The Pedant in the Kitchen by Julian Barnes

Author:Julian Barnes [Barnes, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857899743
Publisher: Atlantic Books

SERVICE WITH A SCOWL

Marcella Hazan, in her omnium gatherum The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, has a recipe for Baked Bluefish Fillets with Potatoes, Garlic and Olive Oil, Genoese Style. I went to a fishmonger’s I tend to enter with a certain trepidation. They sell good produce, they accept your money; but you often have to endure a laugh-in from a pair of tattooed comedians.

‘Have you got any bluefish?’ I asked.

‘Bluefish,’ the monger repeated as if it were no more than a feed line. ‘We’ve got white fish, pink fish, yellow fish. . .’ As he scanned his slab for further hues of jocularity, my heart sank.

Cooking begins with shopping, and while I doubt I shall ever take a cookery course, I might willingly sign up for a shopping course. Resident experts would have to include a nutritionist, a food writer, a games-theorist and a psycholo­gist. I remember being taken shopping by my mother in the aftermath of rationing and first becoming aware of the freighted nature of this everyday process. She was the mon­etary and social boss, he (and that’s one of the problems – it always was and usually remains a he) had control of supply; she knew what she wanted, he knew what he had; she might decline to pay a certain price, he might decline to offer what she needed, even though he had it. The whole exchange felt pointlessly about power – and still does sometimes – with an occasional snifter of class warfare. At best, a certain complic­ity was possible, but rarely more than a factitious equality.

This is why the Pedant’s morale is rarely lifted by a recipe beginning ‘Instruct your butcher to. . .’ or ‘Telephone your fishmonger in advance and ask. . .’ Now I know some excel­lent butchers, fishmongers, and fruit ‘n’ veggers, though I don’t think of any of them as ‘mine’. Equally, I sometimes encounter a needlessly surly butcher who, when you hesi­tantly propose what you might require, will seize something in a flurry of hands, offer it for a nanosecond’s inspection with a lip-curling ‘That do?’, and have it on the scales and off again before your eyes can refocus, while calling out a price which for all you know could well be a touch speculative.

Yet he sells excellent meat. The only time Mr Needlessly Surly softened his act was during the BSE crisis, though the sight of innate surliness overlaid with temporary ingratiation wasn’t for the squeamish. The unlovely success of supermar­kets is due to many factors, but eliminating a potentially awkward social exchange is by no means a minimal one. If you study those serving in the butchery departments of supermarkets, they may be dressed like butchers, but they lack the character; they have the polite, unthreatening manner of corporate employees trained to euphemize the fact that meat comes from dead animals.

The answer, of course, is more knowledge, and thus confidence, on the customer’s part. Cookbooks usually begin with descriptions of equipment and culinary processes; but shopping nous is taken for granted.

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