SUNDAY Roast guinea fowl (plumper and denser than chicken; yearning to be a pheasant) appeared on our dinner table accompanied by new potatoes and green lentils in a savoury stock sauce. MONDAY 5/2 diet day. TUESDAY Guinea fowl leftovers in mushroom cream sauce encased in large square vol au vent. WEDNESDAY 5/2 diet day. THURSDAY We lunched out and only required a lightish evening meal - remains of cream sauce guinea fowl on slice of toast.In households round the world this week's regime would never happen. I find all the reasons fascinating.
VEGETARIAN/VEGAN. Self-explanatory. Less obvious are those who eat nut roasts shaped as lamb chops. See The Guardian for current acrimonious debate.
THE SATED PALATE. That the body's gustatory preferences would somehow revolt if presented with variations of the same thing, despite diet-day separations. Yet these sensitive souls often drink the same brand of wine over and over provided it's cheap enough.
SOCIOLOGICAL GUILT. That the neighbours might regard this as evidence of poverty.
THE VERY AGED. Who remember the nutritional privations of WW2 when one ate what one had without grumbling, even cabbage five days on the trot.
TEENAGERS. Convinced their parents (all adults for that matter) are deceiving them.
Me? I hate waste especially when it’s speciously justified, as in: “We’ll put this out for the birds.” I appreciate VR’s ingenuity at dressing up food in different guises. I am prepared to argue that food may be transformed such that its origins disappear in the process. I hate myself less – admittedly in a marginal way – when the BBC as custodian of my soul reveals how things are in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Yemen, tent cities occupied by the Myanmar, and small foundering craft crossing from Libya to the shores of mainland Europe.
We run on similar regimes, albeit not incl. guinea fowl.
ReplyDeleteMy mother could never throw away food and as a result I am most reluctant myself, usually if all fails, it goes on to the compost heap of which we have two at the bottom of the garden. But we do similar waste-not meals, incl. vol au vent etc.
Childhood dinner talk often included the poor starving Africans in connection with having to finish what was on my plate, never understood the reasoning behind it and consequently never forced my own offspring to eat more than she wanted.
But I live with a kitchen/gardener tyrant and hardly get to have a word in on decisions re food and cooking. His regime is based on current garden produce, the holy bible of what is "in season" and "locally available", and "using up". In fact, he doesn't ook meals, he uses up food in a never ending battle with the contents of the fridge and larder, which he aims to diminish at all cost.
As a birthday present, I once cleared all shelves except for his morning muesli ingredients and he didn't even notice!!!
I have learned the hard way that for people living in Ireland and the UK salad implies tinned corn/carrots/celery, enormous amounts of dressing and often bits of ham or tuna etc. all on a base of something greenish and two slices of tomato/cucumber of you are lucky.
In short: a disgrace.
I've always liked the appearance of guinea fowl, odd-shaped heads with even odder-shaped bodies. I think their feathers are lovely, though.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason I'll never understand, they reminded me of fleas when I was a kid. Gigantic fleas.
Never considered, ever, eating them. Do they "taste just like chicken"?
Sabine: I suspect most of my posts bore you but on the rare occasions when I contrive to ring the bell you are quite profligate with your reponses. Leaving aside Q&A (13/6), where a misunderstanding arose, let me refer you to Grown-up talk (11/5) and Sciatica - Why? (18/02).
ReplyDeleteAnd here we go again. With a couple of tweaks this would have made a fine post for Interim arrangements; instead you have wasted your substance in riotous living (a modified quote from Henry IV, part one) although don't for a moment imagine I'm complaining.
The third and fourth paras, where hubbie gets a right working-over, are told with such spirit and such unexpected detail that I laughed aloud. What more could I add?
I agree about UK salads but in a slightly different way. Long ago some misery-guts working in a squalid hostelry realised that a pile of cheap lettuce leaf could be validated as a salad with the lightest scattering of items that weren't green, typically a shaving of hard-boiled egg, a transparent wafer of tomato, and the skin side of 33.3% of a radish. Thus a tradition was born. I'm sorry to say that the French - ever the opportunists at the lower end of the market - were quick to adopt this frugality but went a step further. Order une salade verte and that's what you'll get - lettuce on its tod. If you're desperate you'll chew for half an hour.
Crow: There's chicken and chicken. I was never a real enthusiast, thinking it was primarily a food for termninal invalids until I tried poulet de Bresse from France. Terrific but so it should be at $33.16 a snip. Guinea fowl can't match that but it is superior to free-range UK chicken, somewhat stronger in flavour and more bangs for your buck.
A slide that came with my Christmas-present microscope in the late forties incorporated a flea. The outline is, as you say, similar to that of a guinea fowl, once you've discounted several of the legs. A long-necked pear, say.
What did you think guinea fowl were for?
They were used for eggs and as alarmists in the barnyard. They make very good guardians for other domestic fowl, though they and geese do not like each other...so I understand.
DeleteJust never knew they were eaten beyond the egg stage.
Crow: Strange, as if we were both talking about two different creatures. And then I realised: your experiences have been confined to the living bird, whereas I have only known the dead one, plucked and packaged in the butcher's shop. It had never crossed my mind that such pink packages laid eggs.
DeleteMore particularly, my thanks for "alarmist" as a noun. Again something strange. I've known it for many years as an adjective, eg, "DT will never win a second term - don't be so alarmist." Yet here it was, perfectly and vividly understandable in another form. Should we engage in a word swap at regular intervals, each drawing on our store of national idiom, serving up exotica which may be new to the other?
If you glance at my comment to Sabine, above, you may notice "on its tod". It was only after I was re-reading the draft that I realised I'd included it (and that I hadn't written it out for several decades). Would you have understood? It's fairly easy, it means "alone". But why did it jump back into my working vocabulary after such a long time?
I am married to an ingenious cook and have very little to do with the kitchen at dinner-time. This has, over the years, given me a huge amount of time to do what I like i.e. write books. It also means that I'm always having to starve myself in between his meals because he's quite a good cook.
ReplyDeleteMarly: So no inter-meal snacking. That's good but in the end it's bad. "Good" experience converts less well than "bad" experience when you're aiming for silverine prose. Our parents split up when my brothers and I were all at impressionable ages; the effects of this peculiarly unhappy time is still detectable (was detectable in the case of Nick, now dead) more than fifty years on. But, at least, unhappiness is something I can go back to and disinter as I try toi understand characters who have a mountain to climb.
ReplyDeleteNot that I'm recommending it. The eventual divorce also left me bereft, perhaps less able to write in a more balanced way. But then how important is balance? Novels aren't equations.
I have always remembered my first (and only) experience of guinea fowl. My uncle ran a 750 acre farm in wildest Kent and I was staying with him, aged about 11. He had the birds, amongst many others, roaming the farm. The taste was "different" and delightful to a young boy unused to such exotica.
ReplyDeleteSuch delicacies did not feature in my parents meals - chicken was special. So I have never eaten them since. Your post whetted my appetite. I must try once more.
Avus: Chicken's culinary status can depend on a consumer's age. For anyone who lived through the war it was for some years a treat, often figuring in Christmas dinner. Then came battery chicken farming and a meat that was both cheap and unlikely to disturb sensitive stomachs. I went off it for a couple of decades, one further reason being the fiddly dissection of the drumstick and the emergence of that discouraging and inexplicable "spine" alongside the bone.
ReplyDeleteOrganic chickens weaned me back again; they are definitely worth the extra cash. By all means keep a look out for guinea fowl but, unless you're not keen on game, reserve your other eye for partridge. Much rarer than pheasant but somehow "meatier".
My apologies to any anti-meat reader. I know all the arguments but at my age I need the protein. Mind you, a few years ago I might have given in to GB Shaw: “Animals are my friends ... and I don't eat my friends. I choose not to make a graveyard of my body with the rotting corpses of dead animals. A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses. While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?”
Would that he were alive to condemn that carnivore in the White House.
As to your remark about bad experience, it's quite evident that early experience of tragedy and death is one of the shaping forces in the lives of writers. I suppose divorce goes in the pot as well.
ReplyDeleteMarly: Many years were to elapse before I discovered just how much I was the product of my parents' divorce. In youth and adolescence we tend to believe our experiences are the norm; eventually discovering how mangled I'd become - how much I differed from any sort of norm - was a salutary experience. Deaths, on the other hand, didn't appear to affect me, though that could be a dangerous assumption. We are all imperfect judges of ourselves.
ReplyDeleteNot just any death--those close to us in childhood.
ReplyDeleteYes, I think it takes a long time to understand the nature of childhood events.