The Good Life
The bottom translated
Pamela Vandyke Price
Sometimes those of us who are otherwise placidly preoccupied with perfecting the poaching of eggs, trying to determine whether there is a detectable difference in the gravy if we sacrifice to it a glassful of prime red Burgundy rather than everyday plonk, or simply attempting to get those who do have enough to eat to eat. better, are exasperated and depressed by the wholly idiotic and unnecessary obstacles put in our way by them. This is bad, because it is difficult to prepare and serve food and drink satisfactorily if one is distracted or lowspirited (rage is bad too, but sometimes it can be worked off by a session of pounding, peeling chestnuts, or merely trying to rend a plastic capsule from a bottle). If, as I have often said, everyone put gastronomy first, there would be less time for trouble; no one has actually declared war over a recipe, dropped a bomb on a rival chef or restaurateur, and even I have never felt vaguely inclined to take up a bottle and bash fellow wine writers gathered around a table. It is therefore calming to translate into gastronomic terms things which interfere with one getting on with living. Spiro Agnew, for example, is the termite active within the whorls of boxwood corkscrews. Water gate, obviously, is part of the vast empire promulgating uncow beverages; Mountjoy is a magarine, of pallider hue than its co-brand, Meadow Bounty, all three of them exemplifying the principle that if you cater, hard enough for the weak, insipid and ineffectual, you will achieve wondrous profits.
.Electricity is a licorice bootlace with an improved knitted protein inner weft — unfortunately it snaps under stress. Gormley is a school pudding, aura-ed with 'good for you' qualities. I think it consists of cold tapioca floating on a tepid sea of ' coke ' —, anyway, its eructatory aftermath can be considerable.
VAT is, by origin, only indirectly to do with drink, for it is part of the secret language of tasting notes, evolved so that people do not peer over your shoulder just as you have written "smells like stale cabbage, tastes like syrup of figs" with the merry cry "Now what do you think of my Meursault Charmes?" "Vermicelli after taste" can bode ill for a wine which you might have expected to have a long life — it will probably never stop fermenting. Oil, in the unolive sense, is the sludge that occurs when you have forgotten to clean out the vegetable rack or container, and that you can't utilise even in the pigbin.
But before the persons whose ungastronomic intake (they certainly do have enough to eat and drink) creates such interior turbulence within them that they double this in the world outside. put out our fires and lights, may I urge you to feed your thoughts
with two excellent books, both of them sure to be standard works of reference for many years. Reay
Tannahill's Food in History (Eyre Methuen, £4.95), elegantly illus
trated, is notable for it surveys what people eat and why in the new as well as the old world, Mrs
Tannahill is able to indicate why certain people — protein nourished — were able to resist, conquer and create; she suggests the origins of vegetarianism, considers why the sweet-sour dishes of ancient Persia were more like those of India and China than of ancient Rome (fruit was generally used in the former, whereas the Romans preferred a mixture of honey and vinegar), she is scientific about mass food manufacturing and nutrition, erudite and deadpan about "digestive wind," and her final chapter, in which she suggests possible future patterns of eating and food production, should be pondered by all to whom gastronomy is more than a vogue word.
Did you know that, until as recently as 1897, the lower deck in the British Navy were forbidden to use knives and forks, which might make them "unmanly "? That the Kalahari Desert is rich in truffles, and that, according to an American writer (Christianity in the Kitchen, 1861), pork, turtle soup and wedding cake are bad for the digestion? These are only some of the amuse gueules Mrs Tannahill presents; her book is a banquet. Jan Read, married to a Spaniard of whom I can say only that I can eat with voracity everything she cooks (many a classy nosh bar would like to say as much!), has written The Wines of Spain and Portugal (Faber, £4.50), for the Faber series of wine books. There is little available for reference for the student of the wines of the Iberian Peninsula, which, in both the inexpensive and high quality ranges, are economically and oenologically important to the British wine drinker. Illustrated by charming old line engravings, this is a remarkably comprehensive book, with all the requisite statistics and facts so often slurred over by the writers of chatty wine tomes. Here you have the history, the methods of production and the names of firms, large and small, that are important, a valuable Spanish and Portuguese vocabulary, and the essentials on the spirits and liqueurs as well as the wines, Unqualified admiration for a book to which, in a tasting note, I should apply the word 'breed'. These two books are lighthouses in a — currently — ungastronomic world. How I enjoyed them!
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