Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  Drain the chickpeas. Add to the stew with the lemon chunks and olives. Simmer for a further thirty minutes, until the meat is beginning to fall off the bone and the liquid has become a thick sauce.

  Serve the stew in bowls, spooned onto a pile of couscous, and garnish with finely chopped fresh parsley or coriander.

  My Mother’s Kitchen

  Observer Food Magazine, 11 October 2009

  It was when my mother minced the tip of her forefinger into the klops that I realised her cooking owed more to enthusiasm than finesse. No, I’m wrong. It was when she decided not to bother to search for the little piece of alien flesh amidst the beef, but carried on kneading the meat with the onions, that I got a sense of her priorities, at the top of which was Just Getting It Over With. I was nine. The kitchen intrigued me for it seemed some sort of battlefield in which my mother laid about various ingredients until they surrendered and accepted their fate in a long, hot oven. She would never have used the term batterie de cuisine, but she took pride in the more fearsome of its implements, in particular the heavy-duty steel hand mincer, which, after it had been polished to military brilliance, was attached to the kitchen table. All kinds of food went down its helical screw-mouth: translucent cod and haddock fillets on Thursdays for the gefilte fish; unusual extra chicken breasts for fried balls served up sometimes on Sundays, and the mid-week jumbo meatballs, the legendary klops of her strenuous attack. Into the screw were also fed lashings of onion and, if she was in a mood to lighten the fish or chicken, a beaten egg or two. I don’t remember her crying out in pain when she pulled her slightly chewed-up finger out of the mincer, though there was a hearty Yiddish curse or two sent in its direction. Like Basil Fawlty scolding his Mini, she had Warned It Before and now it would just have to take the consequences. Into the sink went her finger; on to the slightly drippy wound went an Elastoplast and on she went with the klops. At nine I could (on select occasions) be a sanctimonious little perisher and knew that I could put a stop to the inexorable grinding by asking her whether the ground fingertip was, in fact, kosher, and if not, would it write off the whole dish – one of my father’s favourites? I also knew that she would brush the objection aside with one of her more devilish laughs and that would be the end of it, other than swearing me to silence as Father and my older sister tucked into the klops.

  Later, when she worked as the Field-Marshal of Kosher Meals on Wheels in the Jewish East End, getting up before dawn to travel across London to see all the housebound got their lunches, and relished every minute of it, I realised that it was not the food that was my mother’s foe so much as the domestic kitchen itself. A bundle of animal energy in a pretty little package, she just was not cut out for the middle-class housewife role in which she had got somehow stuck, and all the displaced, ferocious energy, and slightly manic, often comical, action drama just needed a bigger stage to operate on. As far as I could tell, Trudie had always been this way. As a little girl, Chaya Gittel – the name she went by in Whitechapel and Stepney – had the startling looks that made people want to chin-chuck her or (for her), worse, pinch her cushiony cheeks: black curls and cobalt-blue eyes; a killer combo. But when she was made to dress up, and the curls were trained into ringlets, people found out in a hurry she was more spitfire than angel. Her father, my grandfather Mark, the only one of a gang of Lithuanian-Jewish brothers who stopped in Stepney rather than moving north to Liverpool to catch the New York ship, was a butcher. So when Chaya, over furious protest, was forced to dress up in silks and satins imported at great expense from my grandmother’s Vienna relatives for Special Occasions, my mother’s way to make a tomboy statement was to take the butcher’s shears and slash it to ribbons. The thrashing she got made her repent not one bit. She set her jaw firmly and swore she would do it again.

  Perhaps it was the butcher-shop childhood that did it, but my mother grew up seldom relishing food; and certainly holding herself apart from the fatty wallowing in the joys of the Jewish table, which she looked on, often, with undisguised contempt – even, or especially, when she was forced to cook it. Food and its relentless preparation was somehow a chore, an enemy of life. During the war she worked for de Havilland aircraft, Girl Friday to test pilots, one of whom used to take her for spins in his roadster, a bottle of Scotch handy in the glove box. She got to like un-Jewish things: Thames Valley pubs and good hard Cheddar with the odd dark vein running to the rind. My mother thought the test pilot an ace and always laughed at the memory of his fine madness. He ended in a ball of flame, but that only made the story perfect as far as she was concerned.

  In her girlhood Chaya befriended a turkey whose lame strut – a ritual impurity – had saved it from the slaughterer’s knife. She called it ‘Loomie’ – the Lame One – and taught it to limp up and down the stairs. Girl and bird bonded with terrible intensity and spent much time in each other’s company. Then, inevitably one day, Loomie disappeared, sold by my grandfather to a gentile colleague for a destiny with Christmas. My mother threw one of her majestic tantrums, barricaded herself in her birdless room, emerging only to grab her younger brother and attempt to run away south, dragging her teary-eyed little sibling all the way past London Bridge on the road she hoped ended in Brighton, before being picked up by an amazed but kindly copper. All her life she stayed wary of butchers, and had the Insider’s Knowledge to make their lives miserable should she suspect they were overcharging for poor cuts and stringy quality. Burly men in stained aprons from Stamford Hill to Temple Fortune would hide behind the Wieners or hurry to the cold room when they saw Trudie barrel through the glass door. I sometimes thought the curse of the Lame Turkey hung over her entire treatment of poultry, especially the terminally overcooked Friday-night chicken, whose ghastly pallor was enlivened by a coating of Marmite so that it emerged from the oven looking like a society matron who had been mistreated at a tanning salon. Within its cavity rattled a lonely duet of garlic cloves, an exotic concession to my father’s savoury cravings.

  My father belonged to a different Jewish food tradition – Rumanian with a dash of Sefardi ancestry – so that rice, dried fruit, and stuffed vine leaves (with the more Ashkenazi sweet-and-sour cabbage substituting in my mother’s version) were dishes that made him happy and, above all other things, I think, aubergines; still not easy to find in the 1950s. My mother eked out the joy of the aubergine, sometimes making a purée laced with more garlic than she usually found acceptable, and stuffing them with minced beef (without, so far as I know, the addition of human parts) in which the spices of my father’s mother’s kitchen – cinnamon and allspice – played a dangerous, appetising part.

  When she felt she was not Under Obligation, Trudie could turn out some good simple things. Her pride and joy, a thick, glutinous lamb-and-barley soup she called ‘Ta’am Gan Eden’ – the Taste of the Garden of Eden – never quite lived up to its billing as far as I was concerned; the muttony pungency of kosher lamb somehow obliterating the stewed vegetables. But she made wonderful egg noodles to go with the chicken soup that preceded the Poulet à la Marmite; and I would help her slice the egg-rolls into quarter-inch strings and lay them out on greaseproof paper. Every so often I would steal one of the yellow ribbons, popping it in my mouth before the high-speed hand of my mother slapped it away. Then there were the fried fish balls: Sefardi Jews’ gift to Britain (for everywhere else in the Jewish world, gefilte fish is poached). Whatever the precise mix of egg, matzo meal, onion and spices that went into the devouring mincer, my mother got it right, and the smell and sound of the discs, going tawny brown in their bath of hot oil, was when I wanted to be in the kitchen. As far as I was concerned, she never made enough, for though they were fried on a Thursday, I would gobble one down for breakfast the next morning and by Saturday, somehow (though my mother complained about their lengthy residence in the fridge), they had taken on some mysteriously enriched flavour that was, for me, heaven to the palate. In synagogue that morning, my hair slicked up into a pompadour hardened with a secret recipe of Brylcr
eem and Uhu glue, deep in discussion about the fortunes of Spurs and the fabulous Valentine twins up in the gallery whom we ogled from below, I knew that I smelled faintly of haddock beneath the Old Spice. But you know what, dear foodies, I didn’t give a damn.

  Mouthing Off

  Oxford Food Symposium, September 2009

  There’s not much I won’t or can’t eat. I’ve eaten crocodile in Holland; barbied kangaroo at Uluru and mountain oysters in Cody, Wyoming. But tongue, even though Fergus Henderson in his recipe for ‘Ox Tongue and Bread’ lyricises about its slices as ‘like little angel’s wings’, has always tested my gag reflex. (Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’d want little angel’s wings in my mouth either.) Lambs’ tongues are a particular problem – like pigs’ tongues, so I’m told – because, being pretty much the same size as our own, a confusing subject and object of mastication, one stands a fair chance of biting the former rather than the latter. Given that tongues are dense with cell receptors (fifty to a hundred for each so-called bud), the experience – as you all know – can be acutely painful and bloody. But there’s another telling aspect to my lingophobia, which is all to do with the separate, but (I want to argue) connected functions of the tongue, that, in my case, precludes the possibility of consumption. Biting one’s tongue is an act expressing pre-emptive remorse in the mouth, where the tongue is in fact the processing agency of pleasure. And more significantly for those of us in the word business, the fear of tongue-biting seems to me an anxiety about muting the organ of articulation without which our experience of food seems (whether this is right or wrong is the subject of these remarks) incomplete. So it’s the threat of damaging or mutilating the multi-tasking organ which is both the instrument of utterance and consumption that is at the root (not to pun) of my tongue-anxiety, I suppose. Do any of us here really want to eat our own words?

  La langue, is of course a gastro-structuralist’s dream, especially when allied to the palate; though in its connection between language and eating, one that seems not to have occurred to Saussure himself. He may or may not have read Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût, but he never seems to have reflected on the fact that, assuming la langue (as he coined it) is the prior wiring that makes la parole – individual utterance events – possible, it is actually the elemental experience of taste, registered on the tongue’s cell receptors, which gives rise in the infant to sound-communication; and that, further evolved, is the defining characteristic of what distinguishes humans from dumb beasts. We are, as has often been noted, the language animal. But it’s probably only in this symposium that two of the tongue’s three purposes – taste and speech – can be thought of as functionally connected; one kind of experience informing and structuring the other.

  Almost all of the nerve endings in a newborn are centralised in tongue and mouth, so that the former acts as an astonishingly precocious processor of information coming from the maternal breast and its milk. The hunger instinct and what to do about it is activated there, but babies also use their tongues expressively to register difference of mood and wants. In this sense, from our very earliest days, ‘utterance’, however basic, and consumption are tongued. The infant sucks, generates a sound, but in turn that sound, learned by the baby as a signal to prompt parental attention, will cue up a feed. It is, you might say, a perfect feedback loop and the most elementary bonding between using the tongue to consume and the tongue to communicate. Scientific studies have shown – and the experience of many parents will have borne it out – that during that first year of life a baby is surprisingly omnivorous, using the tongue and palate to explore, in addition to breast milk, an extraordinary range of sensations across the four taste categories of sour, sweet, salty and bitter (and perhaps, who knows, even including umami). Our own daughter at this very early stage liked nothing better, we discovered – in contravention to all the received wisdoms about the baby-food purées – than blue cheese (Stilton in particular), lemons, olives and (on, I hasten to say, the rare occasions when she got a chance to sample it) caviar. Likewise, much early language originates in response to flavour. Our daughter’s first identifiable word, both descriptive and commanding, was ‘apple’ (or rather ‘a-boo’). It seems to be only beyond the first year or fifteen months that the dislike for some strong food flavours sets in and a much more conservative separation between likes and dislikes, much of it almost certainly socially learned from siblings and beyond, modifies the initial lingual adventurousness.

  So does all this biological and behavioural information make the case from which we can begin our proceedings here, that if our defining characteristic is indeed as language animal, the lingo compulsion does actually get under way with mother’s milk; that as soon as we eat, we feel the need to make some noise about it, a sound that will end up as verbalisation and, eventually, writing. It’s certainly the case – as I’ll want to argue in a little while – that we do seem culturally and socially wired for this connection, and that while beasts roar with hunger or grunt with satisfaction, our own feeding process demands something more complex. It’s been a standard form of commentary by relatively sophisticated travellers, observing those whom they think of as relatively unsophisticated natives, to make a point of commenting on the savagery of eating in speed and silence, akin, they usually say, to animals. That at least was the view of the many travellers to the United States in the nineteenth century, especially the French and the English who, like Colonel Basil Hall, Fanny Trollope and Dickens, never passed up an opportunity to comment on the velocity and utter silence with which Americans, especially on the frontier, in river boats – but also in large taverns and hostelries – ate. In 1827 in Memphis, Tennessee, Mrs Trollope observed her fellow diners at a hotel eating ‘in perfect silence and with such astonishing rapidity that their dinner was over literally before ours began . . .’; (when) ‘they ceased to eat they darted from the room in the same moody silence which they had preserved since they entered the room . . .’ As for their successors, ‘the only sounds were those produced by knives and forks with much chorus of coughing’. In subsequent commentaries of this kind words like ‘animal’ or ‘scarcely human’ were applied to this habitual scene. From the beginning, as seen by foreigners, America was the habitat of social regression: the land of silent as well as fast food.

  In contrast, the instinct to register relish through description and discussion – to make a commentary on what was being eaten part of the digestive process – has been established as a protocol of civility. As soon as there are texts, there are food compulsions, not least of course in the Bible, which can fairly be characterised as food-obsessed, whether in the morphology of taboos, complicated distinctions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy between clean and unclean, but also of course in prophetic poetics. At almost every critical turning point of scriptural teleology, outcomes presumably fated by that mercurial crosspatch Jehovah turn on food choices: the fruit that evicted men and women from the paradise garden; the fratricide of the horticulturalist against the pastoralist (an argument over which form of oblation was satisfactory to the deity); the mess of pottage that disrupted the family hierarchy and delivered priority to Jacob; Samson’s honey, the Baptist’s wild honey and locusts; the Singer of the Song’s pomegranate fixation, as we might reasonably call it – and on and on. The point is not just that, in the infancy of culture, food allusions and narratives merely occur, but that they are heavy signifiers of outcomes. Much, as Margaret Visser would say, ‘depends on dinner’.

  So if we accept that in culture, rather than nature, there can be no eating, and perhaps no cooking, without talking and writing, the manner of utterance in speech and on the page bears a heavy load of signficance, whether in rhetorical spectacle (like television); the language manners of menus (the subject of another contribution to the symposium and a subject that obviously repays close semiotic reading); or the growth of the vocalising habit in waiting staff which in the United States, perhaps to reverse that earlier reputation for taciturnity, has bec
ome a kind of social preaching often done by not-very-good performers. A chosen diction, an affect of language – and this is usually very self-conscious – carries with it a code of values about the nature of the food and its preparation. The A-line decorum with which the heavily frocked Fanny Cradock presented her cooking lessons on television in the 1950s made it plain that they were meant for the women who aspired to be epitomes of bourgeois propriety. (Though for some of us, this programmed role-playing was strangely, perhaps wonderfully, subverted by Fanny’s androgynously deep voice, especially when she put the whiskered Johnny in an apron.) At something like the opposite pole, a half-century later, Gordon Ramsay’s ‘F Word’ compressing – let’s say it, shall we, and strip it of its coyness – sex and alimentation, fucking and feeding, not to mention the insertion of fuck into almost every moment of embattled cooking, is a possibly over-strenuous way of proclaiming (whether we agree or not) that earthiness is a signifier of social authenticity, a combative liberation from the culinary preciousness of haute cuisine. Since Ramsay’s game is, the implication goes, unquestionably well hung, his is cooking for, by and with the People.

  Other choices of diction and tone summon up other messages. Fergus Henderson, in Nose to Tail Eating, tells us ‘How to Eat Radishes at Their Peak’. ‘Pile your intact radishes onto a plate and have beside them a bowl of coarse sea salt and the good butter.’ Now no one is in any danger of confusing a recipe written like this – in fact the choice of recipe itself – with anything written by the Eff-Chef or Jamie Oliver. But there’s something about that insistent definite article – ‘the’ good butter. What ‘the good butter’ does sound like, very like, is John Evelyn’s treatise on salad, the Acetaria, published in 1699, or in fact any cookbook from post-Baconian (no pun intended again) England of the seventeenth and pre-Romantic eighteenth century – Gervase Markham or Hannah Glasse. ‘Take a faire carp and scour him well,’ etc. Together with Henderson’s aphorisms passed off as dispassionate culinary science and zoology: ‘Woodcock defecate before they fly, so they can be roasted with the guts in, which heightens the flavour.’ (I bet it does.) The message not so deeply coded is that Henderson’s cooking is benevolently archival and is all about a return to the imagined English pastoral of Parson Woodforde or Squire Western, in which nature, slaughter and cooking, blood and guts, snout and tripe, were assumed elements in the native kitchen and table. There are moments in Henderson’s asides as well as instructions that don’t quite add up – as in the requirement for Jellied Rabbit: ‘Use tame or particularly beautiful wild rabbits for this’ – as if we would ever be in a position to reject wild rabbits that weren’t particularly beautiful; but it doesn’t matter because the nativist visceralism of his food regime is so romantically distinctive and strong. The backward historicist journey, away from fusion, faddism and fashion, is meant, I think, as consolatory therapy for contaminated urbanism. ‘Even just writing this recipe down,’ he says of his Fish Pie, as if presenting himself as someone who, notwithstanding blood and guts, is prone to attacks of urban neuralgia, ‘its soothing qualities have quite’ (notice that Wildean ‘quite’) ‘restored me from the fragile state in which I was.’ We don’t really need the confessional tone to make the pie; but we register it as a delineator of authorial personality: the poetic romantic butcher-cook seeking to reattach English cooking to its pre-industrial roots.