What Tastes Good?

Eating the last of the British asparagus I'll get to taste this year made me think about cultural taste differences, as the French, Spanish and Germans all go for the flabbier white asparagus, that has to my palate an insipid taste nothing like the green stuff. There are innumerable other such differences of national opinion: the various rotten fish dishes that Iceland and Scandinavia offer are at the extreme end of the scale - as far as this Brit is concerned anyway; but then I never liked the bitter gourds that I tried in the Far East either; or the nasty Japanese sweets made with bean paste.

That is not to say that they aren't good, just that I for reasons of custom, upbringing, and experience found those gourds and bean sweets unpalatable. 

Our national tastes do change over time, however. Witness the shift from bitter to lager. Witness more pertinently as regards food at least the shift from salads where the only ingredients were lettuce, mustard and cress and cucumber, to the many bitter leaves you'll find in your supermarket pack today - endive, radicchio etc. Doubtless foreign travel has been one driving force; commerce another - add a bit of chicory to a salad bag and increase the price by 20p; simply being able to try these things is another factor. 

Which makes me wonder what we will have in store, as it were, to taste in future. There are many vegetables and fruits never seen here: young coconut I've never seen in Britain; Durian (thank goodness, musky flavour but it smells of sewage); Kalamansi, lovely little limes with a bit of sweetness to them; so many varieties of banana. 

Sadly as we add these exotics, and we doubtless will, we are losing much of our native produce. I'm working on a piece for Cheshire Life about local apples, and find there are at least 33 still around, though many lost already. Will I ever try a Withington Welter? Or a Millicent Barnes? In an ideal world we'd keep those and add the others. Variety is the spice etc. Happily some bodies are fighting to keep the old varieties, and more power to them. When we get to plant an orchard, as we one day hope to, it is the obscure ones - though those with reputedly good flavour - that we'll go for. Even there we have differences between nations, the Japanese fruit I've tasted so bland as to leave no taste memory at all - Golden Delicious (which the French actually like) a feast of flavour by comparison. 

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.