Imperative cooki
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ng: conversation
TTER-CLASSparents used to think it necessary that their offspring be able to converse nicely and amusingly. I imagine that few actually taught this explicitly and most children learned it by example. But whichever it was, is isn't happening flaw. And the council schools certainly don't do it Their products either grunt Mysteriously about football teams or pon- tificate tediously about the doings in their office and the chances of their promotion; the killing they could make if they sold the house now thanks to the extension they have just had built, which puts the house in a different sales category becauses it mea- sures . - • ; and the virtues of proportional representation — do you know that out of the 213 seats . . ? And in Denmark.. Oh, Yes, I assure you, they talk numbers at the dinner table, lots of them, and percen- tages with decimal points. It's not very pleasant when you have taken the trouble to find and cook some excellent swordfish steaks with capers (the ones kept in salt not vinegar) to see your guests hurriedly shoving it all in so they can get down to the main business, as they see it, of the evening, pronouncing on whether fenimisin really has been in the best interests of women, and using the fork Which should be gently prizing off slivers of lemon fish, swirling them in the olive oil and iem olyu and slipping them under a couple of real fat capers, to emphasise their speech rather as trade union secretaries wave biros at block voters. But it's your own fault. You shouldn't have served swordfish. I have explained in an earlier column that 'fast food' is fast in that it quickly is quickly prepared and can be en. At least in the second sense, the eat swordfish is fast food. What you want,
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If You must invite these awful people is Slow-food. Slow food will not turn football- gninters and amateur estate-agents into 9. scar Wilde, but it will shut them up. And Your !m, guests have any decent conversa- L will make the most of it. Slow food is small snails, globe artichokes, more or less undressed crabs, quails, kippers, sea snails and whelks, marrow bones, nuts, garfish and, best of all, pigs' feet and ducks' webs. Recently in Portugal, I was enjoying a huge bowl of tiny snails — 300 odd (someone was bored enough to count, numbers again). Each one had to be prized out, of course, with a pin. Mrs Anderson had a bowl too and we sat eating for about an hour, prior to going to dinner. Every now and then, she or I straightened the back, called for another half-pint of wine or drew the attention of the other to something going on. But pontification was impossible. Part way through, some Ger- mans came in, saw the snails, ordered plates and set to. But they were eager to talk about sport, sex, BMW whatsit ratios and themselves, and the snails stopped them. The snails won. After eating about ten each, the Huns gave in and left, presumably to indulge their voices with a hamburger.
Some slow foods such as snails make long-winded talk impossible. Others make the talker look ridiculous. It is not easy to be convincing about proportional repre- sentation at the best of times but it's impossible with butter or oil trickling from the corners of the mouth, when the good lady one is seeking to address collapses in a fit of coughing because of a fish bone in her throat while one's fellow guest on the other side, who is unused to slow food, is having the devil's own trouble with his claw crackers and sending bits of crab claw whistling past one's nose. What's more important, slow foods oblige each diner to engage in intermittent bouts of sustained, concentrated activity, removing that green backbone from the garfish, mouthing away on the pig's trotter or duck's web and discreetly spitting out any bones too hard to chew, or giving the coup de grace to an especially obstinate walnut whose diameter — there, even I go, it's catching — exceeds that of the nutcrackers. Usually there's some bright spark who insists on showing how it can be done by hand and the air traffic mounts to danger level. Anyway this all cuts off the elaborate peroration, ruins the carefully prepared saga of the house extension and forces the speaker to talk to someone else. It is possible to compose an entire dinner of slow foods to such an extent that the evening will be more or less silent, apart that is from the slurping, spitting, drib- bling, coughing and banging. But that's music compared to Jeremy's promotion chances at the merchant bank.
Digby Anderson
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