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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ seems to pacify the health inspectors. Whether such practices have an effect on the finished article remains a subject for debate. It should go without saying that most recipes remain a closely guarded secret, especially in the crucial and delicate matter of seasoning. And while thyme, marjoram and winter savory are often mentioned, the actual mix of herbs is something most pudding-makers would fight tooth and nail, and no doubt blood and fat, to keep in the family.

      I suspect that those who have tried and disliked Britain’s proud answer to France’s celebrated boudin noir may not have eaten one of the first order. To do so is to experience a piece of craftsmanship that extends beyond sheer cookery. A good black pudding is nothing short of a work of art.

       Cake Forks and Sticky Fingers

      The Continental cake is slim, shallow, understated. It may be flavoured with almond, pistachio, bitter-orange or rose, and its sugared-almond-coloured box will be tied with a loop of the thinnest pink ribbon, from which it can dangle elegantly from a begloved Parisian hand. English cake is fat, thick and cut in short, stubby wedges; there will be sticky cherries, swirls of buttercream, and sometimes royal icing. What it lacks in elegance it makes up for in enthusiasm.

      A French madeleine is a petite almond cake delicately ridged like a miniature scallop shell. An English madeleine is a dumpy castle made out of sponge, doused in raspberry jam and sprinkled with desiccated coconut. It then gets a cherry on top, and if it’s really lucky, wings of livid green angelica. It’s a case of Proust versus Billy Bunter.

      British cakes have a certain wobbly charm to them, and what might be missing in terms of finesse is there in lick-your-fingers stickiness. Fruit-laden Genoa, chunky marmalade, Irish seed cake and glorious coffee and walnut are not delicacies you eat politely with a cake fork, they are something you tuck into with the enthusiasm of a labrador at a water bowl.

       Shopping on the Internet – Couch Potatoes

      You wander down the virtual aisles plucking your supper off the virtual shelves and dropping it into your virtual basket. No wonky trolleys, no kids throwing tantrums by the iced low-fat doughnuts, no sleazy music sending subliminal messages to get you to buy two instead of one (not that you even wanted one, anyway), and no one at the checkout fiddling to find the right change (Oh, for God’s sake, just hand over a twenty, will you?) Add to that the fact that there is no one to peer disapprovingly at your fun pack of assorted crisps, or to look down their ecologically superior nose at you because you have chosen Persil over Ecover, and you have the perfect shopping environment.

      Once you have found in which section the kitchen foil and cling film lives, and worked out which of the seventeen sizes of bin bag is the one that actually fits your bin, and eventually mastered the checkout process, you could, in theory, save hours, giving yourself more time to spend with the family, or finally to take up pilates. Pity you can’t put petrol in the car online too.

      To every up, however, there must be a down, and internet shopping has more than a few. Your inability to find the right dishwasher tablets; the accidental ordering of the wrong colour loo roll (what exactly DO you do with nine apricot-coloured bog rolls?), and the table-thumping, expletive-ridden stress that you suffer when your perfect shopping trip crashes thirty seconds from the final ‘Thank you for shopping with Tesco’ are usually enough to get even the most fervent net-head making for the nearest Sainsbury’s. Add to this the niggling fact that Big Brother now knows how many bars of milk chocolate you get through in a week, or that you haven’t needed to buy condoms for a month, and your twenty-first-century shopping trip begins to look a little less like retail Nirvana.

      But it goes deeper than this. The occasional online shopping list won’t do that much damage to the continued existence of your local shops, but the regular delivery of all you need and more to your door will indeed have a disastrous effect on your cheery local grocer’s till. Eventually he will have to shut up shop and move to a cosy flat by the sea, leaving room for a tacky Southern Fried Chicken takeaway to open in his place.

      Frankly, you deserve it, and when you come to sell up yourself, you may find your would-be buyers less than keen to move into an area whose local shopping street is littered with polystyrene cartons and tomato-sauce sachets with the corner bitten off. And where do you run to when you need that emergency loo roll?

       The Biscuit Tin

      Lift the lid of a biscuit tin and you enter a world of chocolate Bourbons, understated, knobbly Lincolns, crumbly digestives and Jammie Dodgers. A secret place where there are lemon puffs, gingernuts, Jaffa Cakes and, if you are lucky, the occasional chocolate finger. No other country whose grocers’ shelves I have encountered offers the punter and his purse such a display of sugar-sprinkled flour and butter, blobs of jam and drizzles of chocolate, crème fillings and white icing. We are the everyday biscuit capital of the world (the Dutch hold sway at the top end of the cookie market). What France is to cheese and Italy is to pasta, Britain is to the biscuit. The tin, with its tight lid and cute pictures, is a playground for those who like their snacks sweet and crisp and reeking of tradition.

      But there is more to it than that. While some of our biscuits, such as the Custard Cream and the Bourbon, have become icons of our time, there are others whose everlasting success must always remain something of a mystery. What sort of person chooses a pale, dry Rich Tea when there are so many other more interesting biscuits to choose from? Why would anyone want to eat a wafer that sticks to their lips like glue, or hurt their tongue on the sharp little point of an iced gem? Does anyone honestly like the pink wafer anyway? And who took the last of the chocolate ones? Welcome to the British biscuit tin.

       The Digestive

      My father loved a plain digestive, though is it difficult to think of him and the iconic biscuit without conjuring up a picture of him trying to slip an entire, unbroken one into his mouth in one go. I can’t remember him ever actually succeeding, and if he did it was probably something he did in secret.

      It is funny how, whether you had them in your kitchen or not, the digestive always manages to taste of ‘home’. It has a unique ability to take you to a safe place, to somewhere you think you remember fondly, even though you may never have even been there. The smell alone, wheaty and sweet with a hint of the hamster’s cage about it, is instantly recognisable as a good place to be.

      It has been said that this is one of the great dunking biscuits, but I have to disagree. The digestive is altogether too risky. If ever a biscuit will let you down on the way from mug to mouth it is this one, its open, crumbly nature being just not strong enough to hold a decent amount of liquid before it collapses in your lap. But then, like not using the zebra crossing, some might welcome such risks to inject a bit of danger and excitement into their day.

       Bread and Butter Pudding

      The French cook with their senses, the Italians with their hearts, the Spanish with their energy and the Germans with their appetite. The British, bless them, cook with their wallets. Our ingenuity in matters frugal knows no bounds. When it comes to scrimping and saving, we are the masters. We have taken the worthy ‘waste not, want not’ to heights unsealed by the rest of the world’s cooks. Bread and butter pudding did not come about because someone had the idea that bread, butter and rich, sweet custard would make a sensuous СКАЧАТЬ