WeeklySA_AdminNIBBLES: The author wonderfully teases out fond memories of culinary guilty pleasures – to which we are eternally grateful for providing us with soulful warmth…
By Jacob Mawela
“Take this to the German”, instructed a man to his daughter one day inside a working-class household in Margaret Thatcher-governed Britain of the 1980s while he thrusted into her hands a special Silver Jubilee mug filled with white tea and a cheese-and-jam toasted sandwich.
The ‘German’ in question was the young girl’s mother and the man’s wife and the term of reference was one of numerous the paterfamilias – a Scouser (person from Liverpool) stationed with the British army in Germany not long after World War II – gave her and the sandwich in the youngster’s hands happened to be the gastronomic fix from his entire repertoire she loved the most!
This childhood anecdote is related by the then lass and presently the Guardian’s restaurant critic, Grace Dent, in her tome titled, Comfort Eating, about what we eat when nobody’s looking, gleaned from interviews she conducted with celebrities regarding food they really eat. ‘Spykos’ in South African lingo, if you dig!
Inspired by her award-winning podcast of the same name, the offering follows the format of her first expounding upon the virtues of specific foods such as cheese, butter, pasta, bread, potatoes and sweet treats and thereafter conducting a tete-a-tete engagement with celebs on their experiences of comfort eating – with the aforementioned ingredients as basis of their ideas – and sharing recipes of their guilty pleasures!
A proviso is added whereby their fixes have to pass the muster of set rules established to determine whether they are or aren’t comfort food! For instance, one of these laws stipulate that: it’s only a real comfort food if you blush and begin making excuses before revealing it to someone!
The first luminary featured in the book is Scarlett Moffatt, of I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here fame, whose embarrassment Dent claims was palpable while she whipped up her snack rooted in student days – which she regularly fixes for nights in front of the TV – of Beans on Toast with Crushed Wotsits (a popular British brand of cheese-flavoured corn puffs) in her bespoke marble kitchen located at Northumberland.
Categorised in the Sweet Treats chapter is the BAFTA-winning actress from the TV comedy, Derry Girls, known as Siobhán McSweeney who brought along a snack whose three items could be consumed in the same mouth simultaneously in the form of Dairy Milk chocolate, Tayto cheese and onion crisps and a can of Guinness which herself and Dent commenced to devour the chocolatey, cheesy, salty – combination all the while Sister Michael (McSweeney’s character in the series) urged in encouragement, “there, there it is!” as the recently-turned-teetotaller hostess imbibed a swig of the Guinness for a boozy flourish!
Perusing along the pages, a chapter about cheese has Dent reversing down memory’s avenue to a trip she undertook, aged 26, and a while after she’d embarked upon her career in the media, to a country house in Suffolk, England, where the hosts served cheese and the nerve-wracking, as well as insightful, experience it turned out to be as she had to manoeuver her way around the etiquette requisite round a cheeseboard and its accoutrements such as cheese harps, silver-plated cheese forks, et cetera – all the while she mingled amongst posh folk imbued with trust funds evidently beyond her societal standing!
Dent picked up fascinating aspects regarding her experience worth mentioning in this review such as: posh people pluralise cheese as ‘cheeses’; the ‘Joneses’ property likely incorporates a ‘cheese cave’ (just like they have wine cellars), in which they store the delicacy which needs a specific ambience and thereafter requires serving at room temperature after it had been removed from the cave at least three hours prior!
An error the author committed, and which she cites as agitating unto posh people, involved her cutting the ‘nose’ off a cheese. The proper manner, she learnt, is to cut a round cheese in slices, like a cake, so that everyone gets a little bit of the middle and some of the rind.
(Her moment of awkwardness resonates with me, reminiscent of an incident in which a gentleman once ‘corrected’ me on the size of cheese deemed proportionate to slice, once while attending a book launch at the Hyde Park Mall Exclusive Books bookstore).
Nonetheless, Dent avers that cheese (that salty, fatty king of comfort foods cows, farmers, dairy technicians and cheesemakers have perfected utilising techniques ancient than time to turn into something intense, pungent and sating which always hits the spot) is the great leveller, uniting people from across the social classes!
In an appetizing chapter on the delights of butter, Dent, with a tinge of nostalgia not so far-destined from the proximity of the olde-worlde, transports the reader to the role the foodstuff occupied throughout her family tree. She relates of the turquoise earthenware Le Creuset butter dish always bearing room-temperature salted butter which occupies space alongside a toaster in her house –which miraculously, after she’d possessed it for some 10 years, had never been smashed nor stolen during a house party!
She excitably reminisces of boiled potatoes, never mashed, served with butter served at her granny’s house back in the seventies; of thick slices of ‘tea bread’ made with sultanas steeped overnight in Lipton loose leaf, slathered in butter to help it slide down; or the Jacob’s cream crackers smeared with tandsmor (the Danes reference to ‘tooth butter’ – so-called in reference to butter spread so thick as to leave teeth marks as an eater chomps gaily away) her gran made for her grandpa before bedtime every evening!
Britain’s best-loved food writer also throws in a rider by making the point of drawing a distinction between the centuries’ old indulgence and plain margarine – asserting that ‘when people really want to be comforted, they go for the good stuff (read, butter)!
Whetting your palate with a vignette of a mouth-watering, fluffy butter croissant peradventure wooing you from the window display of your neighbourhood bakery, she declared in the opening sentences to this chapter, that ‘we are hard-wired to love butter – it’s in our collective DNA!
Dent’s is a smorgasbord of memorable encounters with additionally the ilk of Neneh Cherry (whom she hosted whilst enthralled by the sight of the songstress sipping on peanut butter and tomato soup with dollops of black pepper) and others unabashedly carrying along their cherished cravings!
There’s even a section headlined The Inaugural Comfort Eating Honours in which, et al., Dent cheekily bestows the television commercial’s Ferrero Rocher ambassador with the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George for Services to the Carlisle Community – in acknowledgment of the advert evoking dreams of grandiose possibilities within her through the simple act of the ambassador letting her in on how posh folk – note her usage of the term again – are behind closed doors!
The tome – which is peppered with Helen Hugh-Jones’ illustrations limning the various celebs’ guilty pleasures – includes the author’s self-invented Dent’s Dictionary Corner of, A Series of Comfort Eating Things That Don’t Have an Official Name but Really Should. Bon Appetit!
* A trade paperback, Comfort Eating is published by Faber and distributed across South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers. Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R415
