Saturday, 20 September 2014

First-World Food Problems

Within a few hours of returning from Nice I was back into the routines of home life. The only thing I missed was the food - or I should say the food opportunities: there were plenty of places offering pizza and cola for the gastronomically unadventurous but also lots of traditional local fare - like the restaurant we "discovered" in Vieux Nice where I lunched on poached chicken, a dish of black pasta shells and mussels drenched with intensely flavoured liquor and a bottle of Provençale rosé of such a pale hue and such a dry, nutty finish as would be impossible to come by outside of the region.

The flight home was short but fell, inconveniently, at lunch time (one of the characteristics of ageing is a tendency to favour fixed mealtimes) and although food is available on easyJet we were not keen to try it. Instead we went to the boulangerie around the corner from our hotel and bought a couple of baguettes filled with ham and cheese for an on-board picnic. And while the lady sitting next to us consumed her "meal deal" - a factory-made sandwich, a Twix and a cup of warm water containing a tea bag - with no outward sign of relish or enthusiasm, we feasted smugly on authentic French fare.

But now that we are back in the fresh-produce-desert that is central Manchester we must make the best of things. One consolation is the regular Sunday morning appearance of a fishmonger who sets up a stall on the street opposite our window. He's not your regular fishmonger offering neatly prepared fillets of cod and haddock: he says he's a fisherman, the owner of two trawlers, and has been bringing his catch here to Chinatown for 30 years. His display comprises crates of whole fish, squid, crabs, lobsters and crawly things I am not familiar with, none of which is labelled or priced. His customers are almost all Chinese and, from my observations, their approach to buying fish is more enthusiastic and more knowledgeable than ours. The early- comers, restaurateurs and older regulars, are followed later in the morning by entire families dressed in Sunday best on their way to or from dim-sum breakfasts. All of them, men, women and children, seem quite comfortable picking up and examining slimy, slippery fish and dangerous-looking live crustaceans.

Fascinated by this spectacle we resolved to join in: each Sunday since we moved in we have chosen a different fish for dinner. Along the way we bought some specialised implements - a de-scaler, fish-scissors, a filleting knife and - for lobsters - an extra large pot. Last Sunday it might have been the turn of blue-clawed crabs but, having awoken with hangovers as a result of birthday celebrations the previous night, we could only face the less threatening Dover sole.

But our relatively adventurous approach to what we eat is not quite matched by flexibility as to when we eat. When, at the suggestion of a friend, we went to the theatre last evening, there was anxiety about the timing of dinner. The performance, with its early start and four-hour duration, made no concessions to our feeding schedule and I was half inclined to call it off on the flimsy excuse that I had seen the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire and surely no actors could better Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh? But I swallowed a handful of peanuts, went grudgingly along and was duly gripped, from the moment Blanche arrived until she was finally led away by the psychiatrist and her sister's howl of anguish closed the drama.

Afterwards, while making do with a very late super of Stilton cheese and a couple of glasses of Barbera d'Alba, the theme of the play called to mind Samuel Johnson's epithet: "Kindness is in our power even when fondness is not". Later still, awoken from an unpleasant dream featuring men in white coats, I recalled some words of advice: “Never eat cheese at bedtime.” Now who said that?

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