I don't understand food porn. It's all over everywhere. You can't move now for people drooling and whipping each other up into a state of stiff-peaked excitement over meringues and tagines. I like food, of course, in its place, which is as a firm and doughy lining in the stomach. It stops you from dying, (although not for ever) or getting drunk too quickly and falling out of windows. Some of it needs heating and poking about a bit. It can taste good, or,if cooked by me, loathsome. That's it.
So I am baffled by folk who like manking about in the kitchen for hours, after spending even more time collecting specially expensive ingredients and ordering black garlic on the internet. It also brings with it a particularly pungent whiff of martyrdom. I was reading a book that Peter Cook's wife had written about her life with PC. Along with the sense of grievance that she quite understandably felt as a result of him being mad, bad and dangerous to know; she seemed to be especially unhappy about continually producing huge and elaborate dinners which he and his friends either didn't turn up for because they were in the pub,or turned up for after the pub, and then fell face downwards in. I can't think why she bothered.You would be looking at the young Peter Cook for some considerable time before you thought "There's a man who will appreciate my ratatouille".
This is an example of passive-aggressive catering.
My Mother hated cooking. She had to do it, as in those days no man worth his codpiece would have been seen near a stove. Given my Father's record with fire (see blogs passim),this may have been as well.Mum in the kitchen was dangerous, admittedly, but surviveable. She prepared food with her coat still on, having come in straight from work. Four tins would be opened, stuck in a pan of boiling water, and then,when the water had boiled away, the contents of each tin would be poured on top of one other. Tinned steak, tinned new potatoes (which tasted exactly like tin) and two sorts of tinny veg. For dessert, a tin of fruit or rice pudding. I imagined that if nuclear war had occured, which of course my entire
jumpy generation expected at any moment , my brother and I would have adapted to bunker cuisine tolerably well.
At University, I gratefully escaped from food for a few years, and lived on Players No. 6 and Stone's Ginger Wine. There were some wholesome girls in my Halls who made Full English Breakfasts for their sweaty boyfriends after they (the B.Fs) had been playing rugby on Sunday mornings. None of them spoke to me, ever. Often because I was palely loitering in the kitchen with coffee and a hungover drag queen. It was a lifestyle clash.
Another one occured in later life, when I fell foul of the French attitude to food. Talk about fuss..I once whisked round Tesco's and did a full week's shop in the time that my two French visitors took to discuss a haddock. The French folk I knew were mostly of the chef persuasion,it is true. Which meant endless planning of meals , shopping for meals, preparing of meals and post-meal evaluations (with shouting, tears, and questionnaires). But I met lots of civilians and they were just as bad.
I once tried to have a beefburger at a French Barbeque. Every time I got near the thing, someone would swoop down, screaming "Mais Non! Mange pas, c'est une cendre!", and hurl it away.Well,maybe.But it was MY cinder. They would then provide me with a piece of meat so raw that with a little medical attention , it could have made a complete recovery and lived a long,purposeful life. I would sidle over to the flames and drop it in again.And so on.
My other nightmare was, and remains, seafood. There is something so disturbing about it. To my mind, the whelk is a thing of complete horror, like an inside-out nostril. All whiskery, spiny, shelly, insects of the sea are pure H.P Lovecraft. The French were having none of this neuresthenic queasiness. They went out of their way to bring me along on Le Picnique miles from anywhere, and then reveal,with a gleeful flourish, a Jacques Cousteau extravaganza in a Tupperware bowl. Impasse. I smoked,sulked, and ate bread, in a marked manner.
I do, however, adore restaurants. It's the theatrical aspect of people engaged in dining ,rather than just eating, that I like. My favourite pastime used to be to sit long and late in somewhere swish, with a like-minded companion, filling up the ashtrays and ordering another brandy. We would observe other diners and embroider entire life-stories for them from the snippets we saw of their conduct and dress. Alas, now one has to betake oneself outside and stand shivering in a doorway for the post-prandial cigarallo.Although you do meet some interesting people, with interesting chest infections.
The porn thing,though..it's not even enough to be vanilla any more, like sexy old Nigella, you have to visit the wilder shores of cheffery, with mad snail porridge, and liver-flavoured ice cream.This is the below-the-counter special stuff. Bored and jaded perverts , mucking about with things that just weren't intended to go down there.
Now,if you will excuse me, I have to go and use my mouth and fingers in a peculiarly satisfying fashion in the kitchen. I am sending out for pizza ,and the phone is in there.
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