Continuing the adventures in foreign dining that I began in “Eating Chinese, Parts I and II” (see January 2004, in the Archives), this entry tackles the question: Is there a difference between dining and dying in the ingestion of English food? Having first posed the question to myself in 1979 I am happy to report that at least I am here to “tell the tale.”
©1979, UrbisMedia
In the photograph I’m standing on the steps of the Albert Memorial. Wearing sweats, a knit watch cap, sneakers and gloves, I look a bit like Sylvester Stallone in “Rocky”. My arms are raised in a victorious salute, and the snapshot caught the steam from my breath and the penumbra of condensation forming around me. It was damn cold in Hyde Park that morning. A few days earlier Laura, Lisa and I had made a snowman over by the little pet cemetery along Bayswater Road. 1979 was a cold winter in Europe.
Patty took the photo. She had come to the park with me around 6:30AM to shoot some photos for her work while I ran my three-mile route from Kensington Palace (most renowned of late for being the last residence of the beloved Princess Diana) in the West to Wellington’s old residence (Apsley House) in the East, weaving around the Serpentine pond in the middle.
Running, or walking, through Hyde Park is a brief journey through English history. It was originally the hunting preserve of Henry VIII. James I opened it to the public and Queen Victoria opened it to “all respectably dressed persons” (well, excuuuuse me!) when she added Kensington Gardens to the park. Since then it has seen artillery emplacements in both the Civil Wars and WWII installed and removed, and has been decorated with statuary and monuments to England’s royalty, military heroes, and other builders of her empire.
We were living in Leinster Gardens Court, just north of the park in the Bayswater area. The daily run had become a virtual necessity if I was going to survive my sabbatical in London. I was, so to speak, running for my life.
My life was being imperiled by English food.
Many people with functioning taste buds and gastro-intestinal tracts regard English Cuisine as an oxymoron. When in the United Kingdom such people head directly for the nearest Indian, Chinese, Italian, or French restaurant at the first sign of hunger. These days I pretty much follow suit when I’m in the U.K.
But back in 1979, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, I got hooked on English food: English breakfasts, and Pub Grub, particularly fish and chips. One theory for this affliction is sort of “genetically” based. Being of Italo-Greek heritage I have hypothesized that might ancestors might have been in those Roman legions back in the first century B.C. that conquered “Britannia.” Many of them settled in the inclement little isle, intermarried with the locals (after the obligatory period of pillaging, raping, and other routines of the Pax Romana ), and no doubt, began eating English breakfasts and other local delicacies.
Anyone who has survived a English Breakfast will recall that it probably consisted of the following: Bacon (though unlike American bacon, this is really more like boiled ham with slabs of translucent fat attached); Eggs (“runnyside-up,” and floating in the grease from the bacon); Hash Browns (cooked in, . . . you guessed it). And to make sure that you are not missing your minimum lifetime requirement of fat and cholesterol: “bangers” (English sausages). Remember that no fat is permitted to be wasted, so the remaining fat is used to—are you ready for this?— deep-fry your toast ! There might be a lonely half-stewed tomato as a gesture to one of the other food groups, or in some cases, and oily “kipper,” which is sort of an oversized smoked sardine. Wash it all down with tea with whole milk, and you are ready for a day in the “loos” of England’s tourist sites, or a test of the cardiology wards of Britain’s socialized medical system. You have just had perhaps the most mis-named meal in the history of cuisine: “The HeartyEnglish Breakfast.” Hearty?! I think they’re considering using this breakfast in place of lethal injection in Texas; and it gives new meaning to that “last meal.”
I have a hypothesis that the Romans left Britain after a few hundred years because their Mediterranean blood chemistry couldn’t handle English cooking. The Romans conquered only as far north on the island as Northumberland, up near Scotland, then sort of gave up on the place. Historians say it was the weather, or the ferocious local tribes, who sent the Romans back south. But you have to have tasted the Scottish delicacy, “haggis,” to know the real reason they left. There’s a long wall in Northumberland that marks the limit of the Roman northward advance. It still has some Roman communal toilets that were built into it, not doubt mute testimony to the Romans’ aversion to the apt sounding concoction of inadequately-cooked, weird animal organs, wrapped in intestines. Could the name have been derived from “gag us?”
History does not record how many Romans were killed off by Hearty English Breakfasts and haggis. If they had blood chemistry anything like this descendant, their serum blood cholesterol and LDL jumped up ten points just being in the same room with the stuff.
To make matters worse I also had this inexplicable urge for English lunches and dinners, too. Pub lunches of bangers, Scotch eggs (hardboiled eggs sealed in a deep-fried carapace of doughy substance), Cornish Pasties of chopped meat in deep-fried dough (not mammary decorations), were favorites. For dinners I gravitated to fish and chips, a meal that totally reverses the arterial benefits associated with eating fish, and an occasional visit to a “carvery,” where one comprehends fully the origin of the term “Beefeater” in a atmosphere that only slightly civilizes what used to be Mediaeval gluttonous revels at which greasy-bearded trenchers flung joints of meat across raucous castle dining halls.
Since those days of running for my life in Hyde Park I have taken more to heart the advice and admonitions of the Surgeon General than I have allowed my stomach to try to digest hearty English breakfasts. When I think back on it there is little wonder why I ended those morning runs in Hyde Park with that little victory dance on the steps of the Albert Memorial; I’d survived another day of English cuisine.
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 5.29.2004)