Food - Bee Wilson has lunch with Lord Gnome
Elsie de Wolfe, a culinary dowager of the 1930s, claimed that every successful meal should contain a "surprise", at least one "new dish presented in a new manner". Even now, some cooks follow this advice. There are those who cannot regard their little get-togethers as a success until each guest has gasped at the searing originality of a honey-baked trout cooked with wasabi and maca- damia nuts.
For others, however, a "surprise" is just what isn't wanted when eating. I was recently entranced by the menu at one of the fortnightly Private Eye lunches, which have been given since time immemorial at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho, central London. It was melon followed by salmon. This was even less surprising than it sounds, because the host (and editor), Ian Hislop, told me that the lunch is always melon followed by salmon - except in winter, that is, when the menu rotates to melon followed by steak. Salmon is, in fact, a quite recent innovation. For decades, Private Eye lunchers ate melon followed by steak all year round. But at some point, perhaps in the late Eighties, someone campaigned for a bit of seasonal variation. So salmon was introduced. And at this level of change - salmon and steak, steak and salmon - the menu has sensibly remained. I enjoyed my lunch (complete with petits pois and Hellmann's mayonnaise) very much. When you don't have to worry about "surprises" in the food, the social aspect of eating seems far more relaxing.
At an individual level, however, avoiding surprises in food is a question not of relaxation, but of control. It is a common trait among pubescent boys and girls to refuse to eat any but a single foodstuff. I once knew a boy who subsisted on cornflakes. His parents would bring a packet with them whenever they dined out. It does not take Dr Frasier Crane to see that this diet expresses a fear of the change that accompanies growing up. The tendency is also found among anorexics, who not only severely restrict the calories they ingest, but categorise them, in a seemingly random pattern, in terms of forbidden and permissible foods. Bananas bad, pears good; tea good, coffee bad. These mysterious restrictions impose a feeling of order on a troubled life. In a life that is already highly controlled, eating the same thing every day represents orderliness gone mad. The footballer Alan Shearer became famous for eating the same tedious repast before every game: a mixture of chicken and baked beans.
A repetitive diet is by no means always a fetish. All over the world, eating the same thing every day - rice, usually, or in this country, chips - denotes the terrible lack of choice that accompanies poverty. But when those who can afford to eat what they like choose to regiment their meals as if they had no choice, something altogether different is going on.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant was famous for his regular ways. His daily walk, which took place at the same time and in the same vicinity of Konigsberg every day, was cancelled only twice in several decades: once, because he was so absorbed in reading Rousseau's Emile; the other time, interruption came in the form of the French revolution.
And so it was at Kant's table. He took only one meal a day, at lunchtime. Perhaps the greatest philosopher of the duties of society, he always ate in company. He served fish and roast meat, whose flesh, in later years, he chewed but did not swallow. Almost every dish was seasoned with mustard. Each guest had his own little bottle of light red wine, to aid digestion. His eating done for the day, Kant would set off on his clockwork walk. The effects of such regularity can only be marvelled at in Kant's Critiques. But for myself, I prefer a diet with a little more flexibility. Like those devil-may- care boys at Private Eye, sometimes I want salmon and sometimes I want steak.
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