Fork food
Pamela Vandyke Price
A friend whose cooking is so comfortable to my taste buds and intestinal tract that I polish my plate and ask for seconds (many a classy nosh bar would wish to vaunt such a tribute), once said that she was so tired she wished she could just "eat something with a fork". For it is not the faison farci en crate sur canapé flambe a deux crus du straight malt that one really wants to come home to, nor those concoctions of plaited fish or aspics-cum-chaudfroids on which Spanish galleons are piped in truffles, which cookery books still seem impelled to promulgate. Exhaustion, exasperation or simply economy give the call of the scrambled egg, rissole, mince, meatball, fish cake and pie, a lowing, bell-like note that wings in to the still sad music of our cuisine-bound culture.
1 used to refer to this sort of thing as "nursery food" until I began to have to explain to the young what a nursery used to be. All these dishes were eaten via the fork, to which one graduated after the pusher and spoon epoch. (It would take a diagram to explain that, but the implement enabled you to wodge your food into the bowl of the Spoon on the dustpan and brush principle.) All of them were very simple, with the best of ingredients — none of your nasty foreign sauces that those poor continentals have to smother theiifood with because it's so inferior to ours.
Now gastronomy is the answer to many things, including keeping people tranquil. If they don't have enough to eat they may, fairly enough, become violent so as to get it. If they have the wrong things, they get all twisted — mentally as well as intestinally — which causes them to do nasty things like imposing silly budgets, closed shops, subsidised sliced bread and uncow milk on the
helpless. Imagine the reinforced concrete mentality (as well as personal interior) that would be the result of a diet of plastic chicken, inferior foie gras, frozen mixed veg, bottled salad dressings, dehydrated Hollandaise and welt-done beef. And what do these horrors — euphemisms for official meals, government banquets and state receptions — tot up to? Not sugar and spice and all things nice, but poor Marcia Williams, who, compelled to take cartons of milk and arrowroot (well does one acknowledge its soothing properties) to the vodkaswilling, caviare dolloping USSR, now expresses her secret and wholly natural yearnings for nursery food in her choice of a peer name. Forkender, forsooth!
Anyone who wishes to go down to history at the end of a fork must 'claim my interest and how does one not want to know the intake of many public persons, should one believe, with Brillat-Savarin, that, "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are." Lady Fin de Fourchette doubtless suffered in that Soviet Union where, one hears, the veriest mini-tasse of bortsch is a long time a-coming — and one's clamouring crop must have what I believe she once referred to — unlucky lady — as "fodder" (dear Marcia, this is something you give to animals so that they are fit to eat, don't by-pass the process or you risk appraisal as "on the hoof" or a "mutton teg"). What she clearly craves for is that Nanny would have made her eat up until she was in a state of bovine amiability — including that apotheosis of fork food, macaroni cheese. Too late now, I suppose to rush one round to the Lords.
Robin McDouall, that impressive diner-about-town, writes of it as something his travelled friends laugh at but "first course, last course, or main course — I won't hear a word against it." His recipe calls for ,a béchamel sauce. Mine, from the first page of my own cookery book, is my Mama's easier version, which she somehow often gave us in the eggless Blitz and which is cosy food in any bleak time; it can be made with noodles you have forgotten which are therefore stale, so it's an economy single dish pleasure.
For four people, allow about 6 tablespoonfuls of noodles of a fairly large sort. Boil these until they are beginning to soften and strain them. Butter an oven dish, and put in the noodles with some more chips of butter and 3 4 tablespoonfuls of grated cheese. Use Parmesan if you can afford it, otherwise a combination of Cheddar and Gruyre is good — not all the one, as it will be too salt, or t'other as it may be too bland. Beat up 3-4 eggs, a tablespoonful of cold water and then about a cupful of milk and pour this over the noodles. Put sliced tomatoes on the top sprinkled with a little nutmeg, bake in a moderate oven for about 3/4 hour or until the top is brown. Two large eggs can be stretched to serve 4 people, and you can also eke out the milk with a little more water. Use salt and pepper according to the cheese you have.
Only suppose . . somebody's mama had been a dabber hand at bubble and squeak, those who stump those powerful corridors might have enjoyed happier times with the noble lady at the end of the fork. (And we might not now be at the receiving end of the indigestion of those who, alas, are indeed what they eat.) Pamela Vandyke Price is also wine correspondent of the Times
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