Imperative cooking: quantities and the ritualists
ONLY those who •cook appreciate how foul most bacon now is. At the slightest application of heat it half-heartedly spits then slowly emits a cloud of steam. This is to prevent you noticing what is going on underneath where a murky deposit is oozing out and sticking to the pan. Later when you add some eggs, they promptly stick to this glutinous mineral waste tip, then break.
But the most intriguing thing about bacon happens in shops. As the price has risen, so grocers have sliced it more and more thinly until it is now transparent. The housewife receives as many rashers as before for her money: her husband has as many rashers as before on his plate, and presumably someone is fooled. The Amer- ican sociologist Robert Merton termed this phenomenon `ritualism'. Faced with a gap between what people want and their means to acquire it, there are a number of strategies they can adopt. Ritualism, a favourite of the lower middle classes, consists in scaling down the proportions of what is desired. They do not give up bacon or have it abundantly but less frequently, they collude with the grocer to maintain the appearance of having bacon as before.
Varieties of ritualism are rampant: Fri- days find hordes of LMC ladies in butchers incanting: 'I'd like a piece of beef, please, Mr Ashton.' Not a rib, sirloin or whatever, always 'a piece', often 'a nice piece' and sometimes 'like I always have'. 'About how much, Mrs Davenport?' Four pounds.' Four pounds weight?' Four pounds money.' Bad butchers display de- congealing joints in the window, each with a little price ticket. This short-cuts the conversation. 'I'd like a nice piece of beef please, there's one in the window about four pounds.'
Price movements do not matter to Mrs Davenport: she simply buys less, or, in her terms, the same, and trots off with a wretched little parcel which will be put through the same culinary manoeuvres as a large joint. They won't work. There is a point of size below which roasting is not a suitable method of cooking and many typical English joints are well below it.
Ritualism in the kitchen is the opposite of the basic culinary injunction: if you can't do it properly then do something else, something easier, cheaper, quicker but something you can do. It produces not genuine dishes but models of food, tokens.
Ritualism is not necessarily motivated by meanness but it often results in there being only just enough of something. This has to be allocated by the gastronomic equivalent of the politburo. Ritualists employ a varie- ty of rationing systems. First they tend to serve easily apportioned dishes — six for dinner means three avocados, one half per person. Everybody will eat half an avoca- do, no more and no less. There is no provision for the unexpected guest, the unexpectedly rotten avocado or those who love them, hate them or have suffered them at the hands of Davenport clones for the last two weeks. To make sure everyone eats the right amount, the avocado halves are served on the guests' plates. Dishes which are not so obviously divisible are rationed by other means. Soup may be served in individual bowls or Mrs Daven- port might rise and ladle it out, one and a half ladlefuls per person. Salads, in- creasingly vegetables, and worst of all butter, are served in pretentious individual portion dishes. Alternatively there is the Pavlovian round system: the salad bowl circulates and the guests police themselves, each taking the same as the person before.
So some imperative principles: if you can't afford an adequate amount of some' thing — adequate for the number of guests or the method of preparation — don't buy it. Buy something cheaper. There should be more than enough for the assembled company. In the absence of servants and unless a dish is very awkward to serve, guests should help themselves from serving dishes. Because of their tendency to Proc- rustean self-policing, the host should shout helpful comments: 'Don't have any if you don't want to, there's bream and guinea fowl to follow, 'Have some more, there's plenty more soup in the kitchen.' Easily. allocatable foods such as herrings, pigeons or (globe) artichokes should be served on central dish and in numbers which require not only the long-divisional skills no longr permitted in schools but fractions; 13 herrings for eight people.
The same is true for breakfast, at which otherwise sensible cooks tend to behave like Soviet canteen commissars. But the principle only applies to good food in good amounts. How steam and mineral waste are best apportioned, I have no idea.
Digby Anderson
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