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Imperative cooking: beware the travellers
01
I HAD breakfast recently in an English hotel. It was all right — to start with.
Visualise the plate. It was oval, as the current silly fashion dictates. Straight ahead of me, to the north, were two sausages, side by side, the further of the two against the far rim of the plate. At the east end — I see now that this really would have been better done in martial terminol- ogy with vans, wings and all that — were the two fried eggs, slightly overlapping each other. Standing guard on the western approaches — is that better? — was the black pudding, aided by the tomatoes, which were rather collapsing and so cover- ing the plate. The fried bread was in the middle and around it and to the south were the potatoes. The bacon sat on top. When a dollop of English mustard — unfortu- nately not freshly made; what do they put in that pre-made mustard that makes it taste so unpleasant? — had been pushed on at the edge by the pudding, not a glimpse of plate could be seen.
Everyone has his own way of tackling such a display. I always start with a check, cutting one sausage to peer inside, bending down and sniffing the bacon and prodding the fried potatoes to see if they're cooked but not mushy and, finally, lifting up a sam- ple of things — say, one egg and the fried bread — to see what is underneath. The chief culprits are likely to be water or fat, but you never know what you might find. Fat doesn't matter if it's good bacon fat, duck or pork fat or whatever, but engine oil does, and water is worst of all. There was no fat or water on this occasion.
On this day, what I found were some mushrooms I had not ordered. At least I suppose that's what they were. They looked nothing like the huge, black, pongy half- pounder field mushrooms I cook. They were roundish, a sort of grey off-brown, like those shoes university lecturers now wear, and slimy. Perhaps they came out of a tin. I decided to get them out of the way at once, but cut them open first out of cau- tion. Immediately a sea of foul liquid, mostly water but some fat and the colour of the mushrooms, flowed out. Within sec- onds — and this is the point of the tale — it had somehow travelled all over the plate. It penetrated the potatoes and fried bread making both soggy and tasting of the mushrooms. Somehow it got on top of the eggs, which were covered with a grey film and also tasted of mushrooms. It ruined the whole breakfast except the sausages, which, reinforced with enough mustard, survived.
What is so extraordinary is the damage one unpleasant ingredient of a recipe or dish can do to the others. All the effort — and as I say the other ingredients were really quite good — that had gone into preparing them was wasted because of this one addition. And unfortunately, it is not a rare event, and nor are slimy tinned mush- rooms the only thing to have such effects. A couple of years ago, and still today in the remoter provinces, it was raspberries. Someone would make a passable salad, a reasonable pâté, even a fish in some inof- fensive sauce. Then, as soon as you got stuck in, you found buried somewhere a raspberry, usually an ex-frozen raspberry. Like the mushroom juice, the raspberrY juice travelled, infecting all in its path, get- ting into, round and over everything. Currants, grapes and kiwi fruit are as inappropriate as raspberries but the dam- age is less because they don't travel as much. Orange and orange juice are, by contrast, seasoned travellers. Appropriate- ly, the only suitable home for them is in those kiosks at Heathrow. They have no place in a kitchen. Bacon bits travel. How many good endive, lettuce or rocket salads with olive oil, wine vinegar, pepper and salt have been rendered foul by some idiot tossing to bits of cold overcooked bacon. Delightful, innocent pheasants and chickens have thor breasts covered with strips of nasty Danish bacon, daubes have bacon thrown trl because ignorant housewives imagine this is the equivalent of the French ingredients, lard and petit sale. Likewise, hare terrines and game pies have rashers carefully lay- ered in so that no area of the game or pork will be uninfected.
Bacon, and we are talking here of high street bacon, though even home-cured bacon is inappropriate in most of these dishes, does not travel by water. It just sweats and oozes away until it has polluted everything around. There is a sure way to avoid adding r° classical dishes things which might travel! pollute and destroy the dish. Don't add anything at all.
Digby Anderson
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