Imperative cooking: Egyptian Viagra

Spectator, The, Aug 8, 1998 by Anderson, Digby

THERE'S a moment which all good hosts and cooks will know. It is when the guest says, `This is wonderful. Tell me, where did you get the idea for this from?' It is not as silly a question as it sounds. It's wrong in that cooks don't get sudden, new inspirations, they draw on an established and welltried repertoire. So the question should be, `What reminded you how good this dish can be?'

I can only speak for myself. I was in Cairo recently, eating in a largely empty restaurant -- currently most of them are, due to tourists' exaggerated fears of terrorism. The head waiter, who was also some sort of proprietor, had plenty of time to chat. He had once worked in King Farouk's kitchen. The King was an enthusiastic fornicator. Like many in the Middle East, he believed certain foods would give him prowess. Did I know what he had for breakfast? No, I didn't. Every day, the cooks were instructed to kill 300 pigeons (Egyptians are fond of pigeon). These were then plucked, cleaned and - wait for it boiled. Boiled for hours and hours. I suppose you could squeeze about ten pigeons into a largish domestic saucepan, so that's 30-odd saucepans bubbling away. The resulting stock (what do you think, ten gallons?) was then reduced to half a pint, which the old boy drank for his breakfast. It must have been thicker than Bovril.

While the waiter was telling the tale, with many asides, I was not thinking of the King or his ladies, but of pigeons: pigeon breasts flattened and grilled with garlic and parsley, pigeons stewed with olives, pigeons stuffed with pork and herbs, pigeon breasts on a risotto made with stock from the carcass, pigeons boned and made into pate, pigeons in sausages. I neither know nor care if his curious Viagra did the trick for the King, but it was enough of a tale to remind me of the culinary virtues of pigeons, and I and Mrs A. had a modest English couple each on my return. Tales, indeed talk in general, are a useful reminder of good food temporarily forgotten. So, to remember good dishes, see you find people who will talk good tales with you.

Bad food is another reminder of how good a dish can be. In France this summer, Mrs A. and I watched while five canal boats loaded with yellowy, weedy-looking Frog children on an ecole de vacances arrived in a Mediterranean port. They had ghastly, left-wing looking moniteurs with earrings who wouldn't let them swim when they wanted and encouraged them to draw New Age signs on the wooden quay. In the evening, after oysters, clams, mussels, grilled bass, salad and chevre, we wandered out to peer into the cabins and see what the rising generation of France was eating for the principal meal of the day. The poor things were sitting crammed round tiny tables conspicuously not eating from a bowl of overcooked, unsauced French spaghetti. Their black waste sacks next morning were crammed with cola bottles and yoghurt tubs. That set off a whole train of memories of good meals cooked in restricted circumstances in the old France: fried anchovies, grilled sardines, omelettes on camping fires, rice dishes made with freshly netted shrimps.

The friends we were staying with had a new kitten, Petite Chose. Kittens need feeding up, and even she ate better than those children: a scrambled egg a day, chopped pork ends and, what she liked best, a spot of horse. There's something attractive about seeing a kitten eat a horse. Horse, now it's a long time since we had a good horse steak....

Nipping along to Barcelona, I remembered salt cold dishes. How can you forget them? The Saint Anthony market is full of salt cod stalls. And that's the other great memory-prodder, markets and shops. Back home, Downhams had a window full of hand and shoulder pork joints and I suddenly thought of pork stews: pork in joints or smaller cubes cooked 'wet' with wine or tomato or lemon or almonds, pork with spices, especially coriander, pork with game and other meats, pork with kidneys, pork in sherry, pork with softened onions, pork and beans, pork and chickpeas with tripe, even with fish. There are plenty of recipes in the standard French, Greek, Spanish and Portuguese books. And books are, of course, the other reminder.

The one thing which I never find useful in jogging the memory is restaurants. If you compare domestic and restaurant food you will see that, despite its embellishments and pretensions, restaurant food is far more limited in types of dishes. How many London restaurants serve any of the pork stews?