Home life
Salt 'n blood
Alice Thomas Ellis
It is not generally acknowledged how very contentious is the subject of food and cookery. I lost my temper recently because one of my dearest friends made himself a little snack half an hour before dinner. It wasn't the timing that made me so cross, although that was sufficiently annoying, it was the nature of the snack. This is what he did. He took a slice of bread, placed upon it two raw rashers of bacon and two slices of raw apple, then covered it with chopped cheese. I watched incredulously as he put it in the oven. 'The bacon won't cook,' I said. 'The apple will half-cook, the bread will burn and the cheese will frizzle, but the bacon will merely get warm!' He said tranquilly that it would be delicious, and sat down to wait while I wondered whether to throw myself on the floor and drum my heels. Later as I prepared a chicken curry he suggested that I should put bananas in the sauce and I cracked again. 'You don't put bananas in the sauce, you terrible fool,' I snarled. 'If you have bananas with it at all you serve them raw, sliced and sprinkled with a little lemon juice.' He said he couldn't see the difference. He also eats toast and marma- lade at the same time as his boiled egg (no salt). Mouthful of marmalade, mouthful of egg. Ugh. I don't know why this is so enraging, but I get the same feeling in those restaurants which have taken to serving stuff like noisettes of lamb coated in chopped anchovy and garnished with peach purée. 'Why?,' I whine querulously. `Why have they done that? Why not strawberry conserve with turbot?' The prospect of turnip and rhubarb soup fills me with gloom, and I hate the sight of slices of kiwi fruit. Down-market it's man- darin oranges. I once read in a women's mag. A recipe for baked potatoes stuffed with smoked mackerel and topped with mandarin orange slices. While there is obviously a place for imagination in the kitchen, I sometimes get the impression that the chef has gone mad. Gazing wild- eyed at a boring old chicken, he thinks: 'Let us marinade it in pina colada and top it off with a helping of salt cod and half a walnut.' I took Janet out to lunch a while ago for a special treat. She had a veal chop which.was flanked by a solitary langoustine looking exactly like something that had fallen off its horse, and this too was astonishingly, disproportionately, irritat- ing. What was it doing there? I blame the Belgians. Soon after the war we went to Lier on holiday and to this day I remember a bowl of cherries with meat balls in it, and last summer in Bruges we had beef casser- ole with stewed apricots. Or maybe it's Just William — sardine and jam sandwiches.
Still, while restaurants can be exasperat- ing, the most dangerously inflammatory place is one's own kitchen. My hackles rise if I see people who have offered to help cutting up onions the wrong way or peeling potatoes thickly with a knife instead of thinly with a peeler or throwing away half the lettuce. After nearly ten years I still have a compulsion to remind Janet to rinse the deleterious steel filings off the carving- knife after sharpening it, and not to put salt in the stew before the meat is tender. She takes it quite well, merely throwing me a warning glance, and I freely concede that she makes better french dressing then me (I can never be bothered with the pinch of mustard which helps it emulsify) and better pastry. In the days when there were a lot of them about, cooks were notorious for murdering and being murdered, and I do see why. Picture the scene: cook in a blazing hot kitchen, slightly stunned on cooking sherry, venison going soot-black on the new mechanical spit, spotted dick boiling dry, oysters beginning to whiff a bit, the smoke pouring down the chimney as the wind changes, and the boning knife freshly honed on the kitchen table. Enter another member of the household. This injudicious person strolls across to where the cornflour sauce is sullenly bubbling on the range, idly sticks in a finger, licks it and remarks: 'I say, Cook, this tastes remark- ably like paper-hanger's paste.' What hap- pens next is best performed off stage, so we'll leave it there.
PS: I learn that the veal/langoustine wheeze is a pale imitation of an American vulgarism called Surf 'n' Turf, best bit of fillet steak served with half a lobster. The thinking behind this is similar to that which leads some potentates to force-feed their women until they have to be rolled around. Conspicuous consumerism, I believe it's called.
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