Lateshows

by Frank Moorhouse

  MEAL REFORM AND THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

  The Club Snack Extolled; the Cucumber Sandwich,

  an Examination of the British and the

  Countrywomen’s Way; Where has Dusk Gone?

  OR

  ‘And, speaking of the science of Life, have you

  got the cucumber sandwiches cut for Lady Bracknell?’

  I have been asked frequently what we eat at the Cabaret Voltaire. Why people should be curious about the repasts at the Cabaret Voltaire is beyond me. The public seems to have an unhealthy curiosity about the Cabaret Voltaire. I blame the inquisition into my chairpersonship and the subsequent publicity which has done much to harm the venerable movements which, along with the Voltairians, use the Cabaret Voltaire as their headquarters (I allude, of course, to the Vortexists, the Futurists, the Anarcho-Syndicalists, the Surrealists, the Fauvists, wild beasts though they be, and the Vorticists, silly devils though they be, and all the rest).

  Before I begin, I wish to make it perfectly clear that the thinking at the Cabaret Voltaire is very much against all meals other than dinner. We have a longstanding policy of meal reform. We were the first to argue for the abolition of breakfast and lunch as they are presently known, and the substitution of eleven eating pauses during the day. We hold with dinner as the meal which marks the end of daylight and the beginning of night and consequently on most nights excluding Sunday we serve a fourteen-course dinner, service ‘a la Russe’.

  As revolutionary as all this may seem, we feel that the abolition of breakfast and lunch as we know them and the substitution of the eleven eating pauses will impart fluidity, nuance and grandeur to the day. However, we are not proposing that people eat more, rather that they eat less more often.

  Furthermore, we assert the proper status of the light repast and the incidental repast – we propose the return of tea at rising, full morning tea and full afternoon tea, high tea, club tea, and more attention to the hors d’oeuvres. As H.H. Munro said to me once, ‘Hors d’oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me, they remind me of one’s childhood … one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d’oeuvres.’ And of course, always a slight refreshment at five, always. A cup of Gunpowder tea perhaps, and an Anzac biscuit. We wish to bring back first toast and second toast (in the community, that is – they have always been served at the Cabaret Voltaire). As I mentioned last month, the savoury toast has almost disappeared from the dinner table. In the officers’ mess it was served just before the meal and after the meal before the port. The ‘second toast’ should be hot and strongly flavoured, something like Scotch Woodcock is a favourite at the Cabaret Voltaire. Some Voltairians favour gentlemen’s relish, a choice which cannot be faulted. Finally we wish to restore supper after the theatre to its rightful glory – not to mention something during the night. We favour the turn-of-the-century Oxford idea of ‘brunch’ – although not just as a substitute for lunch or breakfast but as a meal in itself.

  Let’s face it, the three-part day is ruining this country. It is a regimented perception of the place of food and creates a trough-like approach to eating. The division of the day into three parts – breakfast/lunch/dinner or morning/afternoon/evening – has done irreparable cultural damage. It makes for a restricted understanding of ‘how long’ an activity should go. It punctuates the day too severely, requiring an activity to prematurely ‘finish’ – how often have we heard a chairperson say, ‘We must finish up now so that lunch can be served’? More seriously, we feel that it has damaged the panel discussion by effectively preventing discussion from finding its proper conclusion. It’s true! In this country discussion must always be falsely ending – ‘time’ is always ‘up’. Many of our economic troubles can be traced to the premature ending of the panel discussion. We have never reached a proper conclusion and found the answers.

  When we examine the programming of our days we will see that it is in the service of the three-meal day. We are enslaved. It all begins at school with eating by bells, although the playlunch is a fine institution: a slice of fruit cake, a banana, a buttered Sao biscuit with vegemite – I can smell them now. The point about the smaller meal or snack (how we yearn for a return of the eighteenth-century snack-house) is that it can be eaten while going on with things. The light repast is never an acute disruption. The full meal has within it too serious an announcement – a ringing of the changes, much too autocratic. It is bad enough that people divide the twenty-four-hour period into night and day. Or, indeed, that we work by twenty-four-hour periods at all. Most people have lost dawn, dusk is gone, and late morning and late afternoon are rarely mentioned. As friend Nuuk says, we must remember that ‘always we are hunting’. What he means in his wise way is this: every meal we eat brings unconscious memories of the hunt, a stirring barely intuited – seated at the dinner table we twitch, we move in the saddle; deep inside us are memories of a thousand hunts; as we hold the knife we initiate the moment of death, we are swept by the elation of the kill mingled with a moment of remembrance and respect for the dead animal which is to become one with us. Yes, always we are hunting. So at the Cabaret Voltaire, always we are eating. We at the Cabaret Voltaire take food at eleven intervals of the day.

  We are proud of our cucumber sandwiches. We dispute that they are a hangover from British imperialism. We offer the three classic types of cucumber sandwich: the countrywoman, the Ritz, and the dressed cucumber sandwich. The countrywoman sandwich is renowned for its crunch, the Ritz for its juice, and the dressed sandwich for its tang. I prefer the countrywoman to the effete Ritz sandwich. When making the countrywoman we slice the cucumber with the knife from our belt – finely, but without worrying overmuch about the delicacy of the slice. We place the slices in cold water for an hour (some say iced and salted water), butter both pieces of bread, lid and tray, and then pepper. Paradoxically, placing the cucumber slices in water seals the slices, makes them less moist and produces a crisp slice of cucumber with crunch to it. This is a sandwich which stands firmly.

  I have always found that the Ritz Hotel Palm Court Tearoom sandwich seems to produce too much moisture regardless of pressing and shaking of the cucumber slices in a sieve. There is also an excessive concern with paper thinness of the slice achieved by using a potato peeler. Some say you should be able to see light through the slices. They are also for removing the rind. The Ritz, at least when I was there before the war, would sprinkle vinegar and salt on the cucumber, leave it for half an hour, and then drain away the juice. Some would go further and also place the cucumber slices between absorbent paper. Certainly the sweating of the cucumber slices by salting both enhances flavour and makes them more digestible.

  Some would argue for chilling of the slices, as Nuuk says, for him a touch of home. Dispute has gone on for years over whether the seeds should be removed. The Ritz sandwich has a strained elegance. We all agree on two layers of cucumber to the slice. The dressed cucumber sandwich is edged in sour cream and chives after marinating the cucumber slices in olive oil and vinegar for an hour or so. This gives the sandwich a tang but with some loss of cucumber flavour to the chive and vinegar. It is a sandwich which makes a song and dance of itself, loses the understated virtue of the cucumber. But as Nuuk says, in his earthy Eskimo way (sorry, ‘icy Eskimo way’), philosophically; the choice of sandwich style all means less than a fart in a blizzard so bugger that for a game of soldiers (Nuuk is learning English at the Cabaret Voltaire).

  The Ritz is made from thinly sliced bread with the crusts sliced off, cut into three rectangles. The countrywoman sandwich is cut into triangles for the obvious reason that the Cabaret Voltaire subscribes to an all-embracing system based on the mutual attraction and repulsion of paired forms. We prefer the green rind of the cucumber to be left on. Why? The debate of 1926 went this way: the whiteness of the cucumber flesh and the pale yellow of the butter and the whiteness of the bread create something of a washed-out gastronomic landscape. The dark green rind at least gives an insinuation of the garden to the otherwise
lustreless field of white upon yellow upon white. Mott and Snyder (1987) advise removing the rind of a cucumber as protective action against pesticides and in the United States it is a retailing practice to wax the rind which makes it inedible. By using brown bread as we do at the Cabaret Voltaire we also introduce the suggestion of the rich loam whence the cucumber came. Doubtless it will all be debated again before long. Cutting off the crusts was considered effete in Moruya. If the sandwich has to be held and moved about, as it is at the Cabaret Voltaire when one waves one’s arm around during vehement discussion, or when one is riding on the back of a mule, then it should have the frame of the crust to scaffold it.

  When some of the more earnest Anarcho-Syndicalist members at the Cabaret Voltaire have complained that too much time is given to the discussion of cucumber sandwiches, I have always quoted that famous writer Oscar Wilde, who in his play The Importance of Being Earnest has his character Algernon say, ‘And, speaking of the science of Life, have you got the cucumber sandwiches cut for Lady Bracknell?’ It has to do with the science of Life, you see.

  Bhuja.

  Nuuk and I are on a fact-finding mission to India for the Cabaret Voltaire for the program of meal reform and the science of Life manifestos. It has been a trying year and the Cabaret Voltaire thought that Nuuk and I should give up worrying so much about discussion panels and all that and accept that the Council will not reopen the inquiry. We have put all that behind us and have decided to go on with meal reform.

  I am a person always eating on the run and Nuuk, as an Eskimo, often has to travel across the icy wastes for days with only the food that can be carried in a leather wallet on his belt. The Cabaret thought that because of this we would be the perfect team to investigate and prepare a report on snack foods as part of the meal reform program. I therefore shed my stove pipe hat and Cabaret Voltaire free thinkers’ suit, and Nuuk his five-hundred-year-old fur coat, and hung them in our lockers at the Cabaret Voltaire. We have put on our Bombay shorts, Roman sandals, Panama hats and Hawaiian shirts, and accepted an invitation from my Indian friend Dewas to visit his bhuja factory in Calcutta. He is king of bhuja in Calcutta.

  Bhuja is a fiery mixture eaten as an accompaniment to strong drinks. What E.M. Forster described as ‘three dreadful little dishes that tasted of nothing till they were well in your mouth, when your whole tongue suddenly burst into flame. I got to hate this side of the tray.’ He was the sort of person who hated that side of the tray. Morgan, Morgan, it is that side of the tray in life that we must strive to reach.

  I had Nuuk in mind when I chose the bhuja factory as the place for our holiday and my research. Hot foods are a novelty to him. I still have to explain to him that here in bars he cannot order the favourite Baffin Island drinks – a whiskey and steam or a skiwasser.

  Bhuja is composed of any food stuffs that the Indian population do not want. It is really the sweepings of the Indian subcontinent. This explains its peculiar hot and unidentifiable but unquestionably Indian flavour which belongs to no animal or vegetable. This bhuja is not to be confused with the excellent substitute bhuja which is made from a Fijian recipe. While appearing in every way similar to Indian bhuja, it is another product entirely. In India many people are employed as sweepers – in the old days we called them ‘bungys’ – and it is what they sweep up and do not want that goes into bhuja. It is nothing more and nothing less than the flavour of India. We spent the month touring the factory. So much travel is moving about for moving about’s sake. All that moving about. I prefer to stay put and really look at something. Too much going about shopping happens when on holiday.

  Bhuja is made up of thirty different pieces of things. Many people think that it is nuts, peas, soya and sultanas they see but that isn’t so. They are not peas, they are not nuts, and they are not sultanas. They are moulded by a machine which is called the nut, pea and sultana moulding machine. Four hundred workers are needed to operate each machine. Each machine produces up to sixty moulded nuts, peas and sultanas a week. Working three shifts, that is. No two imitation nuts, peas or sultanas are the same. How so? Hundreds of skilled artisans leap into the vats of moulded pieces before they set and individually handcraft each piece. That is the marvel of it.

  The identity of each piece of bhuja, naturally, is kept a secret. Among bhuja makers it is a big joke that some people claim to have identified the food stuff in the bhuja. That is a mighty fine joke in India. There is a mocking saying in India which goes as follows: ‘He is one who knows his bhuja.’ It amuses Indians when they see someone examining bhuja as if to find something they might recognise. To pay attention to what you are eating from the bhuja dish is a joke in India too. Hence the saying, ‘He who studies his bhuja.’

  Much has been written about the dust which is left when you have eaten the solid bhuja. I can assure you – there maybe something of a buzz in bhuja but there is no bhang in bhuja.

  Rumour has it that bhuja is flavoured with sea salt. This too is untrue. Bhuja is flavoured by the perspiration salt of horses. The lather of working horses is gathered by sponges throughout India and squeezed into glass jars, the moisture is evaporated and the salt scraped onto brown paper, neatly wrapped, and sent to the bhuja factory in Bombay. Bhuja dust is often collected and recycled as a cheap form of concrete. When mixed with water it produces a hardened substance excellent for use as foundations of high-rise buildings.

  The Council psychologist at the inquiry suggested that I have a Peter Pan complex because, as a child, I lived nearby the school and consequently I went home for lunch and didn’t have enough playground play at lunch time. There is a point to all this. Bhuja is, I believe, the Indian word for playlunch. The playlunch is also important because it’s where we are introduced to the notion of the ‘snack’. I wish to go into the history of the snack. The Council psychologist thought that my trying to get back to school in time to get in some play at lunchtime also came to distort my view of the lunch and also my view of the world – that I was forever running to a game that I could never reach, a game which was already half-over – and that I have come to confuse lunch with play. That now I find myself eating only on the run because I am forever on my way back to the playground, desperately trying to rejoin the game.