When gobbling brawn is caviar to the general
There is more writing about food now than ever before, most of it feeble. There are exceptions. My Somerset neighbour Tamasin Day-Lewis descants admirably on the subject because she knows everything about the raw materials and has a stunning gift for turning that knowledge into noble repasts. She is quick and graceful too in cooking: watching her dance about her kitchen preparing a three-course meal reminds me of Margot Fonteyn performing Nutcracker. But most of the tribe are dull; off-putting too. All they convey is their own overweight greed.
My favourite writer on the subject is Lamb. Whenever he touched on it he struck gold. Consider his comments on a consignment of brawn, the work of a college chef, which his friend Manning sent from Cambridge:
Tis of all my hobbies the supreme in the eating way. He might have sent sops from the pan, skimmings, crumplets, chips, hog’s lard, the tender brown judiciously scalped from a fillet of veal (dexterously replaced by a salamander), the top of asparagus, fugitive livers, tender effusines of laxative woodcocks, the red spawn of lobsters, leverets’ ears, and such pretty filchings common to cooks. But these had been ordinary presents, the everyday courtesies of dishwashers to their sweethearts. Brawn was a noble thought.
The passage as a whole is worth a relish. I remember my mother reading it to me when I was a little boy. We did not think much of brawn in those days. Maybe they didn’t know how to make it in the Potteries. As the English equivalent of pâté de foie, it depends entirely on what you put in, and the spell you weave over it.
The ‘smack’ of food, to use Lamb’s favourite word, depends greatly on time and place, and the individual. Princess Diana told me: ‘My favourite of all is a hot bacon sandwich on a cold morning.’ Delicious; especially if you’re not used to it. Not long ago I talked to a pretty Japanese lady on a cruise liner. ‘Are you enjoying it?’ ‘Velly much.’ ‘What do you like best about it?’ ‘Stleaky bacon.’ Conjunction is the essence of gastronomy. Lord de Guest, one of the minor heroes of Anthony Trollope’s Dr Thorne, lays down: ‘Cold pheasant for breakfast is the best thing I know of. Pheasants at dinner are rubbish, mere rubbish.’ A wellmade cold pheasant sandwich can cheer you up on a dismal occasion, as old Mr Crouchback noticed, as he munched during the sale of his house and furniture in the agricultural slump of the 1920s — a poignant vignette from Waugh’s Sword of Honour. As a boy, however, I did not rate sandwiches high — fishpaste fillings were dreary and a lettuce sandwich was the lowest form of human nourishment. But nowadays I regard a tea party (my favourite meal and form of entertainment) without wafer-thin cucumber sandwiches as a fraud on the public. It is the combination that matters. I don’t recall any greater delight in the 1950s than taking the breakfast special to Brighton for a day by the sea, and eating a well-done kipper in the dining-car — even better than the succulent Whitstables one had at English’s later for lunch.
One of the mistakes in life is to despise tinned food. I do not make it because it was wartime when, aged 10 to 16, I first began to notice food, and a lot of our best treats came in tins from America. I will not easily forget my first taste of Spam, in the dark days of early 1942 when we were taking a terrific beating from the Japanese. It was only spiced ham but it seemed an entirely new taste for us. I have always liked corned beef too, particularly in its American apotheosis as corned beef hash, the perfect breakfast dish, now alas slipping in favour so that it is increasingly difficult to find it on the menu at posh New York hotels like the Waldorf. My father used to tell a story about this dish. He had run away to sea, aged 12. This was before the first world war, when boys were allowed to do such a thing. He served on a freighter crossing the Atlantic, and the captain was kind to him. When they got to New York, he said: ‘I won’t give you your pay for they will get it off you. But you may go ashore and look.’ So he did, and eventually became hungry. A notice outside a tavern said: ‘Free lunch.’ So he went in and sat on a tall stool at the bar, and the bartender said: ‘What’s it to be, young thruster?’ ‘I’ll have the free lunch.’ ‘Righteoh, Suh!’ and a huge plate of corned beef hash was put in front of him. ‘And now, Suh, what’ll you drink?’ ‘Oh, I don’t drink, and anyway I’ve no money.’ The bartender put his hands on his hips and said ‘Waal, ah’ll be damned!’ But he gave my father a second helping. ‘The best food I’ve ever tasted.’ I’m not sure that the tinned pineapple chunks we got in wartime from Home & Colonial were not better than the fresh pineapple which eventually arrived in the 1950s. As Charles II said: ‘[Fresh] pineapple is a sad disappointment.’ I also loved tinned fruit salad, especially when garnished with that now vanishing luxury, tinned Carnation Milk. There were those who preferred certain kinds of tinned stuff long after the fresh kind became available. Harold Wilson, for instance, enjoyed tinned salmon, doused with vinegar. ‘I love crunching up those soft bones,’ he said. ‘It gives me a nice feeling of content, like watching George Brown’s face when he realises his gin bottle is empty.’ I don’t despise bottled condiments either. Sydney Smith once complimented a lady at a dinner party for declining gravy: ‘I too, madam, dislike gravy and I compliment you on your taste.’ What kind of gravy was it? Heavy with flour perhaps? Smith preferred to select a relish from the turntable of condiments which garnished the middle of the table, and which you could lean over and spin round to get the jar of your choice, including such rarities as orange angosturas and celery salt. These massive compendiums, some of which incorporated a table-fountain in the middle, were still to be seen when I was a young man in the early 1950s. Hosts were then not ashamed to offer you bottled mayonnaise or even its non-U version, salad cream. Very good it was too. There are now many things I miss, familiar from Lancashire high teas in the old days: boiled ham closely attended by yellow mustard pickles in giant jars; gentlemen’s relish and anchovies served with soft slices of buttered toast (done at the fireside on a fork); really runny custard pies — not for throwing but ingurgitating; spiced-up red gooseberry jam; Battenburgs, goosenah biscuits, Eccles cakes and cherry slab-cake. As they said in Preston: ‘Tha never knows what’ll turn up at ’igh tea.’ Jane Austen, to judge by the food served in the tales and playlets classified as her juvenilia, had similar demotic tastes at one time. We hear of cowsheel and onion, tripe and red herrings being gobbled up with relish. As a mature woman she was never greedy, and never ‘stuffed’ (to use a term which occurs in Sense and Sensibility), but was ‘most particular’ about what she ate. So am I. But I am not proud. I note in the diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles, George VI’s secretary, that he was fond of that nursery dish, hot bread-and-milk, liberally sweetened. I was given it, as a small boy, when I was ‘poorly’ and ‘not up to proper food’. Indeed, even now, if off-colour, it is the only thing to eat. Of course, in smiling times I like Beluga caviar as much as anyone. But as Aristotle Onassis used to say, ‘Caviar is no good unless you can have as much of it as you want to eat.’
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