Babylonian food

The author E. Nesbit was a joint founder of the Fabian Society. Thus it was that she knew my great grandparents. I encountered her only in her fiction. “The Story of the Amulet” was and is a favourite. The children in the book make visits from the present (1905) to the past: one of their journeys is to a city so ancient that there is disagreement among scholars as to where its ruins are to be found. Babylon. Here is an account of the children eating with the Queen.

“She just ate with her fingers, and as the first dish was a great tray of boiled corn, and meat and raisins all mixed up together, and melted fat poured all over the tray, it was found difficult to follow her example with anything like what we are used to think of as good table manners. There were stewed quinces afterwards, and dates in syrup, and thick yellowy cream. It was the kind of dinner you hardly ever get in Fitzroy Street.”

Somehow the reference to Fitzroy Street makes the whole thing the more real. And Nesbit has already described the kind of food that is eaten in Fitzroy Street, a mutton chop, for instance: “as it lay on the plate it looked like a brown island in the middle of a frozen pond, because the grease of the gravy had become cold, and consequently white. It looked very nasty...” Something of a contrast to the Babylonian food which is to come.

Spaghetti cockles

This recipe is very loosely based on the classic ‘spaghetti alla vongole’ but I emphasise with all the force at my command that this is not intended to be an equivalent of the first thing I ever ate in Italy. I am with Elizabeth David on this. And Nigel Slater. I have no difficulty with the idea of creating new recipes, standing on the shoulder of giants, but to pretend that a flan filled with oozing cheese and onion is a quiche Lorraine is simply a perversion of the truth. But I digress. The cockle dish below does not contain any flavourings other than the shellfish, the meat, the vegetables and the oil in which it is cooked.

INGREDIENTS

Spaghetti
Cockles
Lardons
Celery
Shallots
Garlic
Cherry tomatoes
Fresh chilli
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

METHOD

Finely chop the shallots, celery, tomatoes and chilli finely.
Cook the spaghetti.
While the spaghetti is cooking, cook the other ingredients in a large frying pan or wok in roughly this order: olive oil, garlic, shallots, lardons, celery, fresh chilli, cherry tomatoes, cockles. Allow this to cook in its own juices, stirring to avoid sticking. When the spaghetti is cooked, drain it, but don’t worry if there is a little water left behind; stir it into the frying pan, add a little more olive oil and salt and pepper. Stir it all in, serve and eat.

Salt Duck

This was a recipe that my mother discovered late in my childhood, possibly even early adulthood. Salt duck. Perhaps the name had intrigued her. I recall her setting my brother, William, and my great aunt, Aunt C, who was staying with us in Beckenham, to work on it, probably while she was at work. I was not involved in the preparation, only the eating. And I do not recall precisely how it was made. Only that she served it as one might serve Parma ham, with cubes of melon. Delicious. Salt duck. It entered the lexicon of family cookery but I do not recall it ever having been made again.

Here is part of a recipe by Jeremy Lee which I think comes closest to recreating what I ate about thirty years ago.

INGREDIENTS

1 mallard

1 tsp sea salt

1 sprig of thyme

black pepper

METHOD

The day before serving, prepare the mallard for salting. Cut away the backbone and wishbone from the mallard. Place a gentle pressure on the bird to flatten it slightly, then place in a medium dish.

Sprinkle over the salt, ensuring an even spread across the bird, along with six turns of the pepper mill. Add the thyme and bay leaf to the dish, cover well and transfer to the fridge to marinate for 24 hours.

Bring a large pan of water to the boil. Once the mallard has finished marinating, carefully lift it from the dish and place it into the water. Allow the liquid to return to the boil and simmer the bird for 2 minutes.

Once cooked, use tongs to carefully remove the mallard from the pan and place on a baking tray or dish. Set aside and leave to cool.

Slice thinly and serve with melon. Eat.

Lithuanian Cucumbers

Here is a guest recipe from Cousin Tom, whose heritage is Lithuanian.

About 5 or 6 cucumbers peeled, thinly sliced

About 1 half thinly sliced onion
Salt

Dill
Sour cream or yogurt

In a large bowl

Layer slices and generously salt each layer Not too many onions, every other layer maybe Throw in some fresh dill once in awhile Put a small dish with a fairly heavy weight on top Drain during the process After a couple of hours drain well and mix in as much sour cream or yogurt to taste.

This dish always receives compliments. A great comfort food.

Phoney restaurants

“Phoney restaurants”, said Jilly Cooper, “make me giggle”. Where the descriptions are ridiculously long. “Freshly-caught prawns coated with crunchy breadcrumbs, lavishly served in a goblet lined with crisp lettuce leaves and with a generous helping of cocktail sauce laced with brandy”. In David Lodge's “Nice Work”, an English lecturer is taken out for lunch by a manufacturing company director. With a fine sense of irony, she orders each item by reading out the full description. I must do it myself one day. Her host fails to spot the irony. Her meal is pretty dire.

A bacon and avocado sandwich

I went into a decent-looking “Italian” sandwich shop for my lunch where I asked for a bacon and avocado sandwich. I interpolate that the ingredients were there; the avocados were nestling on the counter; the bacon was sizzling backstage. However, my request was refused, on the grounds that the sandwich in question wasn’t on their list and the server wasn’t “allowed” to sell it to me unless it had a corresponding button on the till. She was apologetic but ultimately unhelpful. So I went next door to the greasy spoon which I suspected would give me the same look they gave Peter Mandelson when he asked for some of that “delicious-looking guacamole” in a fish and chip shop in Hartlepool. But I was wrong: they had bacon; they had avocado; and they made me the sandwich for which I had asked at, I suspect, half the price the earlier place would have demanded if they had been prepared to sell me what I wanted.

Pudding

“Pudding” is referred to in the derogatory way in Susan Coolidge’s “What Katy Did at School”.

“Mrs. Nipson was now in sole charge of the establishment. She had never tried school-keeping before, and had various pet plans and theories of her own, which she had only been waiting for Mrs. Florence's departure to put into practice.

One of these was that the school was to dine three times a week on pudding and bread and butter. Mrs. Nipson had a theory,—very convenient and economical for herself, but highly distasteful to her scholars,—that it was injurious for young people to eat meat every day in hot weather.

The puddings were made of batter, with a sprinkling of blackberries or raisins. Now, rising at six, and studying four hours and a half on a light breakfast, has wonderful effect on the appetite, as all who have tried it will testify. The poor girls would go down to dinner as hungry as wolves, and eye the large, pale slices on their plates with a wrath and dismay which I cannot describe. Very thick the slices were, and there was plenty of thin, sugared sauce to eat with them, and plenty of bread and butter; but, somehow, the whole was unsatisfying, and the hungry girls would go upstairs almost as ravenous as when they came down. The second-table-ites were always hanging over the balusters to receive them, and when to the demand, "What did you have for dinner?" "Pudding!" was answered, a low groan would run from one to another, and a general gloom seemed to drop down and envelop the party.”