I grew up in a little market town in Wales, notable only at that time for a irritating little ditty called “Taking a trip to Abergavenny” recorded by Shannon in the ‘50s and Marty Wilde in the ’60’s. Ok, so it was also home to The Walnut Tree, where even back in the ‘70’s you couldn’t get a table without booking six months in advance. But the idea that Abergavenny has become a foodie celebrity in its own right, with articles about it in Observer Food Monthly and famous chefs heading down there every September for the Food Festival is more of a headspin to me than that Shannon track ever was.
It’s true that Abergavenny has changed. I tried to buy a dozen eggs at the local supermarket a couple of weeks ago. Next to my lava bread tossed in oats and a couple of rashers, believe me, these eggs don’t have to be anything special, but could I buy a normal egg in an Abergavenny supermarket? The following week I discovered that the Columbian Blacktail eggs I’d settled for had won an award at The Observer Food Awards. It wouldn’t have happened in my day.
Back in the mid 70’s, my school holidays were filled with food. When my brother and I weren’t packing a picnic and setting off for a day’s strawberry picking, I would head into town with my mother with a shopping list for that day’s lunch and dinner. She would have asked us what we wanted to eat while we were still tucking into breakfast, and irritated as I was about having to mentally leave my muesli for floured plaice and roast lamb, it was the daily ritual, and a day without planning a feast would have been a very odd day indeed.
First stop was the butcher where we’d stand in a long queue eyeing up the fresh meat on offer and reading up about their award winning sausages until it was our turn. “Morning Mrs Smith”, said the butcher “I’ve got some lovely oxtail for you today.” And the two of them would flirt over a recipe for braised oxtail, and he’d give our dog a bone.
Then it was onto Vin Sullivan, the fishmonger in the high street which, so my parents kept telling me, provided Harrods Food Hall with fish from the area. We would go in to buy the plaice for lunch that day and lava bread for breakfast, but I thought it was impossibly exotic, with three sides of counters proudly displaying lobsters, crabs, cockles and mussels, and whole salmon from the River Usk jostling for space with locally caught rabbit and pheasant.
Abergavenny market on Tuesdays and Fridays was the most exciting thing to happen in the course of the week, largely because nothing else happened in Abergavenny in the 1970s, and we would buy up the vegetables for the half week there. If I was lucky, I might even manage to persuade my mother to buy me a cheesecloth shirt or garish kaftan which I’d wear proudly on the next market day.
My father would arrive home at the theme tune for Radio 4’s PM programme, often with whatever he’d managed to mow down on the way back from Brecon. Invariably it was a pheasant which had been ambling out of the Gliffaes estate across the A40, and he would take it into the shed where it would hang until ripe enough to pluck and casserole it. On a very cold December night, he might pick up a hare from Vin Sullivans on his way home, and hang it in the shed for a fortnight. A graphic kind of man, he would tell me in great detail how a hare could only be hung when the last of the flies had gone for the winter. Just one could crawl inside the anus of a hare and lay sufficient eggs to eat it from the inside out. He would eventually gut the hare, taking care not to break its rib cage and collect the blood for the gravy.
Such an earthy attitude to food fired my imagination (and made me turn vegetarian for a few barren years), but when he tells me now about the tripe he and my mother would cook, the sweet milky smell floods back into my senses, along with the leeks and peppered mash that they would serve with it “You can’t buy tripe these days,” he tells me. “Or tongue. Bloody health and safety rules. I was only thinking today that I should go up to Mr George in Talgarth – he runs the abattoir up there – and see if I can get some from him. I should take you and the kids there next time you’re down”.
The idea of my taking the girls to an abattoir is laughable. Thirty years on from those Abergavenny days, my eleven-year-old has just announced that she’s converting to vegetarianism after watching Jamie Oliver slaughtering a lamb on TV. And my eight--year-old is considering her position. Their attitude to my stories of cooking rabbit with Jamie’s mentor, Gennaro Contaldo the other day, reflected their differing stance on food; Elly blanched when I told her how we had chopped the head in two to look at the brains, cheeks and tiny tongue that Gennaro swore tasted so sweet with garlic and red wine, while LouLou took it all in silently – particularly the bit about how it’s important to keep the head on a rabbit at market to differentiate it from a cat. Skinned, they look identical.
After a few moments, she was on the phone to Grandpa to ask if he had ever eaten rabbit. It’s a regular call; she and her elder sister have always been fascinated by Grandpa’s stories of eating snails, frogs legs, brains on toast, heart and tongue jelly, and even if she knows she’s unlikely to eat it herself she knows there will be a good story in it. He didn’t disappoint, with tales of how his mother would go to Cardiff market and bring home a basket full of rabbit heads for the family which she cooked in onions and served up with mashed potatoes.
My children have, at best, a voyeur’s relationship with real food. I write about it and we cook a lot and talk about it, but we buy from supermarkets, and trips to local farms have been more for the climbing frames and tractor rides than to meet the pigs who become their packed lunch a couple of months later. I’ve become so used to doing the weekly shop silently, alone in the crowd of other foodies who have sold their soul to Sainsbury’s when the day became too crammed, that I’ve forgotten the banter that comes with popping into the local butcher or baker, and to be honest, I’m frightened of going back there.
My husband comes from a good Jewish family, but of the two types of Jew, mine’s the Ashkenazi whose ancestors thrived on dumplings. Just thinking of the Sephardic feasts that might have been laid upon my mishporcha’s tables had I chosen a swarthier Jew, makes me faint with hunger. Instead I get to eat a lot of salmon. But give Jed a market in the Mediterranean, and he becomes fluent in the global language of the shrug and the smile and loves nothing better than finding the ingredients for that night’s meal. With such promise in the man, it’s time to introduce him to Sussex.
For the sake of the children, and to see if anyone other than celebrity chefs can find the time, the confidence and the produce to make it worth their while shopping locally, I shall let go of Uncle Sainsbury’s hand. Venturing deep into the forests and farms of Sussex, to the weekend farmers markets and daily open markets, we shall transform our shopping habits, measuring air miles and car miles, time and patience.
And we’ll watch our 11 and seven year old girls mature into … what? Carnivores or vegetarians? Foodies or food haters? Will they cook more or less? Will their children shop like I did or like I do? And will our experiment be an inspiration, or confirmation of the power of the supermarket.
No comments:
Post a Comment