Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table. Nigel Slater

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СКАЧАТЬ will always appear more romantic than one of us popping out to British Home Stores for a cheese and pickle.

      School tuck boxes aside, the art of the packed lunch has very much fallen by the wayside. The oblong tin, its lid held secure by a rubber band, is a rare sight now, though the treasures it contains are just as fascinating. By rights the home-made sandwiches should be accompanied by a slice of cake and an apple, though things have moved on a bit. If there is a modern designer version, presumably without the rubber band, it may well now be filled with stuffed focaccia and a little pot of blueberries, or maybe a slice of panettone. The utterly essential Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer has no doubt been replaced by one of Ms Gillian McKeith’s bowel-opening fibre bars. Hardly ideal, I would have thought, when you are walking through the Yorkshire Dales.

       Toblerone

      I have always found a bar of Toblerone almost as difficult to conquer as the mountain peaks its design so clearly represents. But beyond the familiar rattle of the bar in its triangular box, and the ragged job you inevitably make of unwrapping it from its foil, lies a quietly classic piece of confectionery quite unlike any other.

      Whatever way you try to tackle it, a Toblerone is an obstacle course. It can take a few attempts to break a triangle from the nougat-speckled bar without actually hurting your knuckles, and then, when you finally do, you have a piece of pointy chocolate slightly too big for your mouth. You bite with your front teeth and find the chocolate barely gives, so you attempt to snap it with your fingers, and find that doesn’t work either. The only thing left is to pop the whole lump in your mouth and suck.

      The pointed end hits the roof of your mouth, so you roll it over with your tongue, only to find that it makes a lump in your cheek It is as impossible to eat elegantly as a head of sweetcorn. The only answer is to let the nut-freckled chocolate soften slowly in the warmth of your mouth while rolling it over and over on your tongue. The nutty, creamy chocolate suddenly seems worth every bit of discomfort, and you decide to do it all over again with another piece.

      We persevere because we think we like it, which of course we do, but there is more to it than that. Toblerone is a natural step between the cheap, fatty bars in purple wrapping and the posh stuff with its crispness and deep flavour further up the chocolate ladder. Any child who chooses the pyramid of mountain peaks over a slab of Dairy Milk is obviously on his or her way to becoming a chocolate connoisseur.

      One often wonders just who actually buys this delightful Swiss-tasting confection, as you never, ever see anyone eating it. Toblerone also has the curious honour of being present in every hotel minibar I have ever opened. Even the one in Thailand, where the only other occupant was a Tetra Pak of tepid tamarind juice and a bottle of mosquito repellent. It is in fact the mini-bar bar, and as you sit alone in your hotel room, letting the pointy, uncomfortable lump of confectionery melt slowly on your tongue, your bar of Toblerone may well, albeit briefly, become your best friend.

       The Kitchen Fusspot

      They are, in the kitchen at least, late developers. Often genteel, effete, with a little too much time on their hands. Meals emerge from their kitchens with a sense of expectation, each ingredient having been painstakingly sourced, every direction in the cookery book followed to the letter, and inevitably late. The meal has something of the theatrical production about it, albeit amateur dramatics, as if it has all been so, so much trouble. Which of course it has. And don’t we know it.

      The kitchen fusspot prepares dinner – a charming though slightly too creamy soup, meat with a syrupy, over-reduced sauce, a dessert as elaborate as an Ascot hat and probably just as indigestible – while his guests get more and more hungry, not to say a little pissed. The kitchen, once tidy enough to appear in the pages of World of Interiors, now resembles a bombsite of stacked roasting tins, sauté pans and sieves.

      Fusspot is almost always male. He only cooks once a month, if that, and needs endless encouragement and ego massage. The production starts several days before, with working out what to cook with the aid of a pile of cookery books of the celebrity-chef variety, and a shopping list, often taken to bed. There may be a tasting of the wines to be served, many of which have come from his own cellar. The menu will be changed every day, each dish chosen for its ability to follow its predecessor perfectly, to match the wines, to show the cook at his most competent.

      The directions will have been analysed in a way the poor cookery writer never dreamed of, each line dissected and filleted and then given a jolly good roasting. The kitchen fusspot – let’s call him, say, Julian – is a follower of orders, and a cookery writer’s nightmare. He cooks without any ability other than that of doing what he is told; a cook incapable of using the merest pinch of invention, imagination or intuition. One wonders – briefly – what he would be like in bed.

      Perversely, the fusspot likes nothing better than recipes that ‘don’t quite work’. ‘I think it needs something, don’t you?’ is his knee-jerk response to every recipe he tries. A little more balsamic, a touch of white pepper, a little Béarnaise sauce on the side. The idea that it might be fine as it is is unthinkable.

       Black Pudding

      Be it in the form of berries, loops or horseshoes, or maybe sliced from one long, charcoal-coloured dong, the black pudding remains adored and loathed in equal measure. As with tripe, gooseberries and junket, there is no middle ground. Modern squeamishness has led to those of us who turn misty-eyed about such treats being thought of as carnivorous beyond redemption, if not long-lost members of the Addams family. True, our holy grail is a sausage made from the blood of an ox, thickened with pig fat, pearl barley, oatmeal and rusk, but no one should let a little thing like blood and guts get in the way of good eating. What makes the black pudding so delectable, so deeply savoury, so toe-curlingly satisfying, is partly down to good taste, and partly to the pleasure of knowing that our respect for an animal’s life extends to the point where we refuse to let even its blood go to waste.

      Of course, there is black pudding and there is black pudding. At its worst it is dry, sour and solid. At its best, moist, crumbly and herbal, with a perfect balance of sweetness and deep savour (not to mention being grilled to just the right crispness). I would list a good black pudding as one of the dishes I would want at my last supper, but then it would have to be the very best, and that is where one gets into deep, and very hot, water.

      Black pudding fanciers are fiercely loyal, ever ready to challenge anyone who dares to suggest that their butcher’s pudding is tastier. The national contests to find the best are always controversial, and cause heated debate. There could even, after a celebratory drink or three, be what used to be called fisticuffs. (A drop or two more of spilled blood is neither here nor there when you consider that it can take ninety litres of blood to make a decent batch.)

      Those who trawl southern shops looking for a good pud may wonder if this piece of charcuterie, or perhaps one should say porkery, is about to disappear from the planet, but northerners, particularly those living around Bury in Lancashire, know better. Despite the occasional closure of an outlet here and there, the blood pudding is showing signs of a renaissance, partly due to its being the current darling of many top chefs, who make the most of its savoury qualities as a garnish for other porky or even piscine delights. Black pudding and scallops is much, much more interesting than one might imagine, and is no more strange than bacon with scallops, better known as angels on horseback.

      While the notion of a butcher’s kitchen awash with blood and rusk may appeal to the more deeply carnivorous, it should be noted that a certain number of sausages are СКАЧАТЬ