I can’t be doing with people who are picky about their food. It makes entertaining a nightmare. I gave upon it long ago and simply take friends out to a restaurant instead.
Of course, there are people with genuine allergies and intolerances, but much of this whole ‘foodie’ movement is fashionable posturing. The list grows by the week – vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, dairy free, won’t eat fish, eats only fish but not shellfish – and the latest recruits to their ranks, the ‘clean eating’ brigade. It’s all got rather tiresome.
I blame the glut of food programmes currently on television, half of which preach ‘health eating’, the rest, how to kill yourself prematurely with fats and sugar. Yes, I mean you, Bake Off. The irony is, they’re mostly watched by people (myself included) slobbing out on sofas, gorging themselves on bargain buckets, stuffed-crust pizzas, crisps’n’dip and chocolate. Here’s Jamie, manhandling ingredients, slapping things down, beating things up with a bish, bash, bosh; Nigella, slurping and smirking in a satin dressing-gown as she raids her fridge in the middle of the night, (like we believe that); Nigel Slater, whose recipes are straightforwardly no-fuss, but he chews with the peculiar revolving motion I associate with a tumble-dryer and it’s very off-putting.
How far my generation has come from postwar rationing and simple Spartan diet of home-cooked organic seasonal vegetables. Our mothers, in the absence of a fridge, food-shopped almost daily and carted home meat in bleeding brown paper parcels and clay-caked vegetables wrapped in newspaper.
Every corner greengrocer boasted a handwritten sign, ‘FRESH DUG BRITISH/IRISH QUEENS’ depending on which side of the border you lived. Tinned goods were for emergencies and power cuts.
I tasted my first baked bean as a student away from home. What would our grandmothers, who worked miracles with a wooden spoon and a balloon whisk, make of our microwaves and magimixes, spiralisers and smoothie-makers; our cupboards bulging with tins and packets, our freezers full of pre-chopped, pre-grated, pre-cooked and frozen ready-meals?
Eating out then was a high day or holiday rarity. Hotel and restaurant dinners offered a nearly uniform bill of fare, gussied up with two knives, a napkin and a reverential attitude. Now everybody’s at it, from McDonald’s to Michelin star chefs, furnishing us with a multiplicity of ethnic flavours under the banner of an ‘eating experience’.
Menu-speak is a language apart. It’s what my mother would’ve called ‘flummery’ (which, if you recall, was half-set jelly whipped with a small tin of evaporated milk to enormous bulk, but was in fact, insubstantial as fresh air) ‘Jus’, ‘veloute’, ‘foam’, ‘reduction’ – whatever happened to ‘gravy’? And in a climate like ours, we can do without ‘drizzled’.
Presentation is all. A steady-handed waiter emerges from the kitchen with what, from a distance, looks like a miniature leaning tower of Pisa surrounded by streaks and smears of unidentifiable stuff that look like carelessness. This is food as artwork - sometimes more Jackson Pollock than Old Master but you nearly feel guilty sticking a fork into its artistic integrity.
Just don’t start me on people who take photographs of their dinner. And, come to think of it – plates. Whence came the fashion of presenting everything in a soup-plate, where, if you rest your knife and fork between mouthfuls, both implements slide inexorably into the middle and you have to fish them out with a greasy finger and thumb? Ditto ‘creative presentation’ on roofing slates and chopping boards.
I was in Jamie’s Italian in Covent Garden last week and somebody’s ‘sharing platter’ went by on a three-foot plank delivered by a fragile little waitress with wrists like twigs. Just gimme a square meal on a round plate – please.
A personal word of caution – as you salivate over ‘fat chips twice cooked in beef dripping’ don’t be fooled. You only get about three. Opt instead for that glorious contradiction in terms, ‘skinny chips’. You get more of them……
