Food Of The Gods

Last year, I was diagnosed as being pre-diabetic so I have been making a real effort to cut down on sugary food, do more exercise and lose weight. And let’s face it, if I don’t want to resemble a bowling ball stuffed into a tea cosy at my wedding on December, I need to lose a lot of my excess baggage.

I have actually shed roughly two stone, which sounds quite impressive until you consider the facts. I began cutting back this time last year, which means the weight loss has been only half a pound a week on average. The reality is even worse than this – some weeks I’ve put weight on and had to spend several weeks getting back to where I was before I could sustain the downward trend. A bar chart of my progress during the year would look like the amount of schoolwork completed by the average British schoolchild, plotted weekly, during the Covid pandemic. 

I have a long way to go, and I should be travelling much faster!

But I am – generally speaking – moving in the right direction. A casual observer wouldn’t yet be able to tell I’ve lost weight simply by looking at me – partly because very few people have actually seen me since the first lockdown and most of my friends have probably forgotten what I look like anyway, but also because around half the fat I lost was laid down during the first lockdown, so I’m probably in reality only a stone lighter than when I was last on public display. I myself can tell I’ve lost weight – but only because my bras now make my bosom feel like two apples rolling around in the bottom of a large shopping bag, and my ageing face is beginning to resemble a deflated balloon. So subtle has my weight loss been that I have seriously wondered whether my scales are faulty, but the new set I bought say the same weight so I guess that proves my fat-reduction regime is working (though on those weeks when the scales tell me I’ve put weight on, I know it’s just because these new-fangled electronic weighing machines are notoriously inaccurate…).*

  

Every so often, the ascetic lifestyle gives me the willies and I have a mad urge to bake as if Nigella Lawson was now PM and had issued an edict that anyone who didn’t eat a minimum of two pieces of cake or equivalent every day would be forced to live with Gordon Ramsey for three months. So, during my current bakingfest, I've made a number of different cakes, most of which have, sadly, been donated to friends and family or consigned to the freezer as I don’t feel I can justify eating more than a mouthful of each. After posting pictures of some of my efforts on Facebook, I noticed that one particular friend seemed to dislike several of my flavour-choices – he wasn’t keen on the idea of blueberries in a cake, for instance, or of coconut and lime in combination. Then I noticed other non-FB comments by friends and relatives: apples in a scone were seen as ‘a bit weird’, a syrup made of blood oranges and pomegranate (Nigel Slater’s recipe) was frowningly deemed ‘unusual’, the news that there were lumps of marzipan in a sponge cake was greeted with a scrunched-up face suggesting I’d accidentally said ‘cow pats’ rather than almond paste. And I realised that there was a common denominator in operation: all these critics were born and raised in Yorkshire…

Don’t get me wrong –I love God’s Own County. I moved back here twenty years ago from a place I adored, giving up a job I loved, for goodness sake! But there is no doubt that Yorkshire-folk are discerning food-critics. And by ‘discerning food-critics’, I mean ‘fussy-eaters’ – or ‘picky buggers’, to use a more regional vernacular. I used to feel slightly aggrieved by the portrayal of the people of my home county in comedy sketches like Catherine Tate’s ‘Janice and Ray’  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQd5Ieprung], but I have to admit that Tate had a point. Every picky eater I know is from Yorkshire, culminating the picky-eater apotheosis that is my husband-to-be’s mum.

I’ve mentioned Agnes before. She’s a fabulous person, but her pickiness with food is the stuff of legend. She dislikes most food-groups, including all those things that, for most people, enhance boring food, such as ketchups, chutneys, pickles and sauces. She doesn’t eat fruit due to the mysterious circumstance of having once worked in a fruit shop, darkly hinting at an experience of behind the scenes apple-and-banana-abuse. She won’t eat lamb or pork because her father ‘used to have a small-holding’ [?], and she considers many other meats, including turkey and goose, to be simply too exotic. Particular cuts or types of meat fall into the same category, such as mutton, veal, spare-ribs, belly-pork, and some combinations of food mystify and repel her, such as gammon and pineapple. ‘Fish’, for Agnes, means cod in batter or maybe – at a stretch – a parsley sauce, though she’s not too keen on parsley or sauce really; ‘veg’ means potatoes (but not anything ‘fancy’ like dauphinoise or saute), carrots, sprouts, broccoli, peas and cabbage (but only a limited variety of cabbage – kale is rather exotic and cavalo nero is ‘foreign stuff’). Pasta, for Agnes, is something you find in milk puddings (which she doesn’t like); she has never, in 86 years of life, tasted rice except in rice pudding (which she doesn’t like), or cooked, blue, goats’ or soft cheese, or any sort of egg except a hen’s egg, or any kind of spice except maybe cinnamon and nutmeg in a Christmas pudding (which she doesn’t like). She doesn’t like chocolate or jam or honey or peanut butter or jelly or mousses or any sort of ice-cream except Walls’s vanilla soft scoop or beans or nuts or crisps or toffee or coffee or pancakes or doughnuts or stuffing or roast parsnips. She would, I know for a fact, be horrified if she was presented with anything like rabbit or venison or pheasant, or any kind of seafood, or swordfish or tuna or mackerel or sardines, or anything foraged like samphire or wild strawberries or boiled sweets or any other kind of sweets. She won’t even contemplate trying any sort of ‘foreign’ cuisine like Chinese or Thai or Indian, including such common staples as pizza or spaghetti. She doesn’t like most biscuits, or any cake which has ‘fancy’ stuff on it such as icing. 

We discovered a few months ago that, amazingly, she quite likes white chocolate when it is put on top of what we call buns but the southerners among you would call cup-cakes. But not if you add a Smartie or a Malteser for decoration. I learnt this the hard way.  

But Agnes, miraculously, likes my lemon drizzle cake (admittedly, she’d like it even better without the lemon drizzle). This is like getting a thumbs-up for your hand-thrown coffee mug from Josiah Wedgwood. Given the extremity of her Yorkshire tastebuds, I take it as a true mark of baking success.

I’d love to witness a meeting between Agnes and Greg Wallace, preferably at La Gavroche…

 

*I have to say here that I am not an advocate of diets as such. I have never tried any specific ‘diet fad’. I also believe that dieting actually makes you put on weight in the long-term, as this is what has always happened to me in the past. I have always tried to cut down moderately and eat healthily, while gently increasing my exercise level, but I have always found myself fatter than ever a few years later on, as essentially I think that for most people it is impossible to sustain a truly healthy diet all the time. I’d love to be slim and healthy, but it was only the health risks associated with potential diabetes that have made me embrace yet another attempt at a healthy lifestyle. And I am also aware that food-intake and body image issues are serious problems for many people, not only those with named conditions such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia, so I am not intending this column to be flippant about such things, which I know are often life-destroying.