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For Sarah and Jerry, who have always fed me well.
CONTENTS
4. FINDING THE CHINESE IN KIGALI
7. THE CURSE OF THE SPAGHETTI MARROW
10. THE SUMMER THEY STOPPED EATING
I am a greedy bastard. For the sake of appearances, I could lie about this. I could tell you that my appetites are entirely unremarkable; that my relationship with food does not dominate my every waking moment. But we both know this would be a lie as big and fat as each of my really quite awe-inspiring thighs. I have earned those thighs. Every shadowed dimple of cellulite has been put there courtesy of a restaurant bill. If you are eating while reading this book, if perhaps you thought that a book about food culture in the twenty-first century would be the perfect companion to a meal taken alone, and the image of my over-engineered, middle-aged, lard-heavy thighs is now putting you off your food, then obviously I apologize. That said, I can’t really empathize with you. Nothing puts me off my dinner.
This is less a confession than a vital piece of background information. Otherwise you might assume, as I lead you on a journey through the knotty complexities of how and what we eat now, that it was all merely some academic exercise on my part. It is nothing of the sort. It is motivated by lust and appetite. Even as I’m typing I’m thinking about what I’ll be having for dinner later on. At some restaurant with the word ‘pig’ in the title. I like pig. I admire the way its skin crisps so perfectly, the way the fat melts, the way it takes a cure so enthusiastically, producing the very best of charcuterie; salamis spiked with fennel or green peppercorns; chorizos so heavy with paprika they stain your fingertips orange as you get the oily slices from cutting board to mouth. There’s intense, earthy black pudding, and its Spanish cousin morcilla; bacons, singed rust and bronze in the pan, and pork scratchings that threaten to take out a filling, and …
Sorry. I think I got a little distracted there. Where was I? Oh yes. Greed, namely mine, and its impact upon my work. The point is that a lot of books written about food policy, responding to the undeniably serious issues involved, can take on a pinched and troubled aspect, as if the subject under discussion were the correct interpretation of something profound but strangely unintelligible uttered by the Dalai Lama, rather than an examination of what may well end up as lunch. Whenever I am thinking, asking questions or writing about food, the one question I am always asking myself is: how will this eventually impact upon my lunch?
Some may regard this as a moral failing, will think that too much appetite can get in the way of a cool and collected appraisal of the facts. I see it differently. Just as there’s no point reading a book about sex written by a nun, or a book about morals written by a banker, there’s also no point reading a book about food written by a picky eater. Sometimes gluttony isn’t a vice, it’s a virtue, and this is one of those occasions. Though I accept I may just be attempting to excuse my own failings. If I am, I’m doing a bloody good job of it, don’t you think?
Either way the fact remains: my name is Jay Rayner and I am a greedy bastard.
Live with it.
1.
It would suit the narrative if I could claim that, from the moment I laid eyes upon the chicken, I knew I had to have it; that I was overcome by a greed and hunger verging on the carnal. Granted it was one damn beautiful chicken: good sturdy legs for the brown meat fetishists, a robust skin with the ivory promise of plentiful fat deposits underneath; breasts big enough to make Pamela Anderson wince with jealousy. But the truth is it wasn’t the chicken I saw first, but the entire meat carnival of the butcher’s shop. I had heard tell of Lidgate’s in Holland Park before, of course. It’s one of those high-end butchers that food obsessives dribble into their computer keyboards over, when describing their shopping adventures. It’s the kind of place you visit with more money than sense.
Lidgate’s has been trading for 150 years, has remained in the same family throughout that time and has won countless awards for what, in cheaper parts of town, would be called their ready meals but here are called ‘baked goods’. The window is full of their ready-to-cook shepherd’s pies, the surface of the mash as carefully raked as the gravel outside a stately home. There are boeuf bourguignon pies and pesto-smeared saddles of lamb, and their own enormous sausage rolls, wrapped in the flakiest of butter-rich pastry. The shop is tiled inside and out in Edwardian shades of jade green. The butchers wear straw boaters as if it’s an entirely reasonable thing to do. (It isn’t.)
I stepped inside and waited in the narrow space in front of the counters with the Holland Park yummy mummies, smelling of Jo Malone products – jasmine and mint, wild fig – while others were served. I was not entirely sure what