Food
Michele Roberts compere quiche to stripped pine
Published 10 May 2004
In 1972 quiche, like stripped pine, had not been de rigueur that long
Fashions in food flounce up and down like hems and frills on frocks. I was born just after the war, a time when your mother queued for your orange juice ration and there were proper local shops, Sainsbury's in yards of neoclassical marble where muslin-capped and aproned experts measured out your coffee and cut your cheese. For God-fearing Protestants in this suburb of north-west London, olive oil was a lotion you bought at the chemist's and used for treating earache.
Luckily for us, we lived in a Jewish community, so could buy breads and cakes from the Grodzinski bakery at the top of the avenue. Challah bread was exquisite. Arriving home, having lunched on gristle, soapy carrots and soggy pudding, you tore into it to get the taste of convent school out of your mouth. When the neighbours came for drinks, they got bridge rolls spread with cream cheese, cheese straws, vol-au-vents. Cheese-and-wine parties became the in thing, with a hedgehog platter of pineapple bits on toothpicks stuck into a grapefruit half. Sophistication, to me, meant donning my purple minidress
and white lace tights and handing round the tray of gin and tonics.
Fashionable student food needed to be filling as well as daring. We made hearty moussakas, lasagne, curries, terrible rice fry-ups, proudly stuffing the leftovers into green peppers. At four in the morning, stoned, afflicted by the munchies, we wobbled to the baker's at the end of the street and bought his freshly made lardy cake.
My first job was cataloguing early printed books at the British Library. My kindly boss invited me to Sunday lunch. His elegant wife impressed me no end by declaring, as she served up leek tart, her version of the Belgian speciality flamiche: "Oh, I'm sick of quiche." This was only 1972. Quiches, like stripped pine, had not been de rigueur that long, but she was ahead of the pack. At student parties, if we ate anything, we gorged on peanuts and crisps.
Cut to the triumph of global capitalism, the international market's plundering of world cuisines. Fashionable food becomes more and more recherchee. The point, for the bourgeoisie, is to serve and eat something the neighbours don't. Often, under the hit of nostalgia for a way of life that is being rapidly destroyed, it's faux-paysan goodies, currently Italian: rocket, radicchio rosso, lentils, polenta, cavolo nero, and so on. At literary parties, whither I trot in my relentless and selfless pursuit of knowledge with which to feed this column, I consume, according to the year's whim, mini Yorkshire puds, sushi, satay, mini pork pies, cocktail sausages. English food continues to lurch back into fashion. We spot the first mini black pudding of spring as we hail the cuckoo.
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