Colour? Bah! Humbug!

Forgive the title if you would, always the most difficult part of a post to write, and a longish life influenced by punning newspaper headlines makes it hard to avoid such tropes.

When I prepared my wife's packed lunch this morning - as per a previous post an act of love and economy, a somewhat incongruous pairing - I began to think about colour in food. This was prompted by the cheerier of the two little salads I was making - carrot, red pepper, mandarin segments all bright, ginger less so - and by reading something the previous evening about the English habit of dyeing foods in the late 16th early 17th centuries.

Even in the early years of James I's reign such artificial colouring (powdered sandalwood one of the ways of doing it btw for bright red) was thought to be 'countrified', yet we still do it, the worst offender that luminescent-yellow smoked haddock which hurts the eye when surveying the fish counter. Colour? Bah! Humbug! indeed. Sadly that is cheaper than the undyed version - a bit illogical other than on grounds of volume, so let's stop buying it. When I was a kid my local mini-supermarket, Taygreens, in an echo of an Arthur Lowe anecdote I love, sold two cheeses, cheddar and red cheddar. Even then I couldn't see why people wanted red cheese which looked like someone had mixed it with paint.

On the positive side colour - natural of course for preference - brightens our plates and cheers us. The grey stir-about eaten by prisoners in past times must have been part of their punishment. So I left the apple in my wife's other salad unpeeled to keep the russet red. And colour it appears is an indication of the presence of different vitamins and minerals, so I try to use fruit and veg of different hues to ensure we get a bit of everything.



Even for someone preparing food in times of austerity it is not too hard to add a dash of brightness to a meal - a bowl of cheapo small apples on the table is a tempter and a decoration for example. I use a lot of basic range red and yellow peppers in salads (smaller, knobbly, perfectly fine and cheaper) and (added late on) in stews and ragouts, not big on taste, but good texture and great colours.

Tinned tomatoes are another fine and cheap source of real red (again, why pay for premium tins when the ones at a third the price in the basics range are marked down because they have a few bits of skin, or colour variations - they are not going to be off, and a spoon of sugar will correct any minor under-ripeness). Lidl's I recall won an Observer (?) taste-test some time back.

The Arthur Lowe story in case you're interested was of him asking at a hotel in times of postwar austerity if they had cheese, to be told by the waitress 'Yes sir, both sorts,' which speaks volumes about hard times then, and the poverty into which British culinary standards had fallen.