Tom Roper's Weblog

On haggis

I never cease to sing the praises of the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (subscription required, but most public libraries have one...in fact now anyone can join any public library anywhere, if a local authority is too mean to subscribe, all one need do is join another that is less short-sighted).

The new lives for January are an interesting batch. Among better known entries such as that for Muriel Spark, or Roger Keith Barrett, or Syd as he was better known, one can find Macsween, John Angus (1939–2006), haggis manufacturer. I shall be eating one of his haggises on Burns night.

Pears, lumpfish caviar and treacle

I came home last night and took my first glass of sherry. As it was only my first, when I looked at the wall to see that the cupboard was no longer horizontal, but hanging at an angle of 30°, I trusted my sense perceptions and knew I had to empty it. As I did so I discovered a lot of the jars, cans and bottles were long past their use-by dates.

Archaeologists learn much about the past from the things people throw away. To spare the time of the archaeologists of millennia hence, this is what I threw away. I must reassure those who know me as a gourmand, and know my table as to the Sussex coast what elBulli is to the Costa Brava, that many of the things in this list were bought not by me but by the Burra Mem for herself and the children. This is what I threw away:

Item, a jar of lumpfish caviar, become oddly fizzy
Item, a tin of Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup
Item, a jar of Waitrose mincemeat
Item, a bottle of Reggae Reggae sauce
Item a bottle of Watkins' mushroom ketchup
Item, a bottle of Watkins' anchovy sauce
Item, a jar of melon jam bought from a stall at the French market in Newhaven
Item, a jar of Sainsburys green Thai curry paste
Item, a jar of Sizzle n' Stir tikka masala sauce
Item, a tin of pears in syrup, inherited from my late mother's kitchen cupboard. She died in 2007.
Item, a tin of John West tinned red salmon, of the same provenance
Item, a jar of Morrison's cool tomato salsa. Why 'cool', for heaven's sake? Is this a statement of its desirability, or does it mean it is not very hot?
Item, a jar of Old El Paso enchilada sauce
Item, a tin of Colman's mustard powder

I had to do something with the contents so I found a large plastic bag and poured everything in. The mixture looked quite appetising. I wondered if I might use it as a marinade, or perhaps offer it to the womenfolk as a face-pack. I wondered what dishes could be made with these ingredients: a salad of tinned pears with lumpfish caviar and treacle, for example.

I suggest those who dismiss blogs as solipsistic revise their opinions in the light of the clear usefulness of this post to social historians of the future.

Drinks hitherto unknown to me: number 2

This post is one of a series you can cut out and keep to treasure forever; special hand-tooled goatskin binders, trimmed with dormouse fur, are available from my publisher, Grabber & Grabber, at a very reasonable 150 guineas; though actually the first one was not a blog post but a New Year's Day tweet: http://twitter.com/tomroper/status/1089860574

It is an education having teenage children. My son held a soirée last night in his bedroom for the gilded youth of Seaford. One of the young ladies brought with her a bottle of something called, and tasting of, Jaques. This, the label says is cider with fruit, and weights in at 13% abv. It is made by Scottish and Newcastle, whose marketing department don't seem to have thought very hard about negative connotations before naming the beverage.

From the OED:

1. a. A privy.
   b. transf. and fig.

2. Excrement; filth.

3. attrib. and Comb., as jakes door, jakes-like adj.; {dag}jakes-barreller, {dag}jakes-farmer, jakes-man, a man employed to clean out privies; so {dag}jakes-farming; {dag}jakes-house = jakes.

Morning coffee

Like so many, I find myself unable to work productively if I have not, on the way to work, been able to stop for coffee. I trace the habit back to a school trip to Italy led by the classics masters, Mr Shannon and Mr Youdale, if I remember correctly. There I made the life changing discovery of espresso, so unlike the powdered instant brew my parents favoured. There was also a percolator, but that was only fired up on state occasions. A bottle of Camp hid at the back of the cupboard, but I am grateful to say I was never made to drink it.

On my return, when I had moved up into the sixth form, I started using a café at the end of my road, convenient for the bus stop to school. It stood near the intersection of several bus routes which brought pupils from the villages around Cambridge in to school, and many would meet there. I remember one boy, at a different school, possibly the County Boys', who every morning would add to his coffee a generous shot of rum. He was kind enough to offer me some, which I accepted once, and once only. I have never got the hang of early morning alcohol. I can see him now, though I cannot remember his name, fair hair in a post-Mod haircut. What became of him?

Later, when I worked at the RCVS I would get off the tube one stop early, at Green Park, in order to stop for a coffee, and then a walk through Green and St James's parks. A Sardinian waitress would squeeze my hand when she gave me my change and I became convinced that she had fallen for my rugged good looks. I took to reading D H Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia ostentatiously. Then one day I noticed her squeeze another man's hand. Close observation over the next few days showed that she squeezed the hand of all male customers over 40, doubtless in pursuit of tips. I left a sadder and wiser man.

It is now impossible to throw a stones on a British High street without breaking the window of a coffee shop. Most of these are vile, and there is one chain whose coffee is so bad I will never frequent them. One of the others is just about tolerable but I shan't name them as I don't think they deserve the business.

Fortunately now the best coffee there is may be had in the Pantry in Wandsworth, well worth a detour, though for me it sits on my route to work.

On cagmag

I bought some Christmas pudding yesterday, from the brewers Harveys of Lewes, on the recommendation of someone whose taste is as refined and reliable in puddings as it is in literature. I remembered that, in my childhood, Christmas pudding was served not only at Christmas, but on birthdays too, and was always known, in the peculiar family argot that my father, his to brothers and his sister developed in their childhood, and passed on to their children, as Christmas cagmag.

I am straying into the territory of linguistic blogs covered so well by blogs like Lynne Quist's excellent Separated by a common language, but I find that the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word thus:

[app. a word of dialectal origin, widely used in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and adjacent counties: of uncertain derivation.]
1. a. A tough old goose. b. Unwholesome, decayed, or loathsome meat; offal ; hence anything worthless or rubbishy.

2. attrib. or adj. Unwholesome, decaying, refuse. There is also a verbal use, though I never heard this when young, meaning either intransitively to quarrel or transitively to nag.

This makes sense, as my father's family were physicians from the 18th century onwards, first in Norfolk and then in Cambridge, and Lincolnshire is not far away. In our usage, though, cagmag was not necessarily unpleasant. It denoted a substantial, suet-based pudding, often steamed as in Christmas cagmag, treacle cagmag. Cagmag tout court referred to a sultana suet pudding.

A certain patient of my father's, N, who was not an accomplished cook, would each Christmas give him a cake. My father would accept with grace and then give the cake to the dog to play with in the garden. This gift was known as a N..... Cagmag

Other family phrases I remember are Shakespearean in origin. All the family were keen swimmers, and Lady Macbeth's speech to spur her husband on to murder Duncan was plundered for the lines:
Letting I dare not wait upon I would,
Like the poor cat i’ the adage.

So we would say, 'in an adage', to describe any swimmer or diver who took their time getting into the water.

One of my uncles once misquoted the line from Julius Caesar,
Against the Capitol I met a lion,
Who glazed upon me, and went surly by
substituting a bear for a lion, and when challenged, insisted his ursine version was correct. He was never allowed to forget is error an thereafter any malapropism or misattribution would be called a 'surly bear'

I think Julius Caesar might have been my father's favourite Shakespeare play, perhaps because of its references to swimming. He would often recite Cassius's speech in which he describes a dip with the would-be dictator:

For once upon a raw and gusty day
The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores,
Caesar said to me "Dar'st thou, Cassius, now
Leap in with me into this angry flood,
And swim to yonder point?" Upon my word,
Accoutred as I was, I plunged in,
And bade him follow. So indeed he did.
The torrent roared, and we did buffet it
With lusty sinews, throwing it aside
And stemming it with hearts of controversy;
But ere we could arrive the point proposed,
Caesar cried "Help me, Cassius, or I sink!"

A bad year for Cydonia oblonga

Has it been a bad year for quinces elsewhere? I went to the smallholding in the Ouse valley where I have bought them before, only to find that this year's crop has been poor. Late frosts crippled the blossoms, the plums as well, and then, when the fruits were setting, a storm coincided with a high tide. The river by the side of the smallholding is tidal, and the gale blew salt spray onto the young fruit, damaging them further. The farmer showed me the scars and blemishes on river-facing side, in contrast to the other.

Still, they will be good for quince jelly, or quince vodka. The orchard looked well too, as hens and guinea-fowl ran through the damp yellow leaves.

Patience Gray in Petit Propos Culinaires

In 2005 I recorded the death of Patience Gray, author of Plats du Jour and Honey from a Weed. Adam Federman drew my attention to his article in Petit Propos Culinaires, a reprint of which may be seen on his site, The Whetting Stone.

Food for the aorta

Making suet dumplings as part of my pre-marathon diet, I was struck by the curious fact that the manufacturer's name is an anagram of aorta, the artery that I am about to clog.

suet, dumplings, anatomy

Bread riots

On last night's Newsnight they reported that the price of bread has risen by 14.3% over the past year. There was a time when this would have provoked rioting. I'm not sure why we don't riot. I well remember conversations a long time ago when we believed that if beer reached £1 a pint, revolution would follow.

The price of a loaf at the Seaford bakery I use has gone up. At Bill's in Lewes they ask you for £3 for a sourdough loaf. I could bake my own, of course.

There is a slump. The old bipolar disorder of capitalism, known and tolerated for centuries, gets worse with age,

Food at Sussex

Two Sussex students have made a film about food on campus, Food for UoS.(Google video link; I believe it's also up in YouTube and Facebook)
'Food for US is a student made investigative documentary, addressing food at Sussex University and asking how it could be improved ... nutritionally, ethically and environmentally.'
Good for them. I don't agree with everything they say, but when I arrived at the university in 2003 I was surprised to find the food served for the most part indistinguishable from that offered at university when I was an undergraduate in the mid-70s.
The university has just carried out a catering review, but it was merely an exercise in cost-cutting.