Low life
Dessert ,island
Jeffrey Bernard
The business of being shipwrecked on a desert island is something that has in- trigued me ever since Roy Plomley started his radio programme Desert Island Discs. I've thought of the people I'd like to take, those I'd hate to and I seem to vaguely remember having written about them in this column. What came to mind the other day was desert island food and it's a tricky business choosing 21 meals assuming you're going to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. At first, what sprang to mind was cordon bleu, haute cuisine, provencale and all the sort of stuff that the likes of Ber- nard Levin drool over. But this excludes some of the great dishes of the world that have gone unrecorded by fatty Carrier and the great Elizabeth David. Consider the bacon sandwich washed down by a pot of 1983 Lyons Orange Label tea sipped from a bone china cup (mugs are for cocoa only). I prefer my bacon in the white sandwich loaf bread that's supposed to be so bad for you — wholemeal bread detracts from the bacon flavour — and there should be just a hint of brown sauce. And what about that
prince of left-overs, bubble and squeak? As a child, my favourite meal was Sunday sup- per. Cold lamb left over from lunch with pickles and bubble and squeak fried gently to a golden brown on the outside.
I could not eat a la Gavroche or L'Etoile twice a day every day. I could eat Chinese and Indonesian food nearly every day, In- dian once a week and certainly a paella, just about my favourite dish, once a week. A funny thing about paella is that I've never had a really good one in Spain. I've had plenty of rice concoctions that were the consistency of porridge but 1 suspect that you have to go to a three-star job in Madrid to get the real McCoy. Taste apart, it's great fun to make a paella if you've got a couple of hours to spare and I have most days. It isn't, by the way, necessary to cook everything in a paella together. Ingredients can blend just as effectively just before ser- ving. I suppose you might call shepherds pie a sort of English equivalent of paella and it's an obligatory weekly desert island dish although it has fallen into disrepute in re- cent years thanks to the ever declining stan- dards of British pub food. I once stood in for a chef in a pub off St Martin's Lane who'd fallen ill and my friend the guvnor asked me to make a large shepherds pie. I used steak tartare mince for the foundation and a bottle of 1949 Chateauneuf-du-Pape to bolster the gravy. It was quite stupen- dous, sold like hot cakes and the guvnor lost about £.6 on the dish. The next day I devoted my time in the kitchen to preparing that old classic, the Beethoven's Fifth of food, bangers and mash. Again the guvnor and I nearly fell out. I took a taxi to Jermyn Street to Paxton's for the sausages and he raised both eyebrows when I put egg yolks and cream into the mash. Mashed potatoes must be whipped and not just pulped.
Ill health forces me to eschew most pud- dings but I..do like apple pie and fresh fruit salad. What I would want plenty of on this wretched island is ice cream. Where this could be flown in from, God alone knows. I know of only three places in London: Marine Ices, the one next to Goodge Street tube station and the new one whose name I've also forgotten in Battersea. A word of warning here about ice cream. Never eat the popular brands. I once worked nights as a packer in the most famous establishment and I saw them add left-over fat from their sausages to the ice cream. I also once saw a lunatic urinate into a vat of ice cream.
Another gastronomic must would have to be the weekly injection of fish and chips.
Although it's necessary to travel to France to get properly cooked chips efforts are be- ing made here in some brasseries. For the most part English chips are too fat and soft and remind me of fried cotton wool. Even Wheelers haven't got the hang of them. What amuses me in that restaurant are the faces of people when they see me anointing my fish and chips with tomato ketchup. I gather from their toffee noses that ketchup is frightfully infra dig. And speaking of fish I would like kedgeree once a week for breakfast. I think what I might miss on this island is the hassle, rudeness and aggression I seem to experience in Indian and Chinese restaurants. But I'm sure Man Friday could be trained to get hysterical when I try to pay by cheque having lost my cheque card. He could bang my plates — palm leaves down in front of me and then sneer at my tip. On second thoughts I think I will get a friend with an expense acount to take me to the Connaught as soon as possible.
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