Tom Roper's Weblog

Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume

The young Melvil Dewey is supposed to have organised his mother's kitchen cupboards for her, showing the frame of mind that would make him the creator of the eneumerative classification scheme par excellence. For no very good reason, I decided to do the same with the drinks cupboard.  I present my findings below. Every bottle tells a story.

Apéritifs

Creme de Cassis (two bottles) for kir and kir royale. One is notable for being made a few miles from here, at the Breaky Bottom vineyard
Campari  (two bottles, naturally)
Fernet Branca
Gammel Dansk: Danish bitters, given to me by some veterinary library chums. 'Traditionally served at room temperature in small glasses for any occasion and at anytime throughout the day'. Am I alone in being a little alarmed at being told to drink it 'anytime throughout the day'?
Guignolet de Dijon: an apéritif made from wild cherries
Martini Rosso
Noilly Prat
Pedro Ximénez sherry
Pimms No 1 (two bottles)

Spirits

Bunnahabhain
Calvados (two bottles): apart from the trou normand, essential for faisan vallee d'Auge
Chivas Regal, a father's day present from my son, nearly empty
Cooking whisky
Gin: of course, I'm a librarian. This is Adnams Copper House
Quince vodka, of my own manufacture, two bottles from 2010, the last time I could find quinces in sufficient number
Vodka Limonnaya, nearly empty, bought in Moscow when the USSR was still the USSR
Wood's Old Navy rum

Digestifs

Crabbies ginger wine: my late mother had a prejudice against Stones. I think we inherited this bottle.
Creme de Menthe
Kirsch d'Alsace
Marsala
Orange Curacao: never opened
Oude Jenever
Poire William eau de vie
Port

Sundries

Angostura bitters (two bottles): we were one addicted to pink gins
A soda syphon
Two hip flasks, one tiny, one a decent size

On tea-making

An article by Christopher Hitchens on tea-making has attracted some attention, with the writer's customary reference to Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, novelist and police informer.

I bet neither Hitchens nor Orwell had the Wolf Cub's second star,  which I won in an unhappy time in Lord Baden-Powell's militaristic organisation. To earn this, I had inter alia to make a pot of tea, which I did under the stern eye of Mrs Langford, who 'did' for my mother in the afternoons. Mrs L 'signed off' my effort, as we didn't say in the early 1960s, though I don't remember her actually drinking it. But I do remember the three commandments of the British tea ceremony:

1. Take pot to kettle
2. Warm pot
3. Use a teaspoon of tea per person, and one for the pot

The Wolf Cubs wisely stayed away from the milk-in-first/afterwards controversy, on which Lord B-P left no instructions.

'Most of them do suffocate and strangle the eater'

So says Gerard of mushrooms in his Herbal of 1633, quoted in Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food. In my teenage years, I read and re-read Cambridge public library's copy of John Cage's Silence: Lectures and Writings. Cage mentions mushrooms from time to time. He was a keen mycologist, an interest he thought appropriate as music and mushroom are alphabetical neighbours in dictionaries. And, I thought to myself, mycology is not far away, and fugue is near fungus, and toccata near toadstool.

I wish I knew more about mushrooms. I have always been cautious. Even my mother, well versed in natural history, could be deceived and with her we once picked pounds of what we thought were field mushrooms on Newmarket Heath, only to find when we got them home, thanks to a telephone call from companions in our foray, that they were a species that, while not poisonous, can be indigestible, causing stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhoea. I have only felt confident in eating unusual species when in the company of Polish friends, taught from birth to recognise and prepare the edible varieties.

Now I find this in the garden. It is rather splendid. I wonder if it is edible? If it is not, I may turn to Lucrezia Borgia's Fun with Fungi and invite my enemies to supper.

Nunc est bibendum

To lighten the mood after all this chômage rubbish, I had occasion to clear out my cellar. Child no 1 was out eating pizza with friends, child no 2 is in France, and the Burra Mem is out at a committee meeting, struggling with the Byzantine complexities of small town politics. The cellar here is in fact a utility sideboard that sits in the dining room and contains fortified wine and spirits. Wine is stored in a rack in the kitchen.

This is what I found:

Left to right: grappa, slivowitz, vodka (Pan Tadeusz, named after the Polish national epic, a present from some Polish friends), kirsch, cassis (by Breaky Bottom, good stuff), guignolet ( a black cherry substance similar to cassis), red vermouth, gin and my own home-made quince vodka, from a recipe from Jane Grigson's Fruit Book.

L to r: Pimms no 1, Noilly Prat, the Burra Mem's sherry, my sherry, poire william, genever, lemon vodka (brought back from the USSR when there was still a USSR), calavados and Drambuie

L to r: Madeira, Gammel Dansk (a Danish form of bitters), Marsala, Stones ginger wine and Crabbies, both these from my late mother's drinks cabinet, it being a favourite of hers) orange curaçao, two more bottles of cassis (why?) and Campari.

The drinks cupboard is window to the soul.

The worst meal I ever had

A comment by Mrs Angry, whose Broken Barnet blog should be required reading for all politicians and senior council officers in that benighted borough, prompted me to remember the worst meal of my adult life. I mean here the worst paid-for meal of my adult life. I shall not mention domestic dishes like the liver curry I used to prepare, or the dish of hearts a house-sharer presented us with when, as students, we were on an economy drive.; nor shall I write about school dinners which are in a class of their own.

Like hers it was in Ireland, in Arklow. I was on holiday with my then-girlfriend. It was early evening, and we were looking for somewhere to eat. We drove for miles, failing to find anywhere. Desperate, I suggested that a town the size of Arklow must have a restaurant. We headed for the town and found one, attached to a large hotel in the centre. Reception was unstaffed, but behind it was an empty dining room. We walked in. Ten or fifteen minutes must have passed before a frightened waitress emerged. 'Are you serving supper?', I asked. She was unsure and retreated to the kitchen, returning with some menus. We ordered pâté, followed by a main I can't remember. The pâté came after half an hour or so. My companion looked at it. 'Excuse me', she said to the waitress, 'this is spam'. The waitress giggled and fled back to the ktichen. We left. We did not pay.

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!"