Food for when you laugh, food because you cry
or, cooking and context - prawn cocktail in Harrods, crying in Corfu.
A long weekend spent walking coastal paths between beaches, my book and the weekend supplements the only other entertainment required, I found myself considering cooking and context on more than one occasion.
My main issue with much of the recipe output one is perpetually peppered with is context. The best of recipe writers will provide you with their personal context in relation to the recipe, or perhaps some cultural or geographical or historical context, and sometimes this is enough, or sometimes the recipe will tap into or attach itself to some context you already carry with you, nostalgia by any other name, and this can imbue a recipe with meaning or relevance, but sometimes the recipe is just a shopping list and a methodology, and that is rarely an engaging thing.
Of course by cooking a thing, often repeatedly, often with varying application, varying ingredients, varying success, a recipe that was once an instruction manual can become a splattered and worn memorial tea towel of a thing, each attempt, each version, each setting in which it was consumed present, woven into it as context.
I am currently reading a wonderful book called Tiepolo Blue, a pleasing contemplation of art, repression, sexuality, et al. During a pivotal set piece, an approximation of my perfect meal is used as a backdrop to a taught and tense exchange:
As they sit down for dinner, Anna puts on a record from one of her orchestral concerts: Brahms, Liszt, Stravinsky. Michael sets down three cocktail glasses stuffed with a lumpen, glistening substance the colour of pink opal. Taking a spoonful, Don sucks away the creamy gloop to detect the hard carcass of a prawn on his tongue.
Prawn cocktail is pure nostalgia for me. Growing up middle class in Surrey, my grandparents would take us to Harrods each Christmas to prance about and meet Father Christmas. We would always eat lunch beforehand, have a piece of cake and a cup of tea afterwards. Generally, we ate in one of two places, the first being an Italian restaurant, Zia Teresa, an overpriced trattoria I believe to be very much alive and well, in which we would eat big plates of pasta whilst my Grandparents would coo over simply cooked fish and greens. Some years, however, we would be taken up to a restaurant inside Harrods where a pianist in a tuxedo played generic classical pieces whilst polite conversation rippled across the room. I loved this dining room for its thick carpet and loose attitude to how many bread rolls one could take from the bread basket, but also for its prawn cocktail, a perfectly opulent coupe of shredded lettuce, shell-on prawns and thick sharp Marie Rose sauce.
Childhood nostalgia firmly in place, my unbendingly positive feelings with regard to prawn cocktail were shattered in my teenage years when Roy Keane, an alpha male of quite aggressive renown, and the captain of my beloved Manchester United, denounced us as fans thus:
‘Away from home our fans are fantastic, I’d call them the hardcore fans,’ Keane said, ‘but at home, they have a few drinks and probably the prawn sandwiches, and they don’t realise what’s going on out on the pitch. I don’t think some of the people who come to Old Trafford can spell ‘football’, never mind understand it.’ Here he was berating fans like myself with the withering assumption that enjoying a prawn sandwich meant you didn’t understand football. For a decade or so I swore off prawn-based food kitsch altogether.
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