Imperative cooking: The new food scare
THE COFFEE Science Information Cen- tre has kindly sent me a leaflet to stop me 'Worrying unnecessarily'. It explains there are no links between coffee and illnesses such as heart disease.
Why should these thoughtful people Imagine I was worrying or that I was terri- fied by barmy theories linking coffee to dis- ease? Why should a respectable industry Providing a product which millions enjoy feel it has to have a reassurance informa- tion campaign? The meat and dairy chaps and the brewers are doing the same thing; all because of the antics of the health and food fascists. And I'm not sure they're doing it the right way. They are far too defensive. Why don't they go on the attack against the food fascists and the contradic- tory scares they create among decent peo- ple? It's not kind to scare people unneces- sarily; it might even be bad for their health. As more and more of the scares are shown to be scientifically worthless — the butter scare fell last week — food producers Should be naming the activists who have Worried the masses unnecessarily and irre- sPonsibly, so we can all pour sacks of herbal tea, rotting muesli and lentils, artificial sweeteners and tasteless cooking oil over them.
The real problem, at least with after-din- ner coffee, is not the coffee but the water: there's too much of it. In most houses in en gland and the United States, when one is asked, 'How do you want your coffee?', one has to reply, 'No milk (for me), no sugar, but, above all, no water.' And they still serve something which looks like dilut- ed Vimto. They'd really like to serve it in mugs with unfunny messages on but their version of etiquette won't allow that, so they serve it in a cup too big and too full. And when you've managed to drink half of the dish-water it contains, they threaten, 'There's plenty in the pot,' and down comes another torrent.
This revolting and prolonged post-dinner coffee — no, let's give it its proper name — water ceremony is not an entirely inappro- priate conclusion to many middle-class din- ner parties.
Thus Nigel and Susan recently started us off with a seafood salad: previously cooked squid, sliced tomatoes and tuna on rice. The squid was Californian frozen, which for some reason absorbs water which it dis- charges when it is fried. So it isn't fried but boiled and goes hard. Water again. The tomatoes were English: no flesh, all skin, pith, pips and water. The tuna had been tinned not in olive oil but in salted water. The rice was soggy — cooked in too much water. Then came the gammon. Whether it had been injected with water or whether Danish pigs all have kidney problems, I don't know; but once the bacon starts to fry it behaves much like the squid and oozes water and other things which stick it to the pan. It, too, steams. With it, there were two or three of the unnecessary vegetables which the English love to boil to death in water. I remember a particularly watery marrow.
After that came what would have been a good salad. The dressing was fine: four parts olive oil to one wine vinegar, pepper and salt. But the lettuce was the watery Webbs and the hosts had been keener to wash it than dry it, so once again we all had a bath. After boring, shiny, yellow cheese, which had been incorrectly kept in the fridge in some unpleasant wrapping which made it sweaty, we went straight into the water ceremony. I scarcely need mention that the whole soggy show started with gin and tonic made in that curious, popular fashion whereby the bottle of tonic is warm and it and the gin have ice cubes dropped in them. The result is that the ice melts, producing watery, flat gin and tonic.
Some minutes before that, we'd been waiting outside the front door. What was that smell which wafted out when Susan eventually opened it? Had she been delayed making some last-minute essential adjustment to a sauce in the kitchen? No. The smell was a particularly repugnant tal- cum powder, and she and her husband had been up having the eleventh, totally unnec- essary shower of the week in one of their many bathrooms.
There are a lot of general things wrong with English domestic food, cooking and shopping: laziness, ignorance, meanness, lack of practice, pretentiousness. But one particular fault is that it's wet — dripping, steaming, oozing wet. And wet not with wine or olive oil, but with something near to tasteless which ruins and dilutes so many other tastes — water. So, if we must have activism, here's a cause: drying out the kitchen. And, while we are at it, why not turn that third shower, the one downstairs, back into the scullery it once was?
Digby Anderson
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