Imperative cooking: Land of the free?
IT HAS been a month of surprises: an unpleasant American one, a splendid Span- ish one and a reassuring French one. Imperative cooks always travel with a bottle of claret. Especially in the United States, you never know where you might end up for the night; it might be a motel with no wine and out of reach of a liquor store, or a hotel with lots of wine but all of it over- priced, boring Californian chardonnay. On this visit I had not had to use my bottle of '89. So on the last day it got taken on a cruise up the Potomac to Washington. I should add, for reasons which will become apparent, that the chaps I was with had chartered the entire boat and paid in advance for dinner and wine. Dinner was rather early for a decadent European, so I left the rest browsing below decks and went up on top where two or three of us sat in the evening sun.
We had boarded near George Washing- ton's house, the father of American liberty, and after an hour and a bit we thought it time for a drink. Sitting quietly enjoying the claret we were suddenly descended upon by a party of uniformed men. They demanded to take possession of the bottle, citing terri- fying state ordinances which, apparently, forbid a chap to drink a spot of '89 on a boat. These especially concern a boat that serves alcohol. It is particularly illegal, it seems, to drink your wine when other wine is about (which of course was chardonnay).
I have subsequently discovered other draconian laws about drinking in sailing boats and dinghies which don't have liquor licences. It is not clear that there is any sort of boat where you can drink claret without running the risk of jail. Why have Ameri- cans, some of whom seem proud to have raised arms against their lawful king, the Lord's anointed, in the name of liberty, produced laws which stop a fellow having a glass of Bordeaux on a boat, and indeed laws which allow persons to swoop on one, seize the wine, very good wine too, and pour it down the sink? It's not just boats. There are all sorts of places in America where you can't drink claret and they always turn out to be the exact places where a civilised person would want to, like a pleasant state park beach. Even in motels there are subtle ways to stop all but the most prepared visitors hav- ing a drop; who wants to drink '89 out of thin plastic 'glasses', the only sort provid- ed? (Imperative cooks should always travel with, not glass glasses, which can break, but a small silver tankards.) And it's not only wine. There are legions of food regulations and one hits you even before you arrive. Should you have any of the five-course picnic you took on board left, none of it can be taken into the States. All must be thrown away. For those who smoke cigars, the news is even worse. In this land of the free, if you want to smoke a cigar when any gentleman wants to smoke a cigar, after dinner, you are not allowed to do so unless you are in a special cigar restaurant. Nor may you smoke it in the cab on the way back to the hotel after din- ner. Not even in the restaurant lavatory like a schoolboy. It must be done, if at all, on the pavement, like a tramp. Americans talk a lot about liberty, have conferences on it, set up foundations for it. They go to war to defend their liberty. Then, when they've got it, and secured it, they don't use it.
And, increasingly, nor do we. The Span- ish, French and Italians may not have great traditions or constitutions protecting liber- London Fashion Week The Jarrow March look ty, but they understand one thing: in the end liberty is about the small acts of ordi- nary daily lives.
Thank goodness for Barcelona, where Valenti Puig, a formidable tencherman, took me to several dinners. There were lots of good things we chose from the menu, oysters and salt cod beignets to start with, daurade cooked in salt to follow, but these were no surprise. What sent Valenti search- ing for his English vocabulary was the men- tion among the first courses of trinxat. 'It is potato, cooked potato, potatoes cooked and crushed, with what is it, with cauliflow- er, not the middle, like cauliflower, the leaves."Cabbage?"Yes, cabbage, cooked and. . . ' He needed to say no more, I had guessed. Trinxat isn't trinxat at all; it's bub- ble and squeak.
Very refined B & S. Instead of the beef fat used in the English version, or indeed cold roast beef in the Edwardian version, the Catalans put 'raw' ham either diced or in little slices. This is all fried and turned and turned again as with B & S to get the dark bits throughout. It is also served look- ing like an omelette and in far smaller quantities than B & S. This is an improve- ment. Too much B & S has always pro- voked indigestion. And the Catalan ver- sion, unlike B & S, is suitable within a good dinner, which means it can be eaten more often.
In another of Valenti's restaurants we found another equivalent. It was a Catalan pork scratching, but again more refined because it had some lean meat on the inside of the rind and was served in a larg- er piece like a small chop. With some excel- lent Spanish blood sausage, the one with rice, it also could be part of a refined din- ner, unlike the northern, over-oated British black pudding which is only half acceptable at breakfast. At the same place there were also leeks, boiled whole as in England, but in stock not water, then cooled and served with garlic, vinegar and oil. I am afraid with the Spanish it is a case of anything we can do they can do better.
Finally France. We were there on a flying trip to collect some wine but stopped at Boulogne market for fish (they had some of the delicious weavers that so successfully attacked the holidaymakers in the West Country this summer), chavre, saucisson and escarole. Years ago in French markets, alongside the standard stalls, or rather, fur- ther out on the edge, were small tables with elderly French ladies with scarves on their heads. They would have for sale some stringy salsify, ten rather thin leeks, a few eggs, some home-made fresh cheese and one very roughly plucked duck. They are still there, not obviously the same ones, but new old ladies. France, despite all its silly new things, seems to have an inexhaustible supply of old ladies who still keep small back gardens and bring their produce to market. England has back gardens, Eng- land has old ladies. Why don't we see them at our markets?
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