Comfort and memories - the food of home

When I was maybe 8 or 9 years old, I would often come home from school for lunch. A few times, my dad would be waiting for me in the kitchen. He had constructed a restaurant for me, complete with a menu, a tea towel draped over his arm and even a choice of drinks, with alternatives ready in the fridge should I choose them. He then proceeded to cook whatever I chose from the menu whether it be fish fingers and chips or something similar.

When I was much older and studying to be a teacher away from my marital home, I would travel back to my parents on a Sunday evening for the school week ahead, to find a roast dinner waiting for me, warmed up and presented with a cup of tea or a glass of wine on my own little table in front of the TV. My mum would offer up pork loin with homemade sage and onion stuffing and apple sauce or beef, lamb or chicken, each with it's own accompaniments.

There's a very good reason why dieting is usually difficult. Food is more than fuel to most people. There are many other reasons why we eat and what food provides us with: pleasure, comfort, health, nourishment, warmth, social bonding, love... This is why the food of our childhood and home is so important, it was prepared with love for us and becomes all the more comforting and curing of ailment for it. Everyone has food that resonates with them on a deeper level, whether it's mum's chicken soup, (beef in my case), prepared with intent to cure a cold, later maybe a broken heart, the Friday night feast of fried chicken, gravy and chips enjoyed whilst watching TV or even the chocolate bar or packet of sweets that were bought on the way home from school. 

Whatever else you eat as you grow up, even the meals in 5 star restaurants, will never be able to truly match that which you enjoyed as a kid. In the UK, for a lot of people, this will include Chinese food, Indian food and a whole host of other snacks only available over there. If you really want to know what eating in Britain is like, read Nigel Slater's Eating for England, in which he lovingly recalls and lists quintessential British foods.

  

Indian Food.

Maybe some people from foreign shores are still under the impression that Brits don't like 'exotic' tastes and that we are only truly happy when chomping on fish and chips or roast beef. The fact that curry is our national dish should quell these misapprehensions once and for all. But why do we love it so much? 

It may be as simple as a desire to embrace the highly flavoured food the new British immigrants brought with them, which provided an exciting new direction from the previously bland boiled and stewed beef and cabbage type meals. The returning British occupation from India also brought home highly spiced dishes that included meals that became kedgeree or muligatawny soup. Or, maybe there is some truth in the notion that curry is addictive, providing a natural high as endorphins flood your system to overcome the 'pain'. It could be the social aspect, as I wrote about here, the late night jaunts that initially began to simply get more booze, but grew into an appreciation of the curry stuff itself. 

It's true that many Indian chefs still sadly reflect on what has become of their cuisine, now generically labelled 'curry' for convenience sake and that most of the 'Indian' restaurants in the UK are actually owned by people not from India, but other countries in that sub-continent, especially Bangladesh. Whatever the reasons and the culinary crimes committed by the Brits in Indian food's name, there's no denying that we adore it, whether it's creamy chicken tikka masala, allegedly invented by a Scots man or the more sophisticated Jalfrezi, now rumoured to be the curry of choice.

 

Chinese take aways

Make no bones about it, what we in the West consider to be Chinese food is laughably inauthentic. This is obvious when dining at a Chinese restaurant in a big city. Why do all the Chinese people seem to be eating food so different from what we have on offer? More interesting combinations, fresher, more authentic looking vegetables, stranger meats, is there a secret Chinese only menu? Yes, there really is and unless you visit with someone who can speak the language, you ain't getting it. It's not really mean or discriminate, the owners are merely trying to protect their own interests. If I'm really honest, as adventurous as I'd like to think I am, if a plate of lamb's testicles or sheep's lungs were placed in front of me, I might not be so quick to pat myself on the back for my culinary know how.  I would, however, be happy with a plate of braised lotus root or fresh Chinese greens quickly stir fried and dressed with a sauce of sesame, wine and soy. 

So, we console ourselves with our chow mein, meaty noodles fried with beansprouts and onions, prawns served with the closest we get to exotic vegetables : bamboo shoots and water chestnuts and crisp fried chicken with dubious gloopy red sauce. But, we love it all the same. In the UK, the Chinese takeaway is appreciated from an early age. At school lunchtime we would sometimes head down to the Chinese for crispy pancake rolls, full of slices of barbecued pork, beansprouts, carrots and onion. Or, maybe a carton of fried rice with chips and sweet and sour sauce, dayglo red and thick with cornstarch. 

 

The owner of the Chinese takeaway's daughter was in my class at primary school and for every class party she would bring in a bag of prawn crackers, white, faintly shrimp flavoured, crunchy yet soft inside and delicious to me above anything else. My first memory of Chinese takeaways are hazy, but I remember the chicken fried rice I loved, later the Saturday night feasts brought home by mum and dad after their night out, me collected from Nana's and treated to dishes like beef chow mein, chips and pork curry. 

There would always be a story or two of a dubious nature. Urban legends of 'things' being found in the food that would mean a certain dish was avoided for a while, that and tales of cat and horse being used as substitute meats. Like Indian food, loving Chinese takeaway seems to be ingrained into the collective British psyche. We congratulate ourselves on being so culinary adventurous as to embrace the food of other cultures so readily, when in fact what we are actually eating is not a good representation of good food. I have a few authentic Chinese cookbooks with dishes of simplicity and freshness, such as stir fried lotus root, carrot and mushroom, subtly dressed with a sauce of brown rice vinegar, raw sugar and tamari. Trying to explain how wonderful this dish was to people I knew was met with wrinkled noses and cries of 'give me a sweet and sour pork anyday'.

Pub snacks

Going out for an evening with friends in the UK is very different from Canada. The pub is a place where we go to drink alcohol primarily. No food menus, no waiting for a table, no servers, no bills, just walk in, get your drink from the bar, (no tips), find a seat if you can or stand up and look around for friends that may be there. No prior arrangements need to be made 3 weeks in advance, there will always be someone you know propping up the bar, happy to stand and chat while getting tipsy and usually, they don't have to run off to meet other people or decide they're having a quiet one. A night out in the UK is a night out, not a quick half hour after work. Of course I'm generalising somewhat, but not that much. Unlike Vancouver, where food is served until the small hours, most pubs in Britain will stop any food service they may have at 9pm. Hungry patrons will have to console themselves with pub snacks. I have heard tales of fishermen laden with baskets entering pubs to sell their wares, such delightful snacks as imitation crab sticks, whelks, mussells and prawns. "Have you got any crabs on you, cock" was the schoolboy phrase that witty adults loved to patronise.

 

Pork scratchings, scampi fries, crisps of all flavours, bags of peanuts all arranged on a cardboard picture of a topless or bikini clad woman on the wall, more nudity revealed as more bags were taken off, pickled eggs and maybe, if you were lucky, scotch eggs.

The crisps would usually be opened up and left on the table for people to share: smoky bacon, beef and onion, prawn cocktail, ready salted, salt and vinegar, roast chicken or cheese and onion. Later some clever marketing people brought out hedgehog flavour which tasted a little like beef and later, for World cup football promotions, we had the wonderful smoky Beckham, cheese n' Owen and salt and Linekar, genius.

Pork scratchings, (pictured 1 above) are an acquired taste, not so much for the flavour, but the interesting texture. Like biting into a pig's ear, if you are lucky you may have found one crisp and crunchy, if not, it may be soft and slightly wet with fat. Of course, these are truly revered in Mexico, where they are known as chicharron, but, I'm sure they don't eat them out of a bag in a pub.

The full British fry up breakfast

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Sunday Lunch

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