A duck dinner

One of my favourite books as a child was "The story about Ping" by Marjorie Flack. Ping was a duck who lived with his numerous relations (a little like Rabbit in the Pooh Bear stories) in a boat with wise eyes on the Yangtze River. Ping gets lost - through trying to avoid the spank on the back that the last duck back on the boat would always receive. He ends up being caught by a small boy swimming in the river. When child and bird are on board the boat belonging to the child's family, the father comes out with the immortal line, "Aha, a duck dinner has come to us". Mother replies: "I shall cook him with rice at sunset tonight". The boy protests...but in vain. Down comes a basket over Ping's head. Much later, the boy secretly sets him free, and Ping manages to find his own boat - but not quite in time to avoid the spank on the back! One of the things that never occurred to me as a child is that Ping would have ended up as a duck dinner in any event...

I ate a duck dinner the other evening. My friend Philip, who introduced me to Ethiopian food, cooked something altogether more successful: a stuffed duck from Aldi, with rice cooked in its juices. Delicious.

Shrimp paste

It had lain in the kitchen cupboard for a long time: a suspiciously brown block - a lump smelling strongly of what it was: shrimp paste. Mum pondered it and told us that had we all been in a concentration camp, she would have mixed a tiny amount of it with rice. In the end she threw the packet away.

Paella

I agree with Elizabeth David on this one: this is an overrated dish. Perfectly pleasant but never spectacular in the way that a perfectly cooked risotto can be. It sounds almost insulting to say it is good street food because that is to imply that good street food can never be spectacular. Nevertheless, a good paella, served out of one of those colossal, slightly pretentious, pans: yellow rice, chorizo, chicken, mussels and prawns, to be gobbled in a market.

The village in Southern France where we spent summers in the nineteen eighties had a café (the "Café de la Paix"). When we moved there, it was known by some of the ex-patriots as Lenin's Tomb, so dour was the service; the first time I went in with my parents, nervously, wanting to practise my French, the man behind the bar affected not to understand my request for "Deux cafés et deux Oranginas". Later the place was taken over by a younger couple who offered food in the evenings, advertised on a blackboard outside. But it never seemed to change. Every evening as we drove past the "Café de la Paix", the cry would ring up: "Plat du Jour? Paella!" We never tried it.

Japanese food

My mother tells the story of how, staying in a hotel in Japan, she went down to breakfast one morning. The waitress came to her table and asked her politely: "Amelican Bleakfast or Japanese Bleakfast?" Being adventurous when it came to food, my mother immediately decided against "Amelican Bleakfast" and plumped for the latter option.

When recounting the story, she recalls little of what was brought, other than that there was a mound of rice and an egg, still in its shell. It was only when my mother cracked the egg on to the table and its contents spilled out and started to drip on to the floor that she realised the egg was still raw.

I want you to understand that my mother ordinarily had no difficulty with raw food but even this defeated her. I think the next day she opted for Amelican Bleakfast.

Strawberry milkshake

Packets of Tunnocks Caramel Wafers; tins of Condensed Milk; and bottles of Strawberry Crush. These were things that my parents used to buy at Sainsbury's when we were all younger - but they were not, as might be expected, intended for my brother and I. They were for my father. My brother and I would, naturally, help ourselves to the odd caramel wafer. And, on occasion, the odd milkshake.

My father once found me in the kitchen mixing Strawberry Crush and milk and immediately took over at the brown work surface. Tipping double cream into a blender, adding the mixture I had prepared earlier, he skilfully blended all the ingredients together, giving a running commentary: "Now, I whipped the cream before adding it". Finally, he presented the result to me in a tall glass. "I think you'll find that's pretty special."

Many years later, I was thousands of miles away, in Madras as it was then called. A short walk along the Poonemallee High Road from the school where I was teaching and living, was a restaurant called the Gouri Shankar. Sometimes, instead of food cooked by the Ayah, we would each receive a plate of noodles or fried rice brought in from the restaurant. My high ideals - before arriving in India, I wouldn't have contemplated the notion of being served with special, costly food at the school's expense - were abandoned. The noodles, in particular, were delicious. Shona and Tory were the other volunteers. Towards the end of our time at the school, possibly a little impatient with the restrictions, we would sometimes venture out in the evening and head to the Gouri Shankar. It wasn't quite the pub that Tory longed for but it was atmospherically dark, chillingly air-conditioned and the noodles, as I say, were delectable. Plus they did rather good strawberry milkshakes. I had one on my nineteenth birthday. Not quite as good as the one my father made.