mperative Cooking: expeditions and explosions
IT IS a pity day outings are associated with charabancs, brown ale and serial mass urination, dignified, I am told, by the term `comfort stops'. There is a different outing, a chaps' outing in search of food. Weston's superbly primitive cider factory in Here- fordshire is a good one. Another, in and some pigeons fat on harvest remains. I mentioned outings for game and fish in an earlier column. But avoid the Eighties extension of the lower-class charabanc outing, the day trip to France periodically advocated by topic-starved travel col- umnists. We are 'wrong' to think the Pas de Calais dull. It is very much 'neglected' and we can pay for 'wonderful' meals in the hinterland by the 'savings' we make bring- ing home 228 25-centilitre bottles of French beer, `oh! and those delicious French hypermarket cheeses.' Hmmm why anyone should have 'Calais' engraved anywhere except outside Calais, as a warn- ing, I don't know.
Go instead to Southall, Leicester or any Asian centre. On outing eve, we sit down with a bottle and make a huge list. Mrs Anderson wants some silk to make knick- ers (much cheaper in Asian shops). A friend wants a large leg of mutton to marinade in red wine then steam-roast: the Southalls are some of the few places which sell the hard-to-come-by ingredients for many European, indeed old English dis- hes. We shall stock up on pulses. It's so much pleasanter to buy them in the com- pany of Asian chaps who have also just bought mutton than surrounded by white vegetarians. There are sheep's feet and brains, lean minced lamb, boiling chickens that don't taste of cardboard, an enormous array of fruit and vegetables, rice, gram and different atta flours, dried fish, sensi- ble cooking equipment, toothpicks and, best of all, fireworks.
I mean chaps' not girls' fireworks, F- works which bang and jump not ones that twinkle, look pretty and draw forth `Aaaaaaaaaahs'. Best of all are F-works which start like girls' F-works so all the chaps look contemptuous, then do some- thing loud and unexpected behind you. Many Asian centres sell fireworks the whole year round which is most useful for those chaps who regard them as an essen- tial part of the Church's year (outside Advent and Lent). No wedding is complete without F-works let off as the happy couple come out of church. True, there are parish priests who are against F-works. They mutter about 'the roof but the more likely reason is that they have a very un-Christian antipathy to joy. That's where the F-works come in. There is currently a Church of England body attempting, in the wake of the Durham affair, to devise a test for orthodoxy. What better than fireworks at a wedding? Clergy who complain would be sacked. Those who smile weakly would be retained. Those who say: 'How splendid, we must have some in honour of All Saints: when are you going to Southall next?' would be made bishops. Fire always was the best test of heresy.
Bangers bought, we load the car with them, the pulses, mutton, chicken, and knickers and dive into one of the many excellent restaurants for lunch.
Outings must be frenetic. There should be a list of food to be bought, times and places specified. When you have calculated how long the outing should take, subtract an hour from the total and it will be all the better. Drive fast, trot from shop to shop and bolt the brains marsala, chappati, mattar paneer, and pakora. Eat the paan between restaurant and adjacent car. Any- one not finished when the engine starts puts £1 in the outing fund. Other penalties: 50p caught not smiling, 30p late for any- thing (per five minutes), £3 worried about getting back, making sociological remarks about our increasingly pluralistic society or disrupting the outing song.
Outing songs are chosen — better, com- missioned and written — at the outing eve meeting round the bottle. Old favourites include 'The sun has got his hat on' and `Vieux MacDonald avait une ferme' sung in bad French . . et dans sa ferme it avait un cochon/mouton/canard/poule' etc 'avec un (snort) ici, (snort) la, ici (snort), la (snort), partout (snort, snort), (baaa) ici . . .' There's always some boor in the car who says: 'It's most interesting: the French onomatopoeic expressions for animal noises are different to ours. Their sheep do not `baaa' and their chicken do not . .' He puts a fiver in the box, which is now bulging, and we all have a splendid evening on the proceeds before retiring tired but happy to bed.
Digby Anderson
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