Food
Michele Roberts tastes funeral tea
Published 20 June 2005
Black food would be good for funeral teas, washed down with Guinness
Osso buco for lunch with friends, in France, in a neighbouring village. That's about as dead as an animal can get: bones chopped into meat-ringed chunks; marrow sucked as a delicacy. Driving home through my own village, I saw many cars parked around the church, a crowd gathered, a large hearse parked nearby. I hadn't known someone had died.
I stopped, and joined Yvette and Eugene in the procession of mourners. It's the custom for everybody in the village to attend funerals, to say farewell. We walked slowly along the hot road to the cemetery. Hard-faced people with hard lives, holding back all their tender feelings behind sullen expressions, silent and serious to show respect; a few old ladies sniffling into handkerchiefs. The ushers lowered the coffin into a cement-lined bed, the cement intended perhaps to discourage the worms from their feasting, and then everybody kissed everybody else four times, as we do when we meet and say goodbye. How ugly all the modern monuments were: meaningless curves of sparkling granite surrounded by china scrolls; pots of garish fake flowers. We went off to the village hall for a glass of wine and a biscuit.
Funeral teas in Britain - in novels, anyway - often feature ham sandwiches. Something sturdy inside you to keep your heart up, or at least to put the heart back into you. Black food would be good on such an occasion, washed down with pints of Guinness. Marmite on well-charred toast. Prunes and vanilla pods. Grilled mushrooms with beurre noir. Pieces of bitter chocolate. That French dish, poulet en demi-deuil, chicken in half-mourning, with slices of truffle pushed under its skin. Black wild rice.
In the Victorian hymns we used to sing at school, heaven was presented as a banquet: "There is the throne of David/And there, from care released,/The shout of them that triumph/ The song of them that feast." I had Alma Tadema-style, sub-Grecian visions of male public-school athletes, sconcing each other with gold goblets and calling for more. Women did not figure at these funeral parties. I guessed they bore in the platters, scattered a few rose petals, perhaps danced a bit for the chaps, then went off to wash up. The shy village women at my father's funeral tea did just that. Not the dancing bit - though Dad would have loved it - but the washing-up bit. Dad's was a Tory-dominated village, and women knew their place, doing stalwart, heroic work in kitchens.
In France, the men and women stand side by side at the funeral feast, sipping wine and gossiping. When Nana was dying, she took my hand and said: "The vicar says that heaven is green fields up there. But heaven is you and me together, here, now." Eating osso buco and laughing.
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