Imperative cooking: home pride
IMAGINE you are a music buff. Someone tells you of this excellent new record shop, and off you go. On arrival, you find that it's arranged in rooms: one for religious choral music, one for opera, one for piano music, etc. You visit each of these and it turns out just as your friend has said. Then, last, you go into the room marked 'orchestral'. You are excited, for this is something you really enjoy and your friend's advice has proved itself well in the other rooms. You approach `M' for Mozart. There is not a single record. Haydn? Nothing. Saint- Sans, Mahler? Nothing. Perhaps you have misunderstood the system: 'Excuse me, could you explain how . . . ?' You have understood the system. They have no Mozart or Mahler. You stammer out your surprise. The attendant looks at you as if you ought to know better. 'In this shop,' he says proudly, 'we only sell British orchestral composers.'
Absurd. Well, that's what I keep getting in restaurants and homes. After three or four excellent other courses (well, not bad), I'm offered blasted British cheeses. And not just British cheeses — just British cheeses. No foreign cheeses at all. No Mozart (Roquefort), no Haydn (Pont l'Eveque), no Mahler (Cabrales), no Crot- tin, just boring Cheddar, three others which are a little lighter or darker but taste much the same, an ageing Stilton, which like so much modern Stilton does not age well, and a log of lemon-tasting goat made by lesbians in Cornwall.
For once it is not me being extreme here. I am not demanding they offer no British cheese. I am protesting at their absurd pride in refusing to serve any foreign cheese, any of the world's best cheeses. This pride is rearing its ugly head every- where. Pride is taken in the most ordinary
I think it means we're about to become a bank.'
and thus inappropriate dishes and ingredi- ents, second-rate things like swede. No, that doesn't mean it is worthless, any more than Stilton is worthless, just second-rate and with no right to put first-rate aubergines or spinach off the menu or table. Or take the recent canonisation of cod. Nothing wrong with cod. Fine upper- to medium-level fish. But just because scarcity has increased prices, there is no need to imagine that it is suddenly as good as bass or John Dory; or to do the unforgiv- able and replace salt cod with fresh cod in first-rate salt cod recipes.
There's something odd and unpleasant about the current food climate. Its claims are not outrageous — it's not preaching atonality — just persistently precisely mis- judged. It's a fidgety culture. There's no outright assault on old and tested values, but there is a constant tinkering with ingre- dients and values at the margin. It's sensa- tion- and gesture-driven. It can't leave any- thing alone; it's always titivating up traditional recipes when they are much bet- ter simply obeyed. The modern British cooking culture is far too proud of itself to recognise the virtue of obedience. Through and through, it's so proud of itself.
Faced with the Cheddar, the lesbian goat and the silly pride, I'm not sure I did not prefer things as they were. Remember English food in the Fifties. I have particu- larly fond memories of those revolving hors d'oeuvre trolleys. There were cold baked beans, potato salad out of a tin, macedoine of veg from another tin, sardines from a third, lurid Danish salami, soggy pickled onions, acidic bottled beetroots, greeny- black hard-boiled eggs and piccalilli. Each sat in a brown smoked-glass tray in another silver tray. Then there were six different sorts of veal which were all pork, beaten, covered with lumpy breadcrumbs and served with different sauces which were all Marsala and salty butter, or plaice cooked in old oil; then fruit salad in which tinned mandarins were always over-represented. Funnily enough, the only good thing was the cheese: Gorgonzola and Camembert in the days when it was Camembert. But as for the rest of the meal, no one, including those who cooked and served it, was proud of it. Pride in food was for foreigners. You expected it in France, in the odd Chez Solange in London and at better homes, where it was pride in ingredients.
In those days they ate more Cheddar and more swede. But no one would have been stupid enough to think they deserved top billing, let alone exclusive billing. I suppose the charitable way of putting it is that there is now so much quite good food around that people have lost the sense of the best. But those of us who enjoy the best don't feel or see why we should be very charitable.
Digby Anderson
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