Picnic weather, yeah?
How much time do you spend outside with your shoes off?
Unless you’re the guy in my local park who runs lap after barefoot lap, his tangled mane billowing behind him, before finding a spot, right in the path of all the harassed commuters (who huff and stare as they are forced to take the smallest detour to pass him,) and engages in headstands, exotic stretches and some quite aggressive breathing, before picking up his woven satchel and wondering back along the suburban high street, presumably to his home; unless you’re him (and hello if that is you,) then you likely don’t spend very much time at all barefoot, outside.
The reason I ask is that I feel it is important. I am not loopy, I don’t think, but there is an energy to be found in feeling grass, dirt, sand or soil beneath your feet. It is the same energy that we feel from swimming in a big body of natural water, from lying down for a read or a sleep under a tree.
There is a heatwave coming, right, in fact, we’re in it already, aren’t we, and as such, I hope to collapse into a summer-long rhythm of outdoor eating, amongst other things. Be it pub gardens, restaurant terraces, gardens, parks, street corners, or little low walls surrounding car parks, I plan to eat and drink outside as much as I can. I plan to picnic, wherever I may be.
In my intention though, you see, I have already fallen into the trap laid by centuries of bucolic picnickers, and the picnicking marketing board, that we need bonny weather to eat outdoors, because that is all a picnic is, right? I even wrote a book about this with my partner in greed, Max Halley, Max’s Picnic Book. An international bestseller of quite some acclaim (😉).
With the book, our intention was to evoke the spirit of the earliest picnickers. The pasty was invented so as to provide miners with a self-contained, self-insulated and delicious lunch, the pinched crust even functioning as a handle. The scotch egg was invented so a chap from Clapham could go straight from the office to the All Bar One on the Northcote road without having worry about supper. Both show ingenuity, a desire to eat on the go, and a need to have a portable yet delicious thing. No one thinks this way anymore. Every food-based convenience is catered for. Max and I wanted to bring a little spirit and ingenuity back to the picnic, reinvent the genre even, drag the picnic out of its niche, kicking and screaming if needs be.
Our intention was to reframe what could be conceived of as a picnic, to reconsider everything; so as long as a thing is portable, delicious at room temperature, and could be considered a refreshing departure from an egg and cress sandwich and a slice of luncheon pie, it is picnickable. That was our logic at least. (Disclaimer: the items stated above are both delicious, both legitimate, both at their best enjoyed nearby an open bottle of salad cream, and both have their place at a picnic, we just wanted to offer some new ideas too.) At the same time, we wanted to celebrate culinary spontaneity and anarchy. A pickled egg tossed into a bag of salt and vinegar crisps and attacked with tabasco, we argued, is a picnic; a supermarket rotisserie chicken torn apart and thrown inside a baguette, is a picnic; 20 Dunhills and a bottle of Chivas Regal? Picnic. It’s the intention that’s the thing, the spirit.
In the book we invoke the spirit of certain chefs and gastronomes when thinking about differing picnics, their make up, and ultimately their consumption. Hunter S Thompson and Merry Berry, Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker; all are the sorts of bacchanalian devotees whose spirit we celebrate and cling to throughout the book.
Before I go any further, here is a poem:
I hope to change the way you eat,
Wouldn’t that be neat?
I hope to change the way you think,
When a picnic’s just the treat.
If eating on the ground outside,
or stood upon your feet,
There’s no excuse for cardboard bread
Or sweating luncheon meat.
An ode to eating outside, B. Benton, 2019
To receive the full wisdom of our picnicking heroes and forebears, I genuinely recommend buying the book. As the images below attest, it is eccentric and anarchic and has some very delicious ideas for things to buy, and cook, and eat. I have detailed a few of the lessons I learned from considering how our heroes might picnic below.
So, here follows nearly 20 tips for picnicking, and by their very nature, tips for having a very good time outside:
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