I Imperative cooking: Unwelcome Christmas guests
A NEW epidemic of not-eating is sweeping the country — just in time for Christmas. Experts say it can strike anyone, though I have never known any proper chap catch it. The victims made most of by the media are young girls who starve themselves or just `waste'. It is no respecter of class. The Daily Mail reveals that the girls at Wycombe Abbey school, St Paul's, London, and Chel- tenham Ladies' College are all weighed regularly to check they have not got it. Feminists denounce it as the fault of the male-dominated fashion industry urging girls to be thin to please men. This seems unlikely. The fashion industry, as we all know, is dominated by women and homo- sexuals. Proper men like ladies to be robust.
No, the true villain is, as so often, Mrs Bottomley, the Health Education Authori- ty and the assorted health fascists who use the mass media to terrorise even mildly plump persons into conformity with the approved Euro-figure. If you have 10-year state plans with the avowed aim of making people thinner, you must not be surprised if a few impressionable young girls actually obey them. Hilariously, some are even tak- ing up smoking to become thin.
None of which matters to Imperative cooks, with one exception. What if you find you've a waster come to dinner this Christ- mas season, or indeed any time? It puts a chap off his grub to watch some emaciated, chestless stripling pushing her hare and pork sausage over and round the plate and then to its edge where she hopes it will be unseen in the shadows. There's something rivetingly horrible as she puts a tiny bit of the dark, pungent flesh in her mouth and keeps it there, moving her jaw reluctantly and grimacing, then swallowing and flush- ing. These people ought not to accept din- ner invitations.
They are not the only ones. There are the fussy eaters who won't eat mutton and gar- lic, wild duck, kidneys in sherry or anything which smells or tastes strong; the incompe- tent eaters who can't manage red mullet bones; the bogus-mannered eaters who won't pick up their spatchcocked quail or crab leg and suck and chew it.
And careful on 26 December and 2 Jan- uary: never invite a Londoner to dinner in the country on Sunday, even a trencher- man-Londoner. For obscure reasons, Lon- doners think it clever to eat Sunday lunch when decent people are having tea. So they
turn up for dinner still belching beef. One arrived recently for aperitivos before dinner with a large Dominican cigar still in his mouth from lunch. It's even more pathetic to see a large London trencherman toying with his grub than a waster. Then, just as dinner is over, the blighters wake up, decide they're hungry and massacre the cheese. They want to talk, too, just when normal people go to bed (10.20). The best way to get them out is to have ordered a taxi for them. Don't tell them you have done so. They might countermand it. When it does arrive, there will be a little surprise but they usually go quietly.
The best thing to talk about at dinner is food, followed by gossip and reminiscences. But guests who eat bad food at home talk about bad food. You've killed a splendid Indian game cockerel, plucked it, hung it a week, cleaned and cooked it and the guest says, 'Free-range eh! Do you know, they've got some jolly good free-range birds in the supermarket now, come from France?' Or carefully made pike sausages with crab sauce provokes, 'We eat a lot of fish at home too. Can't beat a fresh fillet of plaice with a quick cheese sauce. Easy, healthy too.'
The Daily Telegraph had a wonderful instance of this blundering, embarrassing, false equivalence recently. It was offering vegetarian alternatives to Christmas geese, ducks, partridges and beef. It seriously sug- gested as being of equivalent merit braised red cabbage with cranberries and orange, puréed parsnips and carrots or nut roast with ready-mix vegetable gravy. The gulf between these ignorant, tasteless people and Imperative cooks and eaters is too wide to be bridged. It is kinder to both par- ties that we do not meet.
But someone has to take the initiative to ensure we don't. In a more refined age, when people were ashamed to hold cranky views about food and understood the obli- gations of being a guest, the matter was dealt with by good manners. Today, one cannot assume them and the code has to be spelt out by the host. Plain-speaking is called for. 'Before I ask you to dinner, let me explain that it is just that, a dinner. That means you are welcome if you are hungry and omnivorous of all that is good. If not, it's not a dinner you need. Try some- thing I believe is called "a party".'
Digby Anderson
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