Things That Enrage Me
The Fish Knife.
Why? I can understand needing an offset spatula to fillet or serve fish but can someone explain what I’m supposed to do with the miniature version they insist on sticking next to my plate in some restaurants? Am I allowed to spoon the fish into my mouth on the flat of the blade? Can I have another knife for the rest of the stuff on the plate? Why do I get one with a lobster when what I really want is a pair of pliers and an electric bone saw?
Queen Victoria banned them from the Royal table. If this is what they mean by a ‘return to Victorian values’ then I’m with Baroness Thatcher for the only time in my life.
The letter Y
I don’t get many opportunities to order yak so I believe I’m safe in my desire to expunge the letter Y from all description of food. Any recipe or menu entry that uses the words ‘cheesey’, or, God help us, ‘lemony’ should be ignored on principle; they were invented by advertising men to conceal the fact that the product contained no real cheese or lemon. They debase food. Even if a dish is laden with cheese and lemon, using these words makes it sound like a ready meal or an air freshener.
‘Crispy’, ‘crunchy’ and ‘tasty’ have no place here either. These are not benefits to which our attention needs to be drawn, they are givens in good cooking.
In San Francisco, once, a passing homosexual gentleman in chaps and a moustache called me ‘Chunky’. I took it as a complement, as I assume it was intended, but I can’t welcome it as a description on a menu.
There was a time in when recipe books were written by admen to promote products. One memorable recipe, involving canned tuna, cream of mushroom soup, crushed crackers and aerosol cheese whip was called ‘cheesy, crispy, mushroom ‘n’ tuna bake’ which sounds to me like colon cancer in a handy, family-sized serving. Perhaps the admen thought housewives were so abidingly thick they could only countenance food that was described like other household goods.
This probably explains why Delia Smith still does it.
"Good olive oil"
Even the immortal, Elizabeth David had this strange verbal tic. In one essay she specifies that we should use good things -good olive oil, good butter, good white breadcrumbs - seventeen times.
It wasn’t just the Goddess David either. MFK Fisher has it in spades, the Grigsons never stop and Mistresses Glasse and Beeton are larded with it.
I love these people… why do they do this to me?
Thanks for specifying the ‘good’ oil, Elizabeth. I was just about to reach under the bench and dress my salad with this three-gallon sump of reclaimed 20W40.
‘Lemon cuts through the richness’
Any used car salesman will tell you how to spot a mug. Anyone who knows absolutely nothing about cars will walk around the heap, stroking his chin contemplatively and then kick the tires. The minute you have a tire-kicker on your forecourt you can wheel out your rustiest lemon and rack up the price. His money is yours.
Now cooking programmes are omnipresent on British television, legions of people with no idea whatsoever about food are being asked to taste things, live on air and come up with something to say. They flounder hopelessly. ‘Hmm, that’s tasty’ seems too weak. ‘Mmm. Tastes just like chicken’, is a little obvious - especially if it’s chicken - which leaves only one line, the culinary equivalent of tire kicking…
‘Hmmm. The lemon really cuts through the richness’
The problem is, it’s not just civilians. I’ve heard every chef ever interviewed say it…repeatedly… like it’s on some ghastly tape loop. God knows I understand the difficulty in coming up with fresh language concerning food. There have been a few writers – Coleridge, Huysmans, Genet, Apollinaire – who’ve confined themselves to describing the realm of the purely sensual. Frankly, they all get a bit of a yawn after a while. It’s obviously a stretch. If stone geniuses like that can’t keep it up for more than a slim volume, what hope has Ainsley bloody Harriot who’s expected to fill endless hours of our time using a markedly smaller intellectual armoury?
But please, please, can’t professionals take it for granted that lemon cuts through bloody grease. It’s so obvious it’s humiliating. It’s like saying ‘’Hmmm. Plunging my head into this deep fat fryer has made it really, really hot”.
Come to think of it… “Ainsley? Can you come over here for a minute?”
Pan Frying
OK… I admit it… my dirty little secret. I’ll stand up in front of a huddled circle of twenty guilty looking cooks and make my full confession…
“My name’s Tim. I fry things… in a pan”.
Other, better people don’t have this weakness. American chefs fry in buckets, the French have always favoured porcelain vases and I’m told that Gordon ‘Hard Man’ Ramsay cups the boiling oil in his bare hands and tosses the food like a juggler.
I’ll order ‘pan fried’ sea bass the same day I can get a side of ‘saucepan-boiled’ potatoes.
Until then, it’s off the menu.
The “French Stick”
To wander into an English bakery is to plunge into a glossary of obscure and beautiful nomenclature. Cobs, baps, split-tins, bloomers, Coburgs, flowerpots, quarterns and farls gratify the ear as well as the eye.
Doubly, distressing, therefore, to encounter the ‘French Stick’, the biggest con to be perpetrated by bakers since they stopped adding alum and ground bones to the flour.
Aspiring middle class parents know that feeding their children white bread is but a step short of inoculating them with rickets, lice and poor grammar. They also know that the French have those lovely long loaves that they carry under their arms as they cycle around, selling each other onions and indulging in soft focus bonviveury.
Cunning bakers have responded, not with an authentic baguette but with a preservative-laden, turd-shaped travesty called – with callous humour – a French Stick.
It’s exactly the same rubbish they extrude into white loaves but delivered in a staggeringly inconvenient shape. Trying to eat a sandwich made with one is like trying to fellate a torpedo.
It sums up everything that’s wrong with us as a nation; our willingness to settle for crap food, our obsession with social distinction, our inability to countenance change and our refusal to attempt French pronunciation in public.
Frying “off”
We used to fry. Then professionals came onto our screens and began to fry ‘off’.
‘I’ll just fry off these onions’
Sounds great doesn’t it? Sounds so professional. Which, of course, it is…
‘I’ll just pour two pints of industrial-grade grease into this metre square brat pan, fry off 800 battery chicken breasts, slap them under the heat lamps and hope no-one dies on my shift’.
That’s professional.
‘I’ll fry off this Marks and Spencer salmon fishcake’
… is absurd
Parsley
God, I hate parsley. It’s the invariable adornment of unthinking cooking. A ‘sprig’ of parsley can be used to garnish anything because it means nothing. It actually has a particularly distinctive taste, but that never matters because no-one ever eats it.
I’m sure there’s beautiful parsley somewhere, light, fresh and tender, like a less rank cilantro, plump and juicy with a misting of dew, but I’ve never tasted it. In an entire life of cooking and eating, I’ve never encountered parsley that didn’t taste like a weed that had choked into leathery senescence behind the chemical toilet on a building site.
The French call it persil, which, for obvious reasons, never makes it onto even the most pretentious menus in the UK, but in spite of the fact that they have some wonderful recipes using parsley, for me it’s an unremittingly English herb. The limp, re-used sprig on an overdone steak in a country pub, the light sprinkling on the skin of a flour-thickened nursing home soup, the triumphant flourish on gammon and pineapple in a seaside boarding-house with delusions and boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley sauce.
Parsley will never pass my lips as long as I draw breath but I, herewith, give notice to my family and loved ones that, at my funeral, once the three mysterious, veiled women have cast their roses on my casket and left in a cloud of chypre and once my body is interred, they should serve over-boiled ham entirely surrounded with a rosette of the oldest, most leathery parsley they can find and weep for my passing.
Thank You. I feel much better. Next time, Deo Gratia, I will be in better humour.