Experimental cuisine in the 1980s
Wednesday, October 19th, 2005 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caddymanI should be working, we have some tight deadlines coming up – provided someone, somewhere makes the necessary decisions. We have a meeting tomorrow to (hopefully) thrash it all out. In the meantime, my motivation is pretty much bumping along the bottom of the tank.
When you are in a period of motivational under performance, the mind wanders where it will to fill the time that should be spent working, and after you have spent a certain length of time mentally pushing pins into a voodoo doll of the Minister, it scurries off in search of more entertaining fare.
Thus it was that an old memory popped into my head unbidden. Actually, it surfaced some weeks ago, but has just come back to the top now – probably displaced by the waterlogged motivation.
Some 25 years ago, in my final year at college1 I managed to get accommodation in halls of residence on campus. I thought it wise since I was terrified of exiting the place after four years with no additional qualifications, and being in halls kept me away from the town centre and all its mystical delights2 and close to the library. That it also kept me close to the subsidised student bar is another matter entirely.
I have never been sure whether the fact that there was a refectory3 on the campus was a boon or a disbenefit. At any rate it kept body and soul together for us during term time, with an array of food that would give many a twenty-first century nutritionist a heart attack just reading the menu. I was 21 at the time. What did I care?
Any road up; the refectory. The only establishment that I can recall from a vast memory for poor food served by frankly dangerous4 eating establishments, that responded to a request for egg and bacon by breaking out the deep-fat fryer. Bacon is generally durable enough to survive this process, although the health-conscious might want to mop up most of the resulting fat before consumption.
Eggs do not perform so well in such a cooking environment.
If you were lucky, and the fat was not too hot, or too deep, you would get something that resembled an egg fried sunny side up. Most often you would end up with a rubbery yellow power-ball attached to a crispy brown lattice of frothed and fried albumen. Nice. Some individuals, less hardy than your correspondent, have never gone near an egg since.
One morning I managed to obtain a couple of fried eggs that were reasonably close to the accepted definition of the same. It being deep midwinter and a little chilly to boot (as I recall, it was one of those increasingly rare English winters where snow settled for more than a couple of hours, and to a depth of more than six inches), I had packed up on breakfast as a means to keep warm. I found myself with an egg spare.
I was raised in a family where we were prevailed upon to clear our plates at mealtimes, so instead of doing the obvious thing and binning the egg, I cadged a saucer and took it back to my room. I thought maybe that I’d eat it later with some bread and a cup of coffee (students can be very obtuse at times; students named Bryan doubly so). In the event, it was a day and a half later before I went back to my room for one reason or another which I shall not go into here. When I came back, I didn’t think about the cold, greasy egg on its saucer.
I forgot about the egg entirely, and then when I remembered, it became something of a pet project. You see I discovered that fried eggs do not go mouldy; they do not go smelly; they do not go green. Fried eggs, left to their own devices, shrink. They get smaller and smaller until they are like little rubber M&Ms with a tiny seam around them.
And they bounce on concrete very satisfyingly.
1It is chastening to think that I have a degree that is both old enough to vote and to stand for Parliament in its own right. Of course, my O-levels are old enough to have teenage kids, and my eleven-plus is probably a granddad.
2Anyone familiar with Wolverhampton town (now city) centre in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s will appreciate the irony of this remark.
3Honestly. We called it a refectory. I know many a greasy spoon out in the sticks that served better and more nutritious fare. But what’s the point of being a student – other than the education, of course - if you can’t be at least a little bit pretentious and up your own arse?
4In the sense of botulism rather than the sense of a dagger up the jacksy.
When you are in a period of motivational under performance, the mind wanders where it will to fill the time that should be spent working, and after you have spent a certain length of time mentally pushing pins into a voodoo doll of the Minister, it scurries off in search of more entertaining fare.
Thus it was that an old memory popped into my head unbidden. Actually, it surfaced some weeks ago, but has just come back to the top now – probably displaced by the waterlogged motivation.
Some 25 years ago, in my final year at college1 I managed to get accommodation in halls of residence on campus. I thought it wise since I was terrified of exiting the place after four years with no additional qualifications, and being in halls kept me away from the town centre and all its mystical delights2 and close to the library. That it also kept me close to the subsidised student bar is another matter entirely.
I have never been sure whether the fact that there was a refectory3 on the campus was a boon or a disbenefit. At any rate it kept body and soul together for us during term time, with an array of food that would give many a twenty-first century nutritionist a heart attack just reading the menu. I was 21 at the time. What did I care?
Any road up; the refectory. The only establishment that I can recall from a vast memory for poor food served by frankly dangerous4 eating establishments, that responded to a request for egg and bacon by breaking out the deep-fat fryer. Bacon is generally durable enough to survive this process, although the health-conscious might want to mop up most of the resulting fat before consumption.
Eggs do not perform so well in such a cooking environment.
If you were lucky, and the fat was not too hot, or too deep, you would get something that resembled an egg fried sunny side up. Most often you would end up with a rubbery yellow power-ball attached to a crispy brown lattice of frothed and fried albumen. Nice. Some individuals, less hardy than your correspondent, have never gone near an egg since.
One morning I managed to obtain a couple of fried eggs that were reasonably close to the accepted definition of the same. It being deep midwinter and a little chilly to boot (as I recall, it was one of those increasingly rare English winters where snow settled for more than a couple of hours, and to a depth of more than six inches), I had packed up on breakfast as a means to keep warm. I found myself with an egg spare.
I was raised in a family where we were prevailed upon to clear our plates at mealtimes, so instead of doing the obvious thing and binning the egg, I cadged a saucer and took it back to my room. I thought maybe that I’d eat it later with some bread and a cup of coffee (students can be very obtuse at times; students named Bryan doubly so). In the event, it was a day and a half later before I went back to my room for one reason or another which I shall not go into here. When I came back, I didn’t think about the cold, greasy egg on its saucer.
I forgot about the egg entirely, and then when I remembered, it became something of a pet project. You see I discovered that fried eggs do not go mouldy; they do not go smelly; they do not go green. Fried eggs, left to their own devices, shrink. They get smaller and smaller until they are like little rubber M&Ms with a tiny seam around them.
And they bounce on concrete very satisfyingly.
1It is chastening to think that I have a degree that is both old enough to vote and to stand for Parliament in its own right. Of course, my O-levels are old enough to have teenage kids, and my eleven-plus is probably a granddad.
2Anyone familiar with Wolverhampton town (now city) centre in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s will appreciate the irony of this remark.
3Honestly. We called it a refectory. I know many a greasy spoon out in the sticks that served better and more nutritious fare. But what’s the point of being a student – other than the education, of course - if you can’t be at least a little bit pretentious and up your own arse?
4In the sense of botulism rather than the sense of a dagger up the jacksy.