival, usually with me struggling behind with a heavy box of beans, a bag of carrots, and once a wooden crate of windfall apples from the garden. The little stone church that sat at the bottom of the hill, and where my father’s funeral would eventually take place, would have marrows of various sizes, bundles of leeks tied with string, and bunches of dahlias the colour of wine gums stacked outside the door. Inside, loaves of bread and the produce of so many local gardens – pots of asters and bunches of chrysanthemums – were propped around the altar and tucked in the deep stone window ledges. The smell, of over-ripe damsons and yellow sunflowers, of freshly picked runner beans and home-made raspberry jam, was undercut with a sharp beery smell from the newly harvested hop fields (the church was in the middle of the Hereford–Ledbury–Bromyard hop triangle). I remember feeling that there could be nothing more beautiful than an English church decorated for harvest home. I can’t help thinking we still do harvest festival well, although it’s a pity that pensioners now insist on bringing tins of Heinz beans. A marrow would be much more pleasing, though presumably a bugger for the old dears to fit in their handbags. I have always wondered why the sight of a place of worship decorated for harvest thanksgiving is so distinctly British, or at least not especially European. I recently clicked that it is the turning colour of the trees in the churchyards, the honey, orange and deep red leaves, that make the festival so much prettier than it is in warmer climates, whose trees are mostly evergreen (save possibly Vermont, though I have never been there). It is the whole picture, of harvested vegetables, bunches of spiky orange and pink dahlias, and the turning trees that make this a picture of Britain to treasure. It hasn’t always been so. The only reason the Church got involved was to bring a little order to the rampant frolicking and drunkenness that traditionally accompanied the end of the harvest. It may have been a time for the farmers to say thank you to their workers, but it was also a time for those who toiled in the fields to get off their faces, fight and fornicate. Then a bit of decorum was brought into the proceedings in the shape of the church thanksgiving service. There’s the bloody Victorians for you. The Lunchbox (#u71f98430-ebbb-5586-a82d-18f9e893debf) There is a certain grace with which Indian women glide through the rice fields, lunchboxes in hand. It is as if you are witnessing a slow procession at a religious festival, rather than wives bringing lunch to their husbands. Of course a pink or saffron sari floating in the breeze against a lavender sky will always appear more romantic than one of us popping out to British Home Stores for a cheese and pickle. School tuck boxes aside, the art of the packed lunch has very much fallen by the wayside. The oblong tin, its lid held secure by a rubber band, is a rare sight now, though the treasures it contains are just as fascinating. By rights the home-made sandwiches should be accompanied by a slice of cake and an apple, though things have moved on a bit. If there is a modern designer version, presumably without the rubber band, it may well now be filled with stuffed focaccia and a little pot of blueberries, or maybe a slice of panettone. The utterly essential Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer has no doubt been replaced by one of Ms Gillian McKeith’s bowel-opening fibre bars. Hardly ideal, I would have thought, when you are walking through the Yorkshire Dales. Toblerone (#u71f98430-ebbb-5586-a82d-18f9e893debf) I have always found a bar of Toblerone almost as difficult to conquer as the mountain peaks its design so clearly represents. But beyond the familiar rattle of the bar in its triangular box, and the ragged job you inevitably make of unwrapping it from its foil, lies a quietly classic piece of confectionery quite unlike any other. Whatever way you try to tackle it, a Toblerone is an obstacle course. It can take a few attempts to break a triangle from the nougat-speckled bar without actually hurting your knuckles, and then, when you finally do, you have a piece of pointy chocolate slightly too big for your mouth. You bite with your front teeth and find the chocolate barely gives, so you attempt to snap it with your fingers, and find that doesn’t work either. The only thing left is to pop the whole lump in your mouth and suck. The pointed end hits the roof of your mouth, so you roll it over with your tongue, only to find that it makes a lump in your cheek It is as impossible to eat elegantly as a head of sweetcorn. The only answer is to let the nut-freckled chocolate soften slowly in the warmth of your mouth while rolling it over and over on your tongue. The nutty, creamy chocolate suddenly seems worth every bit of discomfort, and you decide to do it all over again with another piece. We persevere because we think we like it, which of course we do, but there is more to it than that. Toblerone is a natural step between the cheap, fatty bars in purple wrapping and the posh stuff with its crispness and deep flavour further up the chocolate ladder. Any child who chooses the pyramid of mountain peaks over a slab of Dairy Milk is obviously on his or her way to becoming a chocolate connoisseur. One often wonders just who actually buys this delightful Swiss-tasting confection, as you never, ever see anyone eating it. Toblerone also has the curious honour of being present in every hotel minibar I have ever opened. Even the one in Thailand, where the only other occupant was a Tetra Pak of tepid tamarind juice and a bottle of mosquito repellent. It is in fact the mini-bar bar, and as you sit alone in your hotel room, letting the pointy, uncomfortable lump of confectionery melt slowly on your tongue, your bar of Toblerone may well, albeit briefly, become your best friend. The Kitchen Fusspot (#u71f98430-ebbb-5586-a82d-18f9e893debf) They are, in the kitchen at least, late developers. Often genteel, effete, with a little too much time on their hands. Meals emerge from their kitchens with a sense of expectation, each ingredient having been painstakingly sourced, every direction in the cookery book followed to the letter, and inevitably late. The meal has something of the theatrical production about it, albeit amateur dramatics, as if it has all been so, so much trouble. Which of course it has. And don’t we know it. The kitchen fusspot prepares dinner – a charming though slightly too creamy soup, meat with a syrupy, over-reduced sauce, a dessert as elaborate as an Ascot hat and probably just as indigestible – while his guests get more and more hungry, not to say a little pissed. The kitchen, once tidy enough to appear in the pages of World of Interiors, now resembles a bombsite of stacked roasting tins, saut? pans and sieves. Fusspot is almost always male. He only cooks once a month, if that, and needs endless encouragement and ego massage. The production starts several days before, with working out what to cook with the aid of a pile of cookery books of the celebrity-chef variety, and a shopping list, often taken to bed. There may be a tasting of the wines to be served, many of which have come from his own cellar. The menu will be changed every day, each dish chosen for its ability to follow its predecessor perfectly, to match the wines, to show the cook at his most competent. The directions will have been analysed in a way the poor cookery writer never dreamed of, each line dissected and filleted and then given a jolly good roasting. The kitchen fusspot – let’s call him, say, Julian – is a follower of orders, and a cookery writer’s nightmare. He cooks without any ability other than that of doing what he is told; a cook incapable of using the merest pinch of invention, imagination or intuition. One wonders – briefly – what he would be like in bed. Perversely, the fusspot likes nothing better than recipes that ‘don’t quite work’. ‘I think it needs something, don’t you?’ is his knee-jerk response to every recipe he tries. A little more balsamic, a touch of white pepper, a little B?arnaise sauce on the side. The idea that it might be fine as it is is unthinkable. Black Pudding (#ulink_b9d4716a-f570-545a-b6e5-a78c874a5a59) Be it in the form of berries, loops or horseshoes, or maybe sliced from one long, charcoal-coloured dong, the black pudding remains adored and loathed in equal measure. As with tripe, gooseberries and junket, there is no middle ground. Modern squeamishness has led to those of us who turn misty-eyed about such treats being thought of as carnivorous beyond redemption, if not long-lost members of the Addams family. True, our holy grail is a sausage made from the blood of an ox, thickened with pig fat, pearl barley, oatmeal and rusk, but no one should let a little thing like blood and guts get in the way of good eating. What makes the black pudding so delectable, so deeply savoury, so toe-curlingly satisfying, is partly down to good taste, and partly to the pleasure of knowing that our respect for an animal’s life extends to the point where we refuse to let even its blood go to waste. Of course, there is black pudding and there is black pudding. At its worst it is dry, sour and solid. At its best, moist, crumbly and herbal, with a perfect balance of sweetness and deep savour (not to mention being grilled to just the right crispness). I would list a good black pudding as one of the dishes I would want at my last supper, but then it would have to be the very best, and that is where one gets into deep, and very hot, water. Black pudding fanciers are fiercely loyal, ever ready to challenge anyone who dares to suggest that their butcher’s pudding is tastier. The national contests to find the best are always controversial, and cause heated debate. There could even, after a celebratory drink or three, be what used to be called fisticuffs. (A drop or two more of spilled blood is neither here nor there when you consider that it can take ninety litres of blood to make a decent batch.) Those who trawl southern shops looking for a good pud may wonder if this piece of charcuterie, or perhaps one should say porkery, is about to disappear from the planet, but northerners, particularly those living around Bury in Lancashire, know better. Despite the occasional closure of an outlet here and there, the blood pudding is showing signs of a renaissance, partly due to its being the current darling of many top chefs, who make the most of its savoury qualities as a garnish for other porky or even piscine delights. Black pudding and scallops is much, much more interesting than one might imagine, and is no more strange than bacon with scallops, better known as angels on horseback. While the notion of a butcher’s kitchen awash with blood and rusk may appeal to the more deeply carnivorous, it should be noted that a certain number of sausages are actually made with dried blood, and this certainly seems to pacify the health inspectors. Whether such practices have an effect on the finished article remains a subject for debate. It should go without saying that most recipes remain a closely guarded secret, especially in the crucial and delicate matter of seasoning. And while thyme, marjoram and winter savory are often mentioned, the actual mix of herbs is something most pudding-makers would fight tooth and nail, and no doubt blood and fat, to keep in the family. I suspect that those who have tried and disliked Britain’s proud answer to France’s celebrated boudin noir may not have eaten one of the first order. To do so is to experience a piece of craftsmanship that extends beyond sheer cookery. A good black pudding is nothing short of a work of art. Cake Forks and Sticky Fingers (#ulink_4a098d5e-7f5e-59ae-a06e-dcfaeaab0441) The Continental cake is slim, shallow, understated. It may be flavoured with almond, pistachio, bitter-orange or rose, and its sugared-almond-coloured box will be tied with a loop of the thinnest pink ribbon, from which it can dangle elegantly from a begloved Parisian hand. English cake is fat, thick and cut in short, stubby wedges; there will be sticky cherries, swirls of buttercream, and sometimes royal icing. What it lacks in elegance it makes up for in enthusiasm. A French madeleine is a petite almond cake delicately ridged like a miniature scallop shell. An English madeleine is a dumpy castle made out of sponge, doused in raspberry jam and sprinkled with desiccated coconut. It then gets a cherry on top, and if it’s really lucky, wings of livid green angelica. It’s a case of Proust versus Billy Bunter. British cakes have a certain wobbly charm to them, and what might be missing in terms of finesse is there in lick-your-fingers stickiness. Fruit-laden Genoa, chunky marmalade, Irish seed cake and glorious coffee and walnut are not delicacies you eat politely with a cake fork, they are something you tuck into with the enthusiasm of a labrador at a water bowl. Shopping on the Internet – Couch Potatoes (#ulink_505d68c6-b75d-55f9-9a31-fe7548a75fb5) You wander down the virtual aisles plucking your supper off the virtual shelves and dropping it into your virtual basket. No wonky trolleys, no kids throwing tantrums by the iced low-fat doughnuts, no sleazy music sending subliminal messages to get you to buy two instead of one (not that you even wanted one, anyway), and no one at the checkout fiddling to find the right change (Oh, for God’s sake, just hand over a twenty, will you?) Add to that the fact that there is no one to peer disapprovingly at your fun pack of assorted crisps, or to look down their ecologically superior nose at you because you have chosen Persil over Ecover, and you have the perfect shopping environment. Once you have found in which section the kitchen foil and cling film lives, and worked out which of the seventeen sizes of bin bag is the one that actually fits your bin, and eventually mastered the checkout process, you could, in theory, save hours, giving yourself more time to spend with the family, or finally to take up pilates. Pity you can’t put petrol in the car online too. To every up, however, there must be a down, and internet shopping has more than a few. Your inability to find the right dishwasher tablets; the accidental ordering of the wrong colour loo roll (what exactly DO you do with nine apricot-coloured bog rolls?), and the table-thumping, expletive-ridden stress that you suffer when your perfect shopping trip crashes thirty seconds from the final ‘Thank you for shopping with Tesco’ are usually enough to get even the most fervent net-head making for the nearest Sainsbury’s. Add to this the niggling fact that Big Brother now knows how many bars of milk chocolate you get through in a week, or that you haven’t needed to buy condoms for a month, and your twenty-first-century shopping trip begins to look a little less like retail Nirvana. But it goes deeper than this. The occasional online shopping list won’t do that much damage to the continued existence of your local shops, but the regular delivery of all you need and more to your door will indeed have a disastrous effect on your cheery local grocer’s till. Eventually he will have to shut up shop and move to a cosy flat by the sea, leaving room for a tacky Southern Fried Chicken takeaway to open in his place. Frankly, you deserve it, and when you come to sell up yourself, you may find your would-be buyers less than keen to move into an area whose local shopping street is littered with polystyrene cartons and tomato-sauce sachets with the corner bitten off. And where do you run to when you need that emergency loo roll? The Biscuit Tin (#ulink_b66d2e47-9146-5a1d-bb18-15a1217ae622) Lift the lid of a biscuit tin and you enter a world of chocolate Bourbons, understated, knobbly Lincolns, crumbly digestives and Jammie Dodgers. A secret place where there are lemon puffs, gingernuts, Jaffa Cakes and, if you are lucky, the occasional chocolate finger. No other country whose grocers’ shelves I have encountered offers the punter and his purse such a display of sugar-sprinkled flour and butter, blobs of jam and drizzles of chocolate, cr?me fillings and white icing. We are the everyday biscuit capital of the world (the Dutch hold sway at the top end of the cookie market). What France is to cheese and Italy is to pasta, Britain is to the biscuit. The tin, with its tight lid and cute pictures, is a playground for those who like their snacks sweet and crisp and reeking of tradition. But there is more to it than that. While some of our biscuits, such as the Custard Cream and the Bourbon, have become icons of our time, there are others whose everlasting success must always remain something of a mystery. What sort of person chooses a pale, dry Rich Tea when there are so many other more interesting biscuits to choose from? Why would anyone want to eat a wafer that sticks to their lips like glue, or hurt their tongue on the sharp little point of an iced gem? Does anyone honestly like the pink wafer anyway? And who took the last of the chocolate ones? Welcome to the British biscuit tin. The Digestive (#ulink_34f65fe2-6dc7-5f5f-81be-31f35da84c99) My father loved a plain digestive, though is it difficult to think of him and the iconic biscuit without conjuring up a picture of him trying to slip an entire, unbroken one into his mouth in one go. I can’t remember him ever actually succeeding, and if he did it was probably something he did in secret. It is funny how, whether you had them in your kitchen or not, the digestive always manages to taste of ‘home’. It has a unique ability to take you to a safe place, to somewhere you think you remember fondly, even though you may never have even been there. The smell alone, wheaty and sweet with a hint of the hamster’s cage about it, is instantly recognisable as a good place to be. It has been said that this is one of the great dunking biscuits, but I have to disagree. The digestive is altogether too risky. If ever a biscuit will let you down on the way from mug to mouth it is this one, its open, crumbly nature being just not strong enough to hold a decent amount of liquid before it collapses in your lap. But then, like not using the zebra crossing, some might welcome such risks to inject a bit of danger and excitement into their day. Bread and Butter Pudding (#ulink_8a42cafb-693c-5278-bb63-71d07d8b50ab) The French cook with their senses, the Italians with their hearts, the Spanish with their energy and the Germans with their appetite. The British, bless them, cook with their wallets. Our ingenuity in matters frugal knows no bounds. When it comes to scrimping and saving, we are the masters. We have taken the worthy ‘waste not, want not’ to heights unsealed by the rest of the world’s cooks. Bread and butter pudding did not come about because someone had the idea that bread, butter and rich, sweet custard would make a sensuous and tender pudding. Whoever it was thought of the idea to use up a few slices of leftover bread and butter. It’s a wonder we can hold a wooden spoon, our fists are so tightly clenched. But then, who can argue with a pudding so calm and gentle, so quivering and fragile, so light and creamy? Bread and butter with its layers of buttered bread, sugar and egg custard is a hot pudding for which we don’t have to resort to making a cake mix and steaming it for hours. It is ingenious, and who cares if it just happens to be seasoned as much with meanness as with nutmeg. Eating Soldiers (#ulink_2254358a-847e-5240-9e1e-6bb44fcf3311) A thin slice of buttered toast to poke into the liquid yolk of your boiled egg; an edible teaspoon; a crisp contrast to the runny yolk and jellied white; a jolly idea to get children to eat up their fat and cholesterol – the soldier must have come from the mind of a genius. So christened because it possesses a straight, upright manner, is crisp and uniform in appearance and will stand to attention even when it is up to its knees in yuk. I have never eaten a boiled egg, but I have had a soldier or two. In domestic science, as food technology lessons were once called, we were taught to serve them with mince. Lunch on a Bench (#ulink_b5e9a23f-eca8-58c9-965f-c23bdfb84636) In summer I often eat lunch sitting on a bench in Hanover Square. The benches are crowded with office workers, shoppers and, invariably, people in black from the Cond? Nast offices that overlook the garden, and one has to hover, eagle-eyed, waiting for a spare seat. Other people’s lunches are always more interesting than one’s own, and it isn’t long before I find myself having a furtive peep at the person’s next to me. Somehow it is always a furtive peep, never an open stare. One always feels guilty about this, though I’m not entirely sure why. If we were in another country – Italy or Sweden, say – we would be much more open about it, and might even strike up a conversation. But this is England, and therefore a furtive peep is all one allows oneself, or gets. Combating that Sinking Feeling (#ulink_94981e72-c7f2-5c1c-b4c9-cec58a6f3bd4) While most of the world relishes a cup of tea in the afternoon, and perhaps a biscuit or even a slice of Strudel, few have gone to the lengths of the British, who have managed to turn a cup of tea and a sliver of cake into a national trademark. It is tea, rather than lunch or dinner, to which we inevitably take visitors from abroad, as much for the cultural experience as for sustenance. Though when we do, it is only fair to point out to them that this is a rare and special treat, and not, like grabbing a sandwich at lunchtime, a way of life. Afternoon tea is the works: scones, sandwiches, cakes, and of course a pot of tea. A cream tea is the edited version: a plate of scones, tea, and if you are lucky a bowl of strawberries. It is what the Cornish feed to tourists. It is Anna Russell, seventh Duchess of Bedford and reputedly a bit of a glutton, who is generally credited with introducing afternoon tea early in the nineteenth century. At home in Woburn Abbey, she would get her maid to bring tea to her boudoir in the middle of the afternoon, to combat the ‘sinking feeling’ she experienced between lunch and dinner. I know it well. As the new meal became something of a habit, she took to inviting friends to join her, and soon afternoon tea became a social event. You can always trust the rich to turn greed into a fashion statement. The wealthy British have long been fascinated by China and Japan. Making a fuss over serving a pot of tea, to which the inhabitants of both countries knew no bounds, was probably seen as our way of buying into their culture. This is why many of our tea services were decorated with Chinoiserie, and goes some way to explaining the preponderance of the once ubiquitous willow pattern china. The Brits never having quite understood the ‘less is more’ message, the original elegance and grace of the Oriental tea ceremony became somewhat besmirched by the addition of buns and sandwiches, albeit served in dainty proportions. It seems that no matter how much we adopt a healthy lifestyle, by which one currently means meals that are lower in fat and carbohydrate and with distinctly fewer calories, we still rarely refuse an offer of afternoon tea. There is no real excuse for it; this is not about filling the tank or regulating our blood sugar level. Tea in this sense is an undeniable luxury, a sybaritic pleasure, an orgy of crumbs and cream. Afternoon tea may be the only meal we take that is purely and utterly for pleasure. Perhaps this simple fact is what keeps its popularity steady, not just with tourists looking for the English experience, but with ladies who gossip, lovers of a certain age, aunts treating nieces and nephews, and those celebrating a birthday. It is something that exists purely to make us feel good about life. On recently arriving for a meeting to find it had been cancelled, one of my colleagues saved the day by suggesting we all decamp for tea and cakes. Our spirits were lifted in a way no other suggestion could have equalled. Despite the presence of butter and jam and plates of cream cakes, tea remains a quietly polite meal rather than a greedy and excitable one. It is a treat to share with friends and family, rather than business colleagues. You may do business over a full English breakfast or serve coffee during a power meeting, but it is unlikely that the exciting new business plans you are putting forward to your company will be taken seriously if you have a buttered crumpet in one hand. Especially if that crumpet is dribbling warm butter down your arm. Anyone who doubts that such decadence has a place in a twenty-first-century world of sushi-to-go and travelling cappuccini should attempt to get a table at Betty’s in Harrogate on the turn of four. Or perhaps they might like to step into the Wolseley in London’s Piccadilly at about half-past three in the afternoon. The latter will be awash with silver pots of Darjeeling and three-tier cake stands piled with all manner of little tarts and fancies, the vast room a veritable sea of tea strainers. The clatter of cake forks amid the gentle buzz of gossip can be seen as a cry for sanity in a world obsessed by calorie-counting and pilates. The Coffee Percolator (#ulink_8f9c84e5-32c9-57ed-b62c-452d21a3166c) There is a smell in the hall. Dark notes of burning rubber and something exotic, rich, bitter. I push open the door to the kitchen to see my father concentrating intently on a tall, shiny jug plugged into the electric socket by the Aga, its glass lid covered in dancing beads of condensation. Dad is unusually red in the face, and his tie is crooked. He’s looking slightly panic-stricken. The Formica counter is freckled with dark brown grains, and the silver jug thing with the glass lid is starting to make an excited plop-plipping sound. Steam seems to be coming from both the machine and my dad. ‘It’s the new coffee percolator,’ announces my mother, who is standing next to him with the noticeably resigned air of a woman who has seen canoes, fishing rods, chess sets, marmalade pans and flashing pink Christmas-tree lights that never worked and should have gone back given the same brief moment of furious attention. I am not quite sure why my father has invested in this particular contraption, especially as we don’t really drink coffee anyway, apart from the occasional cup of Maxwell House which we make half-and-half with hot milk. We are simply not a coffee family, and to be honest I am not sure I know anyone who is. Not even the Griptons, and they have an in-and-out gravel drive. But a coffee percolator we now have, and we all stand round it, excitedly awaiting the result. My father says something about my mother saying she always wanted a perky copulater, which I don’t understand and at which she snaps a disgusted, ‘And that’s enough of that, thank you!’ ‘Do you think it’s ready yet? It’s been a while,’ says Mum after a suitable period of awed silence. ‘I don’t know,’ admits my father, who then mutters something about the instruction booklet being in Italian, which is odd, as we can both clearly see the words ‘Morphy Richards’ on the side of the pot. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day. Let’s give it a bit longer, eh?’ Mum starts to fold some towels, and is in danger of losing interest. I’m wondering what the coffee will taste like, and whether I’m going to have to finish it if I don’t like it. My dad gets out the Midwinter china and opens up a box of coffee crystals and another of ‘petticoat tails’ shortbread, which he arranges on a plate. He unplugs the pot and pours out the coffee, which instantly hits the bottom of the cup and splashes into the saucer and over the table. ‘Take the cup up to the pot, Tony, you’re making a right old mess,’ says Mum, who is now almost as het-up as Dad. ‘I know, I know. The spout’s too wide, it all comes out in a rush,’ he explains, and then we all go quiet. ‘Do you think you put enough coffee in?’ queries my mother as she puts her cup down. We all sit there, looking down at our pale, watery drink, thin, brown yet peculiarly burnt-tasting. My dad has turned his back to us and is at the sink, battling with the last of the coffee grounds, desperately trying to get them all off the sides of the sink and to rinse them down the plughole. He carefully dries the pot, the glass lid, the little aluminium filter thing that held the grounds, and puts it all back together, bit by bit. Lips pursed, he shoehorns the shiny jug with the glass lid back into its box, slips the instruction booklet down the side, and folds the lid in at the sides. He takes the box out to the garage and puts it on the top shelf, next to the chess set and the box of pink flashing Christmas-tree lights. Faggots and Gravy (#ulink_dbe85074-6cd3-58e0-8c41-be5d02342468) A well-made faggot is a gorgeous thing, tender as mince, but with a defined shape and delicate spicing. But you need a reliable recipe. I have minced the requisite dark pig’s liver, the pork scraps, the bacon and the pig’s heart as instructed. I have stirred in the fresh breadcrumbs, the thyme and the sage, the ground mace and the allspice. I have rolled the mixture into tennis balls and wrapped each in a webbing of lacy caul fat specially ordered from the butcher. Laid in an enamel tin like fat dumplings (‘faggot’, at least in this instance, means bundle) snuggled up together to await the oven and their puddle of onion gravy, they look as hearty as a supper could ever be. The sort of meal you might want to eat on an oilrig, or after a long trek up Scafell. But my attempts have never matched those of a good local butcher, being just too butch, with too strong a flavour and excessively liverish. The last were coarse and chewy, and weighed on the stomach like lead. Call me a wimpish urbanite, but home-made faggots are obviously for someone who is more of a man than me. The ones you buy in a deep foil tray from a Black Country market or a Welsh butcher are probably the best bet. The Welsh version can contain oats or apples. Those big-name brands that are no bigger than a scallop and swimming in sweet, rather commercial-tasting gravy, are quite passable on a winter’s night. It is almost unthinkable to eat them with anything other than mashed potato and peas, though being a winter dish tradition may have it that it should be a pur?e of dried peas, known as pease pudding, rather than fresh. Pros: The glorious gravy and extreme flavour; the frugality of making entrails into something so delicious; few suppers will ward off the cold like faggots and peas. Con: You are eating pigs’ intestines wrapped up in the lining of their stomachs. The Naked Cook (#ulink_c596ceb5-8f47-5f30-aa65-b95f101d068f) He has swapped his subscription to Playboy for Delicious. He scans the ‘Kitchen Notes’ pages in the Guardian and the Telegraph for the latest gadgets and the hippest ingredients. He orders his organic meat on the internet and gets his groceries by timed delivery. New-man-in-the-kitchen is more au fait with making fettuccine than with putting up shelves. He is more familiar with saucisson than Swarfega, and the only screwdriver he knows comes in a glass with ice and a little dish of olives on the side. Stroll around London’s Borough Market on a Saturday morning and new-man-in-the-kitchen will be there, picking out a nice sea bass for his supper. Still slightly wary of looking too housewifely, he will go for a big fish, or a piece of meat on the bone, rather than anything ready prepared. It is easier to assert your masculinity when buying a whole octopus than a pack of salmon fillets. Mince is obviously a no-no. Cooking has replaced do-it-yourself as a way to show how much of a man you really are. DIY shops are closing like clam shells in a thunderstorm. Anything involving a knife is fine, though he will probably draw the line at pastry. Kneading bread is now seen as just as much a ‘guy thing’ as knocking down a wall. And he is likely to make just as much mess. What men’s new-found love of cooking shares with do-it-yourself is that even the most botched attempt will lead to him receiving compliments, having his ego massaged, and being told, repeatedly, how clever he is. As the French say, plus ?a change. Murray Mints (#ulink_6121a47d-4d08-5c02-9450-a1cf997bca22) There is something about the smooth, almost creamy Murray Mint that seems to soothe one’s troubles away. I have first-hand experience of finding myself lost, late, cross and frustrated, and discovering an elderly Murray Mint in my coat pocket. Within seconds of the sweet hitting my tongue, my mood changed to something altogether more ‘Zen’. Better still, that calmer mood led to me finding my destination in minutes. I was but a block away. Curiously, the soothing effect of the Murray Mint lasts only for as long as you suck. The second you crunch, the spell is broken and the soothing quality completely disappears. Heaven only knows what Freud would make of that. The Farmers’ Market – An Allotment for Wimps (#ulink_14e585fe-6dce-5463-ab49-f6a5f866d918) Home to the locally grown and hand harvested, the farmers’ market fills the gap between allotment and supermarket. I shop there because I want to meet the people who grow what I eat, to experience the joy of seasonal shopping, to be as close as I can to where my food originates from without actually getting my hands in the soil. The farmers’ market works on several levels. It appeals to my need for those who supply my food to have a face rather than to be part of a vast, invisible food machine; it provides an opportunity to buy produce that was picked hours rather than days or even weeks ago; it supports local workers and encourages me to ‘do my bit’ to cut down ‘food miles’. At last, I can put my pound directly into the weathered hand of the person who planted, watered and then dug up the pink fir-apple potatoes I am about to turn into a salad. And I suspect that, as I trundle up the hill with my recycled bag of cheap corn on the cob still in its fresh green husks and a swaying bunch of three-foot-high sunflowers, it probably allows me to feel just a wee bit smug about those shoppers with their supermarket packet of identically sized, overpriced, cellophane-wrapped green beans from Mozambique. There are 350 farmers’ markets in Britain at the time of writing, from Aberystwyth to York. Dorset alone has ten, London a measly fourteen. Pushed from pillar to post, they find a temporary home wherever the local council will let them set up shop, in school playgrounds, village squares and, ironically, supermarket car parks. The bustling square with its jam-and-‘Jerusalem’ stalls and green striped parasols is the twenty-first-century replacement for the local outdoor market. The selfsame market that closed down a decade ago, when it could no longer muster the strength to do battle with the invaders from planet Sainsbury. Coming to town just once a week, this colourful gaggle of brave traders in everything from unpasteurised cream to lavender-coloured aubergines has something of the circus about it. We gather round the stalls in awe, gasping at the beauty of a cloth-wrapped truckle of cheddar or a wicker hamper of downy field mushrooms picked at dawn. The farmers’ market has become the modern equivalent of a band of travelling minstrels. Rhubarb and Custard (#ulink_a0dd91be-6f7a-5d6a-9c13-e1dbe880e9e4) Is this the infamous Ibby-Jibby Custard Green Snot Pie (all mixed in with a dead dog’s eye) of the delightful children’s poem? If it is true that we eat with our eyes, then it is somewhat curious that rhubarb and custard ever made it into our lexicon of national puddings. Perhaps this is a dessert for our hidden child, the one who likes all things ghoulish, spooky and slightly scary. Nothing curdles quite like warm custard poured into poached rhubarb. If you are really unlucky the custard separates into globular forms like those that rise and fall in a lava lamp. I seem to remember ‘rhubarb-n-custard’ was the nickname of a particularly acne-ridden boy at school. Nowadays he would probably be called ‘pizza face’. Blood and pus aside, the idea is gastronomically sound enough. Sweet, smooth custard sauce to soften the astringent blow of the fruit; a yellow blanket to put out the acid fire. This is why it is best not to oversweeten the rhubarb, so you get a pleasing hit of both sharp and smooth in the mouth. Scientifically, sweetening the fruit is less effective, as it is the action of the oxalic acid in the rhubarb that curdles the proteins in the egg custard. Aficionados will surely agree with me that a love of rhubarb and custard, of slithery pink-and-green stems with wibbly wobbly custard, is purely a matter of allowing flavour and sensuality to get the better of aesthetics. That, and trying to forget the spotty kid at school. If you take the genre a step further you can whip chilled rhubarb and custard into a bowl of sleepy, lightly beaten cream to make a fruit fool. Even then, it will curdle a little, though the effect of pale pink fruit swirled through custard and cream like a raspberry ripple will take any squeamish eater’s mind off it. Fruit and Nut (#ulink_e29401b6-3b27-5617-b0e1-a58b925d2b41) There are probably few people over thirty who cannot instantly burst into the theme tune from the Fruit and Nut adverts. Which, for younger readers, is ‘Everyone’s a Fruit and Nut case’, sung to the music of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. It was probably the first famous piece of classical music to be linked to a product, a habit that is now endemic throughout the advertising industry. It is now almost impossible to hear a well-known symphony without a mental link to some household-name product. It has to be said that Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut is an older-generation confection, and hasn’t attracted the younger chocolate-eater. The sole reason is the fact that young people generally hate ‘bits’, and this bar, with its creamy, almost watery-tasting chocolate, currants, sultanas and shards of nut is as bitty as it gets. It has a place in the hearts of the older chocolate-eater, but almost certainly as much for the adverts, and their delightful silliness, as for the chocolate itself, which, let’s face it, is hardly Valrhona Manjari. The Setting of Jam (#ulink_1933c113-6055-5995-afb9-1ce5c5b98af6) To the French, the Italians, the Turkish and all the other great preserve-makers, the perfect jam is all about the flavour, the amount of fruit, and a texture poised somewhere in that heavenly state between syrup and a lightly set jelly. To the Spanish, the Swedish and the Bosnians too, it should have visible fruit suspended in a luscious jelly the colour of a jewel in a royal crown. To the British jam-maker, all that seems to matter is ‘the set’. When you mention, casually and perhaps over coffee, that you made jam last weekend, the question will not be ‘Does it taste wonderful?’ but ‘Did it set?’ The British jam-maker is obsessed with getting their jam so stiff you could turn the jar upside down and the contents would stay put. The rest of Europe makes jam that slides sexily off the mound of clotted cream and dribbles down the edge of the scone (an exquisite moment if ever there was one). We make jam that sits prim and straight, like a Victorian child at Sunday school. Commercially produced British jam is easily spotted because it stays put when the jar is moved from side to side. We make jam a little bit like ourselves. A jam that is a bit uptight and reserved, a preserve that wobbles tautly rather than falls off the spoon with a slow, passionate sigh. Oxo Cubes (#ulink_31382702-fdaf-5e5e-9699-85e0a92a083b) The curious fact about Oxo cubes is that we have probably never really needed them. These little cubes of salt, beef extract and flavourings were, and I suppose still are, used to add ‘depth’ to stews, gravies and pie fillings made with ‘inferior’ meat. Two million are sold in Britain each day. Yet any half-competent cook knows you can make a blissfully flavoursome stew with a bit of scrag and a few carrots, without recourse to a cube full of chemicals and dehydrated cow. Apart from showing disrespect to the animal that has died for our Sunday lunch (imagine bits of someone else being added to your remains after you have been cremated), the use of a strongly seasoned cube to ‘enhance’ the gravy successfully manages to sum up all that is wrong about the British attitude to food. How could we fail to understand that the juices that drip from a joint of decent meat as it cooks are in fact its heart and soul, and are individual to that animal. Why would anyone need to mask the meat’s natural flavour? By making every roast lunch taste the same, smothering the life out of the natural pan juices seems like an act of culinary vandalism, and people did, and still do, just that on a daily basis. Yet the Oxo cube has played a very important role in the British kitchen. It gave us a guaranteed, copious lubricant for our meat, and in the years after the war, the existence of gravy was something to be celebrated. Gravy carried with it an air of achievement and success, but more importantly, it announced a return to normality after years of rationing. It gave us a taste of home as we felt it should be. The red and white box in the pantry was as much a signature of a happy, well-fed home as the teapot and the cake tin. And in the factory-farming years that followed, when modern breeds and cheap production values meant that meat lost much of its inherent goodness and savour, the Oxo was there as a much-needed culinary sticking plaster. The cube’s success also had much to do with the tactile pleasure of tearing open the red and silver foil and crumbling the compost-brown cube into the meat tin, in the style of the ‘perfect, squeaky-clean mum’ from the television adverts. Sadly, in my experience adding that diminutive cube to the contents of the roasting tin will be forever linked with well-done meat. I can’t imagine anyone who appreciated rare beef chucking a load of glutinous gravy on it. If you buy sound meat in the first place, the brown cube is effectively made not just redundant, but an intrusion. I once had a friend who ate Oxo cubes like fudge, despite their high levels of salt. I often wonder what her blood pressure is now. Feeding the Elderly (#ulink_ab7f7549-de11-5c6e-8744-b7eb62ba51a8) It is December 2004, and I am sitting in an old people’s home just outside Birmingham. I’m holding my aunt’s hand. My aunt is ninety-nine, my eldest surviving relative on my father’s side of the family, and probably the person I am closest to. The home was chosen not for its convenient location, or even its price, but simply because it was the only one I could find that didn’t smell of pee. A woman moves past us pushing a Zimmer frame. As she gets level with us she starts to fart, a sound that goes on for what seems like eternity as she continues to move along in her bumpy, caterpillar fashion. My aunt, who has much the same schoolboy sense of humour as me, starts to giggle. ‘What is it about Zimmer frames that makes people trump?’ I ask, having heard her parp her way round the communal lounge on several occasions. ‘It’s all the pushing,’ she says. ‘Those things take a lot of pushing.’ Her giggle becomes a helpless, spluttering cough. ‘They just come out, you can’t stop them. You’ll be like that one day. And sooner than you think. Anyway, they give us too much cabbage in here. We had it three times last week.’ There is cabbage again today. The food is served with more care and grace than one is led to expect of such establishments, but they can’t hide the fact that it is mince and cabbage. Individual likes and dislikes are catered for with a resigned smile, and no one is left without help if they need it (and they had a raffle today), but it is still cabbage. The atmosphere, helped by a team of nurses and social workers who show a distinct fondness for their patients, is lively, and particularly jolly at mealtimes. But it is still cabbage. A quietly-spoken Irish nurse and I struggle to pull my aunt up to the table, sitting her next to Nellie, a dear old lady in a neat cardigan and tartan skirt who constantly asks questions but is too deaf to hear the answers. I can tell she doesn’t like my aunt. No one does here, because she has a habit of throwing out the odd racist remark in front of the nurses, some of whom are Indian or from Ghana. She once asked me in something less than a whisper to pass round a box of Quality Street to everyone ‘except the black ones’. ‘Don’t worry, love,’ said a gentle, kindly black nurse, ‘we know she doesn’t mean it.’ Sadly, she did, and both the nurse and I knew it. Pudding is jam sponge and custard, which seems to take the edge off matters. A sweet busy-bee of a nurse asks me if I would like some. It smells cosy, of warm sponge and vanilla, and I am tempted, but decide I might be stealing someone’s second helping, so I make do instead with one of my aunt’s barley sugars, which I inspect closely, as she has developed a habit of sucking them and putting them back in the wrappers. No one seems to notice that Nellie, who is absent-mindedly humming to herself, is sitting with one hand in her custard. I am tempted to lift it out myself, but then I’m not sure what I’d do with it afterwards, so I pretend I haven’t seen it. A cup of tea and a biscuit becomes a major happening. My aunt looks forward to her milky tea all afternoon, constantly asking if it is teatime. ‘I hope I get the Custard Cream this time. They always serve me last, so I’m left with the pink wafers and the broken digestives.’ Broken biscuits are inedible to my aunt. In the 1950s, broken biscuits were what you bought when you couldn’t afford whole ones. Feeding the elderly has none of the charisma of feeding children. There is no Jamie Oliver to improve the daily diet of old people. Fewer photo opportunities, probably. What celebrity chef wants to fill his cookbook with pictures of wrinkly people with no teeth? A child with a blob of custard on her chin looks cute; an old person with a blob of custard on hers simply looks demented. Before my aunt came into the home, where she now gets three perfectly edible meals a day, she lived on Cup a Soup and cream crackers. Not a piece of fruit or vegetable passed her lips for twenty years or more. She could dance, albeit a slow waltz, till she was ninety-seven, then she started falling over and I had to get her into a care home. She was lying on her back in the hall once for twenty-four hours, like an upturned beetle. ‘Put me in a home and I’ll come back and haunt you,’ she once threatened. Now I see her every time I look in a mirror. Many of the residents have their food put through the mincer, so the only difference between meals is the smell. It’s like baby food without the bright colours. My aunt wears a plastic bib to eat now, though she can still feed herself. It’s just that most of it ends up down her, rather than inside her. I’m not sure anyone notices. With what ends up around their mouths, down their cardigans or on the floor, I suspect no one realises that what old people actually die of is malnutrition rather than old age. She says she prefers her Cup a Soup, but they won’t let her have it, though I do smuggle in a Marks & Spencer cr?me caramel whenever I can. ‘Oh, and bring me a miniature of Bailey’s Irish Cream, will you dear?’ It must be interminably dispiriting to cook in an old people’s home, to watch your careful cooking, a neatly peeled vegetable or delicately filleted piece of fish, being pushed through the mincer, but that is the long and short of it. The advert in the Caterer and Hotelkeeper will insist that applicants must have passed their catering exams, should have the requisite experience and a love of cooking for other people, but it is unlikely to point out that everything the successful interviewee cooks will end up as a pur?e. One can only imagine they know that easily-swallowed food goes with the territory. Like having no hair or teeth and filling your pants, eating pur?es is what you do when you come into this world, and again when you go out of it. Custard (#ulink_0a81ad64-5339-5d3d-9793-e6e16ede1339) It is difficult not to think of custard with affection. Though it must be said that to the British it is more likely to be vivid yellow and made with custard powder than the calm and pallid cr?me anglaise favoured by the French. Now even that shortcut has been superseded by ready-made versions available at the chilled counter, some of which are almost indistinguishable from a handmade egg custard sauce. The point of custard, or more correctly custard sauce, is essentially to help a dry pudding – treacle tart or spotted dick, say – down the gullet, but it is also a pudding in itself, especially when it becomes the divine dessert banana custard. (I have always found watching slices of banana sink slowly into a deep Pyrex bowl of custard particularly agreeable.) Made somewhat thicker, it is firm enough to be used as a layer, along with sponge cake, fruit and cream, in a trifle. Yet nowhere is it as welcome as with a steamed sponge. Ginger, jam or raisin puddings are rarely quite themselves without a steaming moat of custard, although somehow treacle pudding is better with cream. The main reason we turned to custard powder was not because of the cost of eggs, milk and vanilla, but because of the sauce’s reputation for curdling. ‘Curdle’, like ‘separate’, ‘split’ and ‘collapse’, is a word that brings unreasonable fear to the hearts of many British cooks. The truth is that nothing can go wrong if you keep the mixture from getting too hot, and even then a curdled mess can sometimes be rescued with a good stiff beating in a cold bowl with a wire whisk. A Custard (#ulink_d7d05cf4-e67c-54a8-a875-39c99e75a203) A single ‘a’ changes everything. In this case it means nothing more than getting a deep pastry tart filled with a nutmeggy mixture of cream, sugar and eggs rather than the expected jug of creamy yellow sauce, ‘I’ll have a pot of tea and a custard’ being a request for a hot drink and an individual tart rather than a dish of sweet sauce. I fear for the custard. It is as old-fashioned as a slice of Hovis or a clothes brush. It belongs to a world of fire-tongs, antimacassars and black-and-white television. The appreciation of sinking your teeth into the soft, almost damp pastry of a custard tart and feeling the filling quiver against your lip is not for the young. The true enjoyment of a custard (as opposed to the pleasures of custard) is something that only comes with age, like rheumatism, bus passes and a liking for Midsomer Murders. I am probably the only person in England to regularly buy a couple of custards from Marks who is still in possession of his own teeth. The way you tackle a custard is as much a ritual as the way you eat an ‘original’ KitKat. First you take the tart from its box, then, with the help of your fingernail, you separate the tart from its foil container. It is essential to get it out whole, without denting the fragile pastry edge. Regulars find that pushing up from the bottom helps. You then set about eating the tart either by picking it up and tucking in, or, more likely, as you are obviously a custard tart sort of person, cutting it neatly into quarters. There is something graceful about this last method. What you do with the foil container is not really a matter for this book, but my guess is that it will be crushed, perhaps fold upon fold with an almost origami-style neatness, until it is ready for the bin. The Economical Cook (#ulink_ea9fde25-ff4f-5b43-8626-e41851c61e68) Mrs Penny-Pincher saves butter papers. A little wad of them in the fridge door, kept neatly folded for greasing cake tins before she bakes her weekly Victoria sponge. Anyone with a pair of nostrils knows that butter gets fridgy if you don’t use it quickly enough, even when you keep it in one of those annoying little compartments in the fridge door. Heaven knows how old some of Mrs P’s butter papers are by the time she gets round to using them. She may be saving a penny or two but seems oblivious to the fact that she is actually greasing her cake tins with rancid butter. She makes stock with every bone and carcass she is left with; uses every manky vegetable in the rack for soup; keeps used tin foil in a pile by the cooker. At the shops, first port of call is the reduced-to-clear bin. Not out of necessity – Mrs P is hardly on the breadline – but out of the possibility of saving a penny or two on a dented tin or a bashed Swiss roll: ‘Well, it will be pretty bashed when I’ve put it in a trifle.’ It makes sense, until you consider that you have to buy custard, cream and a tin of fruit cocktail in order to make the most of your thrifty purchase. Normally not known for taking risks, the economical cook is nevertheless willing to take a punt on the can with no label on it. The chances are it will be baked beans, but what the hell, you never know your luck It might be tinned peaches. The Voucher Queen (#ulink_9db50818-1bd9-50c0-a457-7d101c21fb64) So, you have spent far longer shopping than you intended, getting rather carried away with the new Gary Rhodes saucepan set, and now you are late to pick up the kids from school, and there’s a queue at the checkout. Of course there’s a queue at the checkout. There is always a queue at the checkout. You start looking at your watch, and then burning your eyes into the neck of the person in front (always helps), daring them to start chatting with the checkout girl, or having the audacity to have some unpriced item in their basket that needs a price check. All appears to be going well, and you are just reminding yourself not to be such a pessimist, when your heart sinks. The person in front is paying with vouchers cut from a magazine. In terms of annoyance, this is akin to being behind the woman who ferrets in the furthest reaches of her purse for the correct change – ‘No, I’ve got it, it’s in here somewhere, dear’ – the man whose charge card is refused, the person who finds a leak in their packet of washing powder and has to wait while a runner goes and gets a replacement. Each voucher has been religiously snipped along the dotted line, and despite the honesty with which such people no doubt spend their carefully collected booty, each has to be matched to the contents of the shopping trolley by the cashier. Standing behind them in the queue, hopping from one foot to the other, and knowing you were late for the kids last week too, you can’t help wondering if they are redeeming the voucher against something they would have bought anyway, or are simply buying something to get money off it. You know very well they really would have preferred the almond fancies, but the voucher was only redeemable against cherry Bakewells. So cherry Bakewells it is. A Cake Walk through Britain (#ulink_d6cb7a75-d8e2-5222-9bd4-29bc0031b2bf) These islands are rich in local recipes, and you could probably eat a different cake in every town from Land’s End to the Hebrides. Cornwall’s peel-flecked heavy cake would keep you going until you got to feast on Devon’s cream-filled chudleighs, before moving swiftly along through treasures such as Somerset’s crumbly catterns, Dorset apple, and the sultana-spiked Norfolk vinegar cake. On the way you could snatch a Banbury cake, a Chorley cake, one of Yorkshire’s fat rascals or a nice slice of treacly parkin. You might also like to include Richmond maids of honour, Shrewsbury cakes, orange-scented Norfolk sponges and curranty Pembrokeshire buns. Then there is Pitcaithly bannock (a sort of almond shortbread studded with chopped peel), Westmorland pepper cake with cloves and black treacle, and something called Patagonian black cake, named for the Welsh families who emigrated to work in the South American gold mines. Richmond, Rippon, Selkirk, Nelson, Grantham and Goosenargh all celebrate their existence with something for tea. This is little Britain in a cake tin. At four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, cake in hand, we can toast almost any county, city or fair we choose. We can say thank you for the harvest or well done to the sheep shearers, we can salute a wedding or wave goodbye after a funeral. There are temptations to raise a glass of Madeira to Shrove Tuesday and First Footing, to Twelfth Night and Hogmanay, to mop fairs and matrimony. On a Sunday we can thank the Lord with a slice of bible cake or scripture cake, godcakes (but naturally, no devil’s food cake) or church window cake, better known as Battenberg. Then there’s sad cake, soul cake, sly cake and shy cake; cakes for spinsters, cakes for the navy, cakes for the Queen. There is almost nothing in this country for which a cake hasn’t been named. The Gingerbread Wars (#ulink_6f555805-a0de-5ee7-b072-4f0fa29a3059) It would be wooden spoons at dawn if any single place tried to claim gingerbread as its own. Instead different territories have laid their claim by adding a little something to the basic butter, sugar and treacle mix. Whether it’s beer and ground almonds in the recipe from Fochabers, the oatmeal in Orkney’s broonie or the honey that Welsh cooks have been known to stir in, every area seems to have left its stamp. Visitors to Nottingham would no doubt have delighted in the scent of cinnamon from the sticky little cakes sold at the Goose Fair, and while Yorkshire cooks threw in caraway seeds and ground coriander, the Lancastrian bakers next door stirred in marmalade and a teaspoon of mixed spice. Irish recipes have included the worthy note of wholemeal flour and the unabashed luxury of preserved ginger, while Scots drizzled black treacle into their parlies, the little ginger drops so beloved of the Scottish Parliament. The most famous of all, from Grasmere, is barely gingerbread as we know it, being a secret recipe more akin to a biscuit, tender and crumbly and without a hint of treacle, yet blessed with the distinctive notes of brown sugar and butter and the essential whiff of the treasured spice. Shopping for Meat (#ulink_9285417f-4db9-5133-b0e1-8d12b2bf6b03) Sawdust and scrubbed wood, the wince-inducing scent of fresh blood, men in white coats with Brylcreemed hair and hands like sausages – the traditional butcher’s shop was where you went for black pudding for breakfast and a nice chop for your tea. You stood in the cool of white tiles and pale oak butchers’ blocks bemoaning the heat outside, or the state of the pavements, or the price of elecrticity. The butcher’s was where you came for a piece of beef for Sunday, or just a bone for the dog and a natter. Those butchers that are left have a queue only on a Saturday now. There is little time for gossip, and gone are the animals hanging from hooks, which together with the telltale drips of blood on the floor reminded us that our chop was once something that walked and blinked and farted. Today meat is presented to look as little like an animal as possible. Perish the thought that anyone could ever link the lamb on their plate to the gambolling jelly-legged teddy bears in a spring meadow. The headless deer hanging up at Borough Market in London comes as a shock nowadays, sending shivers of Bambicide down your back. It’s the hacked-off head that does it, the bloody, gaping neck and the fact that the poor animal always seems to be tied to the fence in a leaping position, as if it was butchered while happily leaping a moss-encrusted log. When Jamie or Hugh kills an animal on television now, it creates an outcry, as if pulling the guts from a pig’s carcass has nothing to do with the sausage in our sandwich. The death of an animal for food seems all the more barbaric now that we are kept as far away from the act as possible. In the city it is rare even to spot a pheasant for sale with its feathers on. If you eat meat and have a local butcher, cherish him. Buy your eggs from him, and your bacon, your butter and your chutney. We need to put as much money in his till as we can if he is still to be there in five years’ time. Otherwise a decent pork chop will be as rare as hen’s teeth. Toast – The Story of a Nation’s Hunger (#ulink_4a74d139-aba7-5753-bf91-c238e5de5948) I’ve eaten toast everywhere, from Laos to Luton, and I can say without a shadow of hesitation that no one, but no one, makes toast like the British. Just as you will never find a green curry with quite the subtly aromatic undertones it possesses in Thailand anywhere else, or an osso bucco as celestially tender as one from the hands of an Italian cook, nowhere on earth will you ever be given a piece of toast of the quality you can get on this island. Why is something you cannot readily put your finger on. Toast is our offering to world gastronomy. The French have more interesting bread than us, the Italians produce sweeter butter, and no one attends to detail in simple matters quite like the Japanese, yet their efforts at a round of buttered toast are nothing to our own toothsome triumphs. Even when it is not at its best, British toast is perfectly acceptable, unlike the white, flabby versions you might encounter in, say, Greece (where the whole point of toast has surely passed them by) or the laughable attempts you get in the US. No, in matters of toast we excel. I am not sure that anyone can lay claim to the perfect recipe. How we eat our golden round is distinctly personal. Thick or thin, crisp or soft, gold or brown or black or a bit of all three – and then there is the question of crusts and their retention or removal (it’s a minefield, I tell you). Having said that, it is generally accepted that when we ask for a round of toast, we do not expect it to be made with brown bread. Like perfect bed linen or underwear, the perfect piece of toast can only ever be white. Brown-bread toast is for middle-aged people who suddenly decide they should look after themselves a bit more. You might as well eat grilled cardboard. It is permissible for making soldiers for dunking into soft-boiled eggs, but that is as far as it goes. Frogspawn and Nosebleeds (#ulink_fda0eb3a-d345-5241-b02c-f0debbec2d2d) The idea was that you rushed through your main course to get to your ‘afters’, so a pudding that is horrible makes no sense at all. It follows that a pudding, dessert, sweet – whatever you call it – must be nice. Naturally, that disqualifies anything that is sloppy, slimy, gummy, cummy or lumpy. It should go without saying that a pudding shouldn’t make you gag or retch or heave or shudder. So how come we ever got to eat tapioca? Along with those wicked sisters of the school dining room, sago and semolina, it defies the first law of pudding, in that it must be a treat, something you want to eat, and more importantly something you will agree to be good for. Why should anyone want to tidy their room, be nice to their sister, take the dog out, clean out their rabbit’s cage or write Auntie a thank-you letter if their reward is a bowl of snot? No one else is stupid enough to eat it. Not the French, not even the Germans, for God’s sake. Rice pudding, on the other hand, is the quintessential nursery food. It is simply breast milk for adults. Introduced to Britain by Saxon invaders – how sweet of them to bring us such comfort with their rape and pillage – the pottage of broth and cereals was at first savoury, then by the seventeenth century developed into a sweet mixture of grain, milk and spices. That such dairy-based delights as tapioca and sago puddings have survived in an age of double choc-chip ice cream and black cherry cheesecake is surely testament to the seductive, soothing and security-giving qualities of warm milk. The word soothing has been attached to more luxurious things than milk puddings, among them Brahms’s symphonies, cashmere throws and Cadbury’s Flakes. But the genre is still regarded as one of the most successful ways to smooth our ruffled feathers and to make us feel safe and loved. It is also probably the cheapest comfort next to sucking our thumbs. Puddings of grain, milk and sugar that are cooked in the slowest possible way, usually for three hours or so in a cool oven, seem to belong to a different age. A time when speed was of less interest, where the instant hit of a quick-fix blueberry muffin and a skinny latte was but a distant dream. At first they were sweetened with sherry, cinnamon and sugar, or enriched with eggs. In the eighteenth century they were often covered with a pastry crust – nursery food with knobs on. Unusually, the modern milk pudding is less rich than its forebears, often being made with nothing but rice, milk and sugar. A long curl of lemon rind or a sprinkling of nutmeg is now seen as an unnecessary addition. A vanilla pod is the only extravagance I put in my own milky puddings, split in half so that some of the fine black seeds escape to freckle the sweet, ivory-coloured milk. Vanilla extract is a cheaper option, but is less subtle. My stepmother always added a bay leaf, until she saw one on Gardener’s World and realised our bay tree was actually an ornamental laurel. I don’t know anyone who still eats those schoolkid’s nightmares sago or tapioca, though they must have their fans. They carry the nickname ‘frog spawn’ appropriately enough. I have always felt that to be named after amphibians’ eggs was actually far too polite for the grey slime they served up as tapioca at school, and have always had my own, rather more gritty, term for it. Stirring Jam into Your Rice Pudding – Or Not (#ulink_4c481b64-5acd-5076-a2fa-b27c27638c30) The world remains divided on whether or not to add some sort of preserve to rice pudding at the table. For every person for whom a blob of raspberry jam, or blackcurrant or black cherry in their pudding is a step closer to heaven (my father stirred marmalade into his), there are a hundred schoolboys shouting ‘Nosebleed!’ at the very thought. Perhaps they are right to question the sullying of something so pure, so white, so gentle. The Nut Cutlet (#ulink_c3298e5b-5ffa-5b10-956d-d93aec6f14d4) Most vegetarians would now wince at the thought of a mixture of minced nuts and egg formed to resemble a lamb chop, but thirty years ago the nut cutlet (we are talking mostly Brazils here) was the height of veggie chic. If a non-meat-eater accepted an invitation to a dinner party, it was a pound to a penny they would end up with a substitute chop. The sad thing is that for all the cook’s craftsmanship and artistry, the nut cutlet was about as welcome on a vegetarian’s plate as a burned sausage. The Brazil nut is about 63 per cent fat, 25 of which is saturated, which makes it the nut with the highest fat content. Your veggie guests may not thank you for that. Nuts do not take well to seasoning with either herbs or spices, which leaves most recipes wanting. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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