Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table. Nigel Slater
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of the pavements, or the price of elecrticity. The butcher’s was where you came for a piece of beef for Sunday, or just a bone for the dog and a natter.
Those butchers that are left have a queue only on a Saturday now. There is little time for gossip, and gone are the animals hanging from hooks, which together with the telltale drips of blood on the floor reminded us that our chop was once something that walked and blinked and farted. Today meat is presented to look as little like an animal as possible. Perish the thought that anyone could ever link the lamb on their plate to the gambolling jelly-legged teddy bears in a spring meadow. The headless deer hanging up at Borough Market in London comes as a shock nowadays, sending shivers of Bambicide down your back. It’s the hacked-off head that does it, the bloody, gaping neck and the fact that the poor animal always seems to be tied to the fence in a leaping position, as if it was butchered while happily leaping a moss-encrusted log. When Jamie or Hugh kills an animal on television now, it creates an outcry, as if pulling the guts from a pig’s carcass has nothing to do with the sausage in our sandwich. The death of an animal for food seems all the more barbaric now that we are kept as far away from the act as possible. In the city it is rare even to spot a pheasant for sale with its feathers on.
If you eat meat and have a local butcher, cherish him. Buy your eggs from him, and your bacon, your butter and your chutney. We need to put as much money in his till as we can if he is still to be there in five years’ time. Otherwise a decent pork chop will be as rare as hen’s teeth.
Toast – The Story of a Nation’s Hunger
I’ve eaten toast everywhere, from Laos to Luton, and I can say without a shadow of hesitation that no one, but no one, makes toast like the British. Just as you will never find a green curry with quite the subtly aromatic undertones it possesses in Thailand anywhere else, or an osso bucco as celestially tender as one from the hands of an Italian cook, nowhere on earth will you ever be given a piece of toast of the quality you can get on this island.
Why is something you cannot readily put your finger on. Toast is our offering to world gastronomy.
The French have more interesting bread than us, the Italians produce sweeter butter, and no one attends to detail in simple matters quite like the Japanese, yet their efforts at a round of buttered toast are nothing to our own toothsome triumphs. Even when it is not at its best, British toast is perfectly acceptable, unlike the white, flabby versions you might encounter in, say, Greece (where the whole point of toast has surely passed them by) or the laughable attempts you get in the US. No, in matters of toast we excel.
I am not sure that anyone can lay claim to the perfect recipe. How we eat our golden round is distinctly personal. Thick or thin, crisp or soft, gold or brown or black or a bit of all three – and then there is the question of crusts and their retention or removal (it’s a minefield, I tell you). Having said that, it is generally accepted that when we ask for a round of toast, we do not expect it to be made with brown bread. Like perfect bed linen or underwear, the perfect piece of toast can only ever be white. Brown-bread toast is for middle-aged people who suddenly decide they should look after themselves a bit more. You might as well eat grilled cardboard. It is permissible for making soldiers for dunking into soft-boiled eggs, but that is as far as it goes.
The idea was that you rushed through your main course to get to your ‘afters’, so a pudding that is horrible makes no sense at all. It follows that a pudding, dessert, sweet – whatever you call it – must be nice. Naturally, that disqualifies anything that is sloppy, slimy, gummy, cummy or lumpy. It should go without saying that a pudding shouldn’t make you gag or retch or heave or shudder. So how come we ever got to eat tapioca? Along with those wicked sisters of the school dining room, sago and semolina, it defies the first law of pudding, in that it must be a treat, something you want to eat, and more importantly something you will agree to be good for. Why should anyone want to tidy their room, be nice to their sister, take the dog out, clean out their rabbit’s cage or write Auntie a thank-you letter if their reward is a bowl of snot?
No one else is stupid enough to eat it. Not the French, not even the Germans, for God’s sake.
Rice pudding, on the other hand, is the quintessential nursery food. It is simply breast milk for adults. Introduced to Britain by Saxon invaders – how sweet of them to bring us such comfort with their rape and pillage – the pottage of broth and cereals was at first savoury, then by the seventeenth century developed into a sweet mixture of grain, milk and spices. That such dairy-based delights as tapioca and sago puddings have survived in an age of double choc-chip ice cream and black cherry cheesecake is surely testament to the seductive, soothing and security-giving qualities of warm milk.
The word soothing has been attached to more luxurious things than milk puddings, among them Brahms’s symphonies, cashmere throws and Cadbury’s Flakes. But the genre is still regarded as one of the most successful ways to smooth our ruffled feathers and to make us feel safe and loved. It is also probably the cheapest comfort next to sucking our thumbs.
Puddings of grain, milk and sugar that are cooked in the slowest possible way, usually for three hours or so in a cool oven, seem to belong to a different age. A time when speed was of less interest, where the instant hit of a quick-fix blueberry muffin and a skinny latte was but a distant dream. At first they were sweetened with sherry, cinnamon and sugar, or enriched with eggs. In the eighteenth century they were often covered with a pastry crust – nursery food with knobs on.
Unusually, the modern milk pudding is less rich than its forebears, often being made with nothing but rice, milk and sugar. A long curl of lemon rind or a sprinkling of nutmeg is now seen as an unnecessary addition. A vanilla pod is the only extravagance I put in my own milky puddings, split in half so that some of the fine black seeds escape to freckle the sweet, ivory-coloured milk. Vanilla extract is a cheaper option, but is less subtle. My stepmother always added a bay leaf, until she saw one on Gardener’s World and realised our bay tree was actually an ornamental laurel.
I don’t know anyone who still eats those schoolkid’s nightmares sago or tapioca, though they must have their fans. They carry the nickname ‘frog spawn’ appropriately enough. I have always felt that to be named after amphibians’ eggs was actually far too polite for the grey slime they served up as tapioca at school, and have always had my own, rather more gritty, term for it.
Stirring Jam into Your Rice Pudding – Or Not
The world remains divided on whether or not to add some sort of preserve to rice pudding at the table. For every person for whom a blob of raspberry jam, or blackcurrant or black cherry in their pudding is a step closer to heaven (my father stirred marmalade into his), there are a hundred schoolboys shouting ‘Nosebleed!’ at the very thought. Perhaps they are right to question the sullying of something so pure, so white, so gentle.
Most vegetarians would now wince at the thought of a mixture of minced nuts and egg formed to resemble a lamb chop, but thirty years ago the nut cutlet (we are talking mostly Brazils here) was the height of veggie chic. If a non-meat-eater accepted an invitation to a dinner party, it was a pound to a penny they would end up with a substitute chop. The sad thing is that for all the cook’s craftsmanship and artistry, the nut cutlet was about as welcome on a vegetarian’s plate as a burned sausage.
The Brazil nut is about 63 per cent fat, 25 of which is saturated, which makes it the nut with the highest fat content. Your veggie guests may not thank you for that.
Nuts do not take well to seasoning with either herbs or spices, which leaves most recipes wanting.
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