Making salt

In about September 1981, I began studying Chemistry at school as a separate subject. My career as a chemist was to come to an ignominious end four years later when I dropped the subject, having achieved the distinction of the lowest mark in the exams in the entire school year.

But I still remember aspects of the subject with affection. Burning magnesium! My white shirt being turned into a chromatogram by some clever idiot in the desk behind me, using ink, a pipette and surgical spirit or similar. Best of all, in that very first lesson in 1981, we made salt.

The process involved dissolving a pile of what looked like sand in water, heating the water (Bunsen burner) and then - can't remember the detail but I think filter paper may have been involved somewhere - ending up with a small and rather damp pile of salt.

Very satisfyingly, we were allowed to take the results of our experiment into the dining hall to have with our lunch. Monday lunches were particularly dispiriting: salad, so-called. The salt improved the undressed lettuce and slab of pork pie.

It may have been on the same occasion that I was required by the prefect in charge of the table (I shall name and shame him: Jonathan Harding) to eat my pork pie jelly, a feat I managed only by melting it into the barely warm mashed potato on my plate.

Taramasalata

Taramasalata is a lovely word. I used to pronounce it stressing the RAMA bit (to rhyme with farmer) and the LATA bit (rhyming with starter). Sounded like the name of a glamorous Russian villainess.

Anyway, I was wrong in my pronunciation. The woman in the shop opposite my school - Maggie her name was - insisted that it was in fact TA-rama, the stress on the first syllable and ram as in the animal.

A little more about "Maggie". She called all of us schoolboys "Darling" and had no objection to our doing the same to her in return. Tough, feisty, heavily made-up, a heavy smoker and, I suspect, baggage-laden lady, who probably thought we all had plums in our mouths.

Taramasalata, then, was one of my luxuries at school in Canterbury. Fifty pence for a quarter of a pound, it came in a white polystyrene tub into which Maggie had scooped it from a larger bowl of the stuff. Some years before I arrived at the school, they had stopped providing tea in the afternoons and, as a sop, there was a twice-weekly bread delivery to our dormitory or study. So, sitting on my bed, I would eat the salty, granular, ice-cream pink taramasalata on white sliced bread.

It was on the island of Skopelos that I tasted the best taramasalata I have ever eaten. Patrick Leigh Fermor called the island "a lobster's song" (did the name remind him of the noise a lobster makes?) and it was a glorious place. No airport, so you had to get there from the neighbouring island of Skiathos by hydrofoil. It was on the island that I tasted the bitterest cucumbers I have ever eaten: someone told me vaguely that it had probably been fertilised incorrectly. Happily, the rest of the food I ate was memorable for quite different reasons. Including the taramasalata, on the menu in a restaurant in Glossa, on the other side of the island from where we were staying. Not pink but white and served with pitta. Much better than caviar. The photo below was taken not in Skopelos, but in Crete, fourteen years later. Trying to recreate an earlier dish rarely works...