The potato and rose

No, it’s not the name of the newest gastro-rubbish. As if we needed any more.

I’m referring Shakespeare and his rose, and Gershwin and his potato (and tomato). Will and George both approached these morphemes in a largely egalitarian manner – pronunciation and the morpheme itself are held as irrelevant compared with the object.

I am all for engaging with the substance and truth of something. It’s what art is about, isn’t it? In whatever manner the artist has understood something, don’t they seek to portray that elemental truth? If I was feeling really generous, I would consider even Hirst or the Chapman Brothers as trying to get to the truth of what they are producing. But, I’m not, so I won’t.

Anyway, as usual, I digress. The substance of something versus the term used to describe it.

It is my brother’s 30^th birthday this Sunday and I am arranging a wee soiree at his favourite steak restaurant. I have yet to eat at this particular establishment given that, being the monogamous type, I have eaten at The Hawksmoor. No further explanation required. My brother, however, has always maintained that his steak restaurant was far better than The Hawksmoor, having eaten at both. This holds little sway with me coming from the boy who flaps his hands over the idea of a stuffed-crust meat feast pizza from the faceless pizza takeaway near his house.

Oh my, how the eyebrow arches.

Anyway, his 30^th, so his favourite restaurant. We will be a merry group of 7, so I dutifully phoned said “incredible steak joint” to book a table. Now, being the diplomatic and not at all biased individual that I am, I shan’t name this establishment. All I will say is that the name begins with ‘G’, and doesn’t end in ‘o’. You do the maths.

The phone is answered in a hurried and already irritated fashion (I have specifically called after the lunch rush, at 3pm, knowing how hectic it can be answering phones and attending guests).

“Hello G…., can I help you?”

“Hi there, I’d like to book a table for next week, for 7 please.”

“What day?”

“We’re completely flexible as to the day, it’s more the time – around 7pm. I know we’re a larger table, so really any day you can fit 7 of us in at 7pm.”

“Madam, I need a day.”

“Um, ok, what about Thursday?”

“What? Thursday? No, no way. You can’t have a table for 7 on Thursday.”

“Oh, really? Why?”

“Madam, it’s Thursday evening.”

“Yes.”

“No, we’re fully booked every night from Thursday to Saturday.”

“What, every week?”

“Yes Madam.”

“Even throughout next month?”

*sigh* “What. Date. Do. You. want. To. Come. Madam?”

“Is it not simpler if you tell me when you can accommodate 7 people at 7pm?”

“No.”

“Okaaay. How about 3 July?”

“No. I can’t do 7pm.”

“Can you do another time?”

“What time do you want?”

“Around 7.30 then?”

“No.”

At this point I was really rather uninterested at the idea of eating at this establishment at all.

“Ok, what about your City restaurant?”

“Yes.”

“ Yes you have a table at 7pm on Thursday?”

“NO. Yes you can call them. Goodbye.”

And so the call was ended.

Aside from her outrageous unhelpfulness, it was the way she called me “madam” that irked me. She used it as if I had started the conversation by telling her she should curtsey when I enter the room, not look me in the eye, and always call me “madam”. The word was thrown at me, spat out with contemptuous venom at each turn.

Feathers firmly ruffled by her rudeness, I reluctantly tried the City branch. No luck there either with a table, however a decidedly less rude conversation, albeit just as unhelpful in terms of searching for availability for 7. We had to go through the whole ‘name a date’ scenario before realising that in the near future there is nothing for 7 at 7.

Thinking about it after, there are obvious issues I have with their modus operandi and the tone in which I was spoken to from simply having asked to book a table please. (I work with someone who approaches every restaurant booking with the “don’t you know who I am” strategy. She then proceeds to snap and demand, threatening all manner of bad PR, until she gets what she wants and puts the phone down, voraciously pleased with herself.) But more than anything, it was how she called me “madam” that stuck.

As a child, my parents would tell me not to “be such a madam”. A ‘madam’ was someone stroppy and unpleasant. (She in the office is a madam working from that definition). However now, at work, I have to address male clients as “sir” and female clients as “madam”. It is a polite way of referring to someone unknown to you. George’s egalitarianism gets washed away here – the pronunciation of this word makes an immense difference to its meaning.

The other day The Boy asked me if being called a ‘lady’ offended me. I smirked. I am most certainly not a lady (he agreed). Alternatives are ‘woman’, ‘female’ or ‘girl’. When speaking about myself, I can’t bring myself to use ‘lady’ or ‘woman’. Far too…grown up? Inflated? Anyway. It’s either ‘girl’ or ‘female’, admittedly the latter sounding more like something being discussed in a post-mortem examination.

For men there is ‘gentleman’ (Ha. Ha. Pray tell where I can find one of those..?), ‘man’, ‘bloke’ (one of the ugliest words in the common language), ‘guy’, ‘boy’, and ‘male’. People my age are ‘boys’. People my father’s age are ‘men’. End of. Much simpler than the lady-woman situation. ‘Gentleman’ is too cumbersome, and nowadays is sparsely heard in familiar conversation.

Signing off emails or letters is another good one. Recently I was in conversation, via email, with a recruitment consultant, and in her final email she wrote her name and then “x”. I have never met this womanladyfemalegirl. Our relationship has been solely this handful of emails, in which I am seeking her professional help. Is a kiss really apposite?

I will concede that I listen and think a lot. Words, their meanings and connotations, seep into my brain like rum into a baba, saturating it with ideas and ruminations. Perhaps more so than others. But like our rose, potato and tomato, it is the thing which the word describes that gets my cogs turning, and how volatile a word can be, creating all manner of connotations in its wake. Should I stop being a madam and start being a madam? Or should I aim higher? Should I be a lady? And should I cease and desist calling him The Boy? Is A Boy better? Or The Man? And saying good bye to you now. Would you be offended if I went in for a kiss?

Or, after all that we’ve been through together, would you be offended with nothing at all?

I know. DIY. Fill in the blank as you see fit.

___

Those happy endings

I’m fine with the fact that I am not logical. I know I have oddities. The Boy probably calls them absurdities. But that’s fine. Making sense and being predictable and logical is completely over-rated. I have to be methodical in the workplace. In fact, I seem to have to be methodical for everyone around me in the work place. So in anything else, I reserve the right to be precisely what I want to be, regardless of whether or not there is a sensible reason behind it. To hell with rationale. Living by the seat of my bloomers, I know.

When something is good, by and large, you don’t want it to end or stop. On Monday night, for example, I took The Boy to St John’s Restaurant for his birthday, and that was a meal which I didn’t want to stop. The more I ate, the hungrier I became. (Remember, my appetite is great.) And when it was gone, I was sad. I wanted to order it all and start again.

However, there are certain food-stuffs that, when eating the end, I am over-joyed and make pleased chuntering sounds. Some examples that spring to mind are:

Cereal.

Bread (not the pre-sliced monstrosities. Proper bread).

Crackers.

An ice-cream cone (previously having contained ice-cream).

A crêpe, folded, as is traditional, into a triangle. The point of that triangle.

Food from the pan or serving dish.

For each of the above, I revel, like a pig would in mud, when munching away on their ends. The Boy and I eat different cereals, and I get to have his ends. That’s love, isn’t it? He calls them ‘dust’, retracts his head slightly and wrinkles his nose. I call them WONDER-dust, stick my head forward enthusiastically and open my gob.

With bread, again, The Boy doesn’t do the ends, the crust.  And yes, his love stretches to giving me his crusts. But, I’m no sponge. I give. He gets the squidgy, doughy pillow from my bread. I can’t deny that when alone, I scoff that part too, but, tit for tat, crust for dough. His reasoning here is that he doesn’t like chewing (this holds true for all food. A preference which I will never be able to comprehend, me with my penchant for anything raw and crunchy). My reasoning is that I love chewing, and that the crust, when off a decent loaf, has a wonderful brown taste to it. I can almost smell the flour-dusty oven and taste the hot baking trays as I gnaw away.

Cracker packets are a veritable treasure trove. Much like the cereal wonder-dust, particularly if they are seeded crackers, the corners of their packet hold all manner of blissful fragments. Sprinkle them over a salad, on top of a soup, or just straight onto a spoon.

Now the ice-cream cone and crêpe are one and the same idea. Actually wraps too. I would like to add wraps to this list. (I dislike burritos because they are flabby and stick to the roof of my mouth, so that I look like a cat summoning forth a hair ball as I use my tongue to unstick said pappy covering. So when I say “wrap”, I mean the type made from Lebanese flatbreads.)

Essentially I am referring to anything that is an edible container, with a bottom. As you eat your way down, the juices or remnants and smaller parts of the filling work their way to the bottom. By the time you come to the end, behold - there is a delightful pot of edible gold waiting for you. You eye each other up, lovingly, for a brief moment, and then, with a beatific smile, you both know what comes next. Eyes closed, head back, down in one. Oh. Yes.

As for food, from the pan in which it was cooked or dish in which it was served, that confuses me more. I enjoy cooking, so the idea that the leftovers from a pan taste better because they haven’t been immediately preceded by slaving away over the stove doesn’t fit. Even when I have had a plate of the food in question, and enjoyed that plate, a schpoonful from the pan ultimately tastes better. I know if you left the food over-night, the flavours may have developed and so taste better for that reason. But, otherwise I can’t quite put my finger on why I enjoy food from the pan or dish so much.

I suppose it’s similar to baked beans in the tin, straight from the fridge. Or is that just me?

This pan/ dish scenario is a conundrum to me. I’m sure some psycho-expert could tell me why. To be completely honest, I don’t really care. I like schpoonfuls from pans, tins and serving dishes. No need for a reason why. When I worked in a small B&B in Umbria, where dinner usually comprised of 4 courses, and at least 8 side dishes with the mains, all taken from their vegetable garden that day, we used to wait for the guests to have finished their meals before picking odds and ends off the serving dishes. The type of satisfaction that gave rise to is different to that gleaned from eating a whole plate of eye-crossingly delicious food (because it was), but I would say it is just as powerful.

In short, an eternally happy ending for this here schpoon and her ends.

It's been a pleasure to meat you

There is something profoundly comforting knowing that someone knows you well. Perhaps it is linked to the subconscious realisation that they know you well and still choose to associate with you…or perhaps that’s just me..?

Anyway, for me, when someone close to me does something right up my street, bang on my button and hits my jackpot (no, that wasn’t a euphemism for anything you foul beast), it gives me a strange sense of security. Being known is one step closer to being understood, and being understood is inextricably linked with being connected with another. And the search for connections with others is a universal, eternal instinct in all humans.  

Opening my birthday card from The Boy back in April was a faceful of said security. My present was a butchery course. I do gormless very well on a normal day, but in that moment, I did gormless to a whole new level. I think for a moment he thought I was staring at the card because I wasn’t happy with its contents.

Oh dear Boy, how very wrong.

When I worked in a restaurant, it was a fish restaurant, and I was a pastry chef. I did learn about fish, but the meat all came prepared. A butchery course, aside from the macabre attraction of slicing and dicing animal anatomy, had always been something I thought would be immensely useful. As food prices rise, being able to buy a whole joint of something and zorro it up into its smaller cuts definitely helps, and then there’s also being able to present a cut of meat well.

The course I attended was at The Butchery Ltd, in their headquarters under the railway arches in Bermondsey. They run numerous courses focussing on one particular animal, but this was a megamix of meat: Butchery to Pimp your Home Cooking. Over three hours we jointed a chicken, a leg of lamb and a whole shoulder of pork. Wait. It gets better. We got to take it all home. Anything we wanted from our class, we could have. Bones for stock, just the meat, both, neither, all. Everything.

A frenzy of meat.

There were just three of us in the class, run by the co-owner of the company, Nathan Mills. He and his partner came over from Australia around 8 years ago, having grown up in a family of butchers. To hear his journey from when he arrived here to owning his own company would make even the most hardened name-dropper blush. But he reels off the names as if they were average Joes, not because he’s arrogant, but because to him they are precisely that, average Joes. Just people. Jamie Oliver, Barbecoa, Whole Foods, Smithfields, Borough, Raymond Blanc, Angela Hartnett – they’ve all had or are in line to get a piece of his meat. (AGAIN, stop being so dirty. No double entendres.)

Not to my surprise, my fellow rookies were male. Nathan confirmed my suspicion that there aren’t a vast amount of women in the butchery business (in the UK at least). I can appreciate why – my “little piggy” required both hands to lift it, and then there are the cows in the walk-in fridge. Close to 90kg each.

Hmmmm. I can’t imagine being over successful trying to move one of those alone.

Nathan took us through the cuts with ease and explanation, but not over-complication. He helped when we struggled, but never took over too soon – we wrestled and we stabbed and we probed and we cut. And only if we really started to hash it up did he come to our rescue.

With the chicken, we removed the breasts and marinated them in cloudy apple juice, garlic, sage, chilli, rosemary and thyme. I hadn’t ever thought about apple juice as a marinade for chicken, but I can honestly say, having cooked them last night, they tasted wonderful. We had also removed the legs, which I poached last night, and with the carcass I obviously made some stock. Roll on risotto, please and thank you.

With the lamb, we removed the bone and then butterflied the meat out for barbequing. Well, he is Australian. That had a simpler marinade of a splash of oil, lashings of garlic, thyme and rosemary.

And for the finale, we had the pork. We removed the ribs and numerous other bones that I dare not name for fear of getting them wrong, but lots of bones we did remove. And then we butterflied the joint, layered up outrageous quantities of garlic, sage, rosemary and thyme, and then rolled the beast.

It was at this point, having finished the work with knives, that Nathan advised a glass of wine may help. Not as a marinade for the meat, but for us before we tried our hands at tying the joint up. So, glasses of red in hands, we watched as Nathan demonstrated slowly, twice, how to tie the joint up.

Hmmmm.

The Eyebrow was most certainly raised.

Deep breath. Big gulp. Off we go.

After much laughing and invention of new and interesting knots never seen before, we all finally got there, and before we knew it we were scouring for anything which we could roll up and tie.

With our spoils we then vacuumed packed whatever we wanted, Nathan tidied up, and we sat down together to a light dinner of fantastic bread, cheese, smoked venison, and sterling British hot-water crust pies. We were even treated to a visit from Nathan’s partner, who is the office machine behind the company, and their 16 month old daughter. The conversation ranged from how they got to where they are now, to amusing accounts of other class attendees (doctors) reconstructing the carcasses they had only just carved up in perfectly accurate anatomical way, and onto the whys and wherefores of Ebay and antique meat slicers. Food, of course, was at the core of it all.

As I struggled out with two very heavy bags of flesh, I had that grin again. The same type of elemental, profound grin caused by knowing I am known, but this was caused by knowing that there are people out there who know about what they do, and who want to share that, whether through classes or by offering the best product available. And I suppose again there is that sense of having connected with the course, Nathan, the other attendees. With gifts like that, with butchers like them, and with evening courses like this, the world can’t be all bad, can it.