Over Christmas, my Uncle Ted discovered Tiramisu.
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My sister made it for him, a little drier than my own pet recipe, but nevertheless a sublime confection for a connoisseur. The ecstasy on Uncle Ted's face as he took those first few mouthfuls of the newly discovered heavenly dessert will live on in our family's collective memory whenever we meet.
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I didn't have the heart to tell Uncle Ted that his fabulous discovery is deeply unfashionable among the beautiful people of the Food World. Maybe it was the dawn of supermarket versions in individual pots; maybe it just reached it's sell-by date, but Tiramisu has long since joined other once-trendy treats currently languishing at the bottom of the fourth division of the Culinary League.
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Where once cognoscenti would pronounce whether flares and platforms or shoulder pads and winklepickers were in, now the style dictators tell us what to eat. Suddenly, the already weighty responsibility of giving a dinner party assumes making crisis-level fashion-decisions.
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Oh, the faux pas of serving a dish at a soiree which was, as far as you knew, the pinnacle of haute cuisine, only to find out that it was last year's pinnacle. It leaves today's wannabe hostess tip-toeing through a minefield of edible embarrassments. Sun-dried tomatoes. Are they still okay? No way. I've seen them in a supermarket in Canvey. What about pesto? You can get it in jars now…. Better cross out prawn cocktail and Black Forest gateau, too. Though I guess they have a certain post-ironic charm these days. What goes around comes around.
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I try one of those BBC2 cookery shows for a spot of advice….
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Some worthy gentleman takes me back to his schooldays with 'comfort food', smugly informing of the illicit joys of syrup sponge and Lancashire hotpot. But don't fool yourself that these are the stodgy delights traditionally associated with these dishes. Oh no. These are hothouse hybrids, dotting micro-spots of sultana sponge in the middle of a giant white plate topped with a drizzle of crème anglaise and calling it Spotted Dick. It's all either health foods or luxury ingredients that we are then expected to not feel guilty about, despite their taking three years off our lifespans with each mouthful.
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 | | Don't tell me... skate's back in? |
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Where are the treats we really ate in those halcyon days? Where are the e-numbers, the processed packaging and the grapefruits covered in silver foil with cheese and
pineapple sticks? Where are the nuclear-pink swiss buns covered in hundreds and thousands or the dayglo orange squash of childhood parties?
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This cuisine is either chic-ly indulgent using essence-of-papaya, or tincture-of-cinnamon pod - or denuded of colour, taste and texture by the health police. You can get 'natural' colour glace cherries in my supermarket. What was ever natural about glace cherries, for Heaven's sake? When I was a kid and my mum made the Christmas cake, the sight of those red, green and yellow glossy balls of refined sugar signalled the season far more than a host of Blue Peter Advent Crowns. They had about as much to do with the actual fruit as Cherry Coke. They were the colour of baubles, of Rudolf's nose, of holly berries. They weren't 'natural' - and thank God.
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I recently checked out a not-even-particularly-hip catering course. It displayed a centre-pyre of culinary lepers, such as iceberg lettuce and zig-zag tomatoes, food fashion-victims all. Whatever did 'radish roses' do to anybody? It took me ages to master them. Why on Earth should I have to insist on flat-leaved parsley, and not that dreadful, vulgar curly stuff, which I'm rather fond of even if it is inextricably linked in my memory with my childhood pariah, boiled skate? I really hated that. Oh, don't tell me. Skate's in?
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Suddenly I have to stop enjoying something that tastes good and start eating boiled skate because some double-barrelled tyrant in checky trousers says it's cool. Huh.
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The Taste Squad are everywhere. Some chap calling a radio phone-in recently was sniffily dismissed by the agony-chef for enjoying deep-fried camembert, the culinary equivalent of shell-suits and, admittedly, repulsive - but if he likes it, that's surely his choice?
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The biggest quandary of all is what to tell Uncle Ted. Dare I risk general humiliation by serving a pudding he will genuinely enjoy, or stick a vanilla pod in a lychee and call it dessert?
Read on:
spiked-issue: Eating
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