Food Shock

I’m sorry to have disappeared abruptly, blogging friends. We went to a wedding in Oxford yesterday, all very lovely, and now I’m back and trying to catch up!

When we were away on holiday, my Dad came back from an outing with a book he’d picked up for me. It was by Alice Thomas Ellis, an author whose fiction I admire very much indeed. But it was a non-fiction book entitled Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring, which turned out to be a charming and quirkily fascinating culinary history. It is extraordinary to read the things that people have considered to be delicacies over the past few centuries. And I mean, really extraordinary. One section that particularly caught my eye was on the addition of marshmallows to salads in the USA. Can this be for real? Alice Thomas Ellis describes one compilation of American recipes in which, out of 65 salad recipes, three are based principally on lettuce while 25 contain marshmallows, and she draws attention to ‘one twentieth century lady [who] mixes up a packet of orange jello with apple butter, diced celery, diced apple, chopped pecans, marshmallows and a pinch of salt, pours it into a greased mould till it sets, then serves it on a bed of crisp lettuce. :Mayonnaise makes a delightful topping.”’ Eewww! Having lived in France, I find that I do love my salad dressed, and I generally make my dressing up from olive oil, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice and Dijon mustard. My horror was entirely equal to that of Alice Thomas Ellis’s when she came across a recipe that had the ‘effrontery’ to call itself French dressing and that consisted of: ‘a half-can of Campbell’s tomato soup, three-quarters of a cup of vinegar, half a cup Wesson oil, a quarter cup sugar, a tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, three tablespoons grated onion, one tablespoon each salt, paprika and mustard.’ A tablespoon of salt? ‘Shake well. Keeps in the refrigerator indefinitely’ the instructions suggest, to which Thomas Ellis retorts: ‘I bet it does.’ Lest we get too insular and smug, however, she also follows back this tendency to mix sweet and savoury to the time when dried and preserved fruit were first available in England and mince pies were filled with currents and raisins and chopped meat. She recalls also that ‘our ancestors were passionately fond of things that wobbled – junkets and syllabubs and flummeries and jellies – so maybe American cookery is, in a perverted way, more authentically British than our own, which grows increasingly Continental.’

Now I cannot claim to have vast experience of food in America. Whenever I’ve been there, I’ve been trying to adjust my resolutely stubborn time clock to a different time zone without much success. It hasn’t mattered what has been put in front of me for dinner: my stomach has known that it is really 12 o’clock or worse, 5 in the morning, and been less than interested. Breakfast has generally been my most welcome meal of the day and I’ve had lovely breakfasts in the States. And I do remember the food at conferences I’ve been to has been very good. So maybe it’s a 1950s thing, when food the world over seemed to be at a particularly low spot. Britain was still crippled by rationing and food was inevitably dull and tasteless. Bill Bryson, in his memoir of the 1950s, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, suggests that food in his family was no better even when unrationed, although he’s clear this is entirely down to his distracted mother. ‘We didn’t call it the kitchen in our house,’ he says. ‘We called it the burns unit.’ His family was ‘radiantly unsophisticated’, and foods like pasta, rice, mayonnaise, corned beef, cream cheese, salami, fish that wasn’t rectangular, curries, enchiladas, sushi, couscous and yoghurt were either unknown to his family table or else were still to be invented. Instead: ‘our meals consisted of leftovers. My mother had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of foods that had already been to the table, sometimes repeatedly. Apart from a few perishable dairy products, everything in the fridge was older than I was, sometimes by many years. […] I can only assume that my mother did all her cooking in the 1940s so that she could spend the rest of her life surprising herself with what she could find under cover at the back of the fridge.’

Of course every nation’s cuisine has some doubtful dishes and some bad days. I’ll never forget my mother letting out a scream of horror at a ferme auberge in France when the waiter proudly lifted the lid on a dish of roast duck with their heads still on. And whilst the meals I ate at restaurants and friends’ houses were uniformly wonderful, the canteen at the collège I taught at was truly awful. There was a particularly gruesome vegetable dish with peas and celery and other unspecified lumps floating in a thin, watery gruel. And lifting up half a very recognizable bunny to find the chips underneath freshly varnished with blood was also an experience designed to turn me off my food. There were some days when I just ate a lot of pâtisserie. I’ll also confess to having my own horror stories in the kitchen, although I do generally like to cook. Puddings seemed to have a fairly high disaster quotient, and on one memorable occasion I decided to make a caramelized apple flan (which I’d done before); it’s a simple recipe – a centimeter or so of demerara sugar in a cake tin, sliced apples laid over the top and then a shortcake base, all baked in the oven and turned upside down to serve. Only I’d baked it in a cake tin with a removable base, so my molten sugar had seeped out and was coating the bottom of the oven instead. We actually moved house not long after that one; it seemed the easiest thing to do. My most humiliating experience however, was when my husband invited an American friend of his over for dinner one evening when his wife and children were back in the States. The meal I cooked was fine, perfectly edible, but it just wasn’t particularly good; it was one of those occasions when nothing had turned out exactly as I’d hoped. After we’d finished eating I happened to ask the friend what his wife did, and he replied ‘She’s a professional chef.’ I chokingly declared that I would never have cooked for him if I had known that, but now on reflection, I can see that what I really needed was a recipe for a salad, something in jello with mayonnaise on top that couldn’t possibly turn out wrong, something I could have prepared in advance, and something to remind him of home. I doubt that he’ll ever come to dinner again, but if he does, the next time I’ll be ready for it.