Food - Bee Wilson on what to cook if you are feeling unwell
The news that Loyd Grossman, of Masterchef fame, is to preside over a £40m overhaul of NHS food has been the cause of much hilarity. Jokes about serving balsamic vinegar and sun-dried tomatoes to cancer patients have come thicker and faster than Grossman's own-recipe paahrrsta sauces. The hero of the hour has been infuriated by all this, as a recent appearance on the BBC's Question Time showed. "Why don't yeeeeough do the job?" he asked a hapless member of the public who had presumed to suggest that his appointment might be construed as a PR exercise. You could see him thinking: "Don't they kneeeuouw how important I am?" But there is something even more fascinating at stake than Grossman's ego. All those balsamic vinegar jibes confirmed that we no longer, as a nation, see food for the sick as separate from food for the well. There is posh food and pleb food, but no distinct sickbed food. Invalid cookery is dying as surely as the patients are.
Rules on feeding invalids used to be a common element in general cookbooks. Mrs Beeton, for example, recommends beef tea without "the smallest particle of fat or grease on the surface", gruel served in a tumbler, simply dressed fish, small quantities of temptingly arranged delicacies arranged on trays, lightly boiled eggs and "a few spoonfuls of jelly". It would be almost unthinkable for a food publisher to include such advice now. If a recipe for lightly boiled eggs is given, it is because they are "comfort food", which can be photographed with a desirable soldier voluptuously breaking the yolk. If recipes are concocted without the aid of butter, it is so they are easy on the waistline rather than the stomach. By contrast, in 1845, Eliza Acton wrote about a fat-free dessert as "invalid's new baked apple pudding", and remarked that it was very "wholesome".
Over the course of the past year, I have suffered no fewer than five separate bouts of gastroenteritis, and have thus been more than usually aware of the gourmandising of fashionable food journalism. Those pages of oozing baked taleggio with garlic, seething and buttery risottos and deliquescing layer cakes, which look so alluring when one is robust, turn into pictorial emetics when the stomach is delicate. The assumption of most food writing is that one would like, in theory, to eat as much mayonnaise/pastry/cream as possible, if only they weren't so fattening. Nausea and its concomitant demons are almost never allowed for.
The best food while convalescing after a stomach bug, I have found, is plain white rice, rather overcooked in salty water. On day two, use chicken stock instead of water. On day three, cook some carrots in with the rice and add a knob of butter and chopped parsley at the end. Tinned consomme, which is all too difficult to find nowadays, is also good, as are any of those plain broth-like soups such as avgolemono or chicken noodle.
Such a diet is, needless to say, not suited for all illnesses. The real art of invalid cookery is suiting the diet to the patient. No one has ever understood this better than Galen, the Roman physician of the second century AD, whose works on food and health have been translated and collated in a splendid new edition. Galen believed that you could be healthy only when the body's four humours - blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile - were evenly balanced. The purpose of diet was to stop the humours from getting out of sync and to correct them when they did. Pomegranate juice for heartburn. Leeks, mustard and beets for phlegm. Rice, Galen confirms, is used "to check" the stomach. He thinks that barley soup is soothing for the moderately ill, but that it might kill patients in a critical state.
As for vinegar, it could liven up the taste buds, cut through oily foods and, when mixed with honey and apple juice, cure loss of appetite. So perhaps Grossman should be bringing his bottle of balsamic into the wards after all.
Galen on Food and Diet, edited by Mark Grant, is published by Routledge (£15.99)
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
