G - Garnish
Apparently, archaeologists can measure time with ‘The Vole Clock’. No matter what stage of evolutionary history there is always a vole, they often survive as fossils and, because their teeth evolve quickly to accommodate changes in diet, they are a unique belweather of the age.
The garnish is a culinary equivalent. My first kitchen job was ‘doing the garni’s’. Laying out lines of limp lettuce leaves on big trays and topping each one with a slice of cucumber and a wedge of tomato.
As this was a Bournemouth hotel in the seventies, there was also a smaller number where the tomato was replaced with lemon for fish and a half dozen topped with a pineapple ring for the gammon.
I never knew what the garnishes were actually for. Nobody ate them, I’m sure that was considered dreadfully non-U. The staff often whispered that, in cheaper hotels, the dishwasher rescued them and dusted them off for re-use.
The floor staff were supposed to have some obscure code that reminded them how the steak was done by the placement of the garnish but, as they all went out well-done anyway, it can’t have made any difference. Since then I’ve watched the garnishes with the avidity of a twitcher.
Somehow we evolved. Sprigs of fresh herbs came next; dill for the fish, parsley for the meat then came the eighties. Physallis, or slices of starfruit lay limp in the drizzled coulis while a bloke in braces made improper advances to a girl in pearls and a Lady Di hairdo.
There was a brief flash of fried sage leaf and then we were galloping into a new decade of knotted chives and whittled ginger roots.
For months now I’ve been watching and waiting. What would be the cliché de garniture de nos jour? What would emerge as the trite and meretricious gilding of nouveau gastropub, post sleb chef, reinvigorated and confident ‘Modern British’?
And now we have an answer - roasted cherry tomatoes on the vine. Marvellous stuff. Roughly torn from the plant, tossed carelessly in the oven, organic yet ‘pukka’. Easy to cook, requiring no thought and utterly, utterly pointless