Sweet Home Port Talbot

This might be the street of my hungry writer dreams, right here in my hometown.

• Riverside Café
• Gossip Café
• Sweetmans
• Jenkins Bakers and Café
• Greggs
• Lynda’s Café Bar
• Ferrari’s Café
• Selections Coffee Shop

All within 500 yards of each other and I’m only half way up and yet to check out the other side. Ask any writer and they’ll glaze over (a bit like a fresh doughnut) at the thought of being tucked at a table with coffee and cake, a pen and a notebook, a little condensation on the windows maybe, anonymous chatter and the random clatter of cutlery against china.

Today I’m on a mission: my mother has told me that Jenkins is renowned for custard slices. They’re a family firm from Llanelli, in West Wales, going back to 1921 when Lizzie Jenkins opened ‘The Unique Café’ on New Dock Road. Their slogan at the time was ‘Every bite – pure delight’ and even though the business has since expanded to 25 retail shops, including this one in Port Talbot, it is still being run by a third generation today.  

Of course, tucked in the corner of my mind is an awareness of my mother’s bias: she’s Llanelli born and even though she left her home town nearly 60 years ago she’s still a dyed in the wool Scarlets supporter (the Llanelli Welsh Rugby Union team).

But the Scarlets have dropped a few points today: not a custard slice in sight. There are a couple of concoctions behind the glass case labelled ‘non-dairy jam and cream slice’.  If it’s not dairy, how can it be cream? But then I remember those gargantuan Cream Horns of my childhood – thick,papery, hollow pastry horns filled with a sticky cloud of sweet fluff...

Yes, obviously I am

But nostalgia does not sway me and I pop a few doors along where Greggs have custard slices that look as if they’ve been putting in gym-time pumping up their fillings. So Greggs get my £2.10 and 3 custard slices and I get a box, the lid of which advertises my weakness,  that’s designed for 6 cakes though I doubt it would take the weight of 6 custard slices: I have to carry it in two hands to stop it from bending. These are more hunk than slice. 

In fact they’re so big me and my mother share one between us after dinner. ‘The custard is nice,’ she says. ‘Not too sweet.’

The Gregg's custard hunk

And she’s right. I might just go for another half. But she’s still waving her Llanelli supporter’s scarf. I was probably too late for the custard slices at Jenkins, she tells me. They’re so popular they would have sold out by three in the afternoon.

I have 5 more days here, more than enough time for an early morning custard slice expedition, I believe.

Hungry Writing Prompts

• Write a list of shops that would exist in your perfect imaginary street.
• Write about different kinds of noise.
• Write about what delights you.
• Write about carrying something precious.
• Write about getting up early in the world. 

The path to addiction (and some maths)

I have discovered a piece of France that evaded me while I lived there. But not because I wasn't paying attention. It somehow even managed to evade my French sister-in-law, Manuela, for 38 years. She discovered it when some French language students from the west coast gave it to her as a gift when they stayed at her home in Swansea, South Wales. She gave it to me. 

This post should come with a warning of addiction. There is no way back once you start. Forget licking out the bottom of a large bag of Kettle Crisps, forget 'oh, just one more then' when the box of Ferrero Rocher comes around for the 8th time. Whatever your guilty pleasure, it will fade into insignificance if you go any further. Don't come crying to me in a month's time. You have been warned.

But let's do this slowly.

the batter

What are the things you were allowed to cook as a child? The first things I remember preparing were the batter for Yorkshire puddings and mint sauce. Late Sunday morning in the kitchen of our council house: the condensation thickening on the window, beans kept green with a dash of bicarbonate of soda, the roast topside or silverside of beef, tied with string, under a dome of tinfoil.

The mint came from our garden and I washed it, dried it and chopped it with the thin blade of a silver handled knife, one of my mother's wedding presents. When the chop was fine enough I added a little bit of caster sugar. Then I chopped it again, added more sugar, before scraping it all into a little glass jug and adding malt vinegar to a level my mother approved of.

My mother once told a family friend from Yorkshire that I made the batter for the Yorkshire pudding. 'But what kind of flour do you use?' he asked me with an air of suspicion and condescension. Are all Yorkshire men this threatened by Welsh ten-year-old amateur Yorkshire pudding batter makers?

You can use plain or self-raising for our silky batter recipe which calls for very little of it - a mere 100 grams.

Do you recognise it? Please don't mistake les moules for mussels. That would lead to all kinds of unpleasantness.

I also helped to make fairy cakes when my mother had a Saturday baking session. When did fairy cakes submit to the American 'cup' cakes? The term must derive from the measuring cups American cooks use. We don't use cups here in the UK. A lot of us don't even use grams. We use real money: ounces. But the drift towards the continent is worth it in this case. Trust me.

These are the moulds (les moules) you'll need to buy.

Yes, you could substitute something else but it won't be the same. You won't get that sweet, gooey and simultaneously crisp bite of french perfection.

Listen to me and this is what you will have in a few hours time: Cannelés Bordelais

And now for the maths. Take 64 cannelés, deduct 8 (for the neighbour), divide by 2 (people) over 16 (hours). How many remain? Your answer may well be different from mine:

You'll find the recipe below the writing prompts. Steady now.

Hungry Writing Prompts

1. Write about addiction.
2. Write about giving.
3. Write about an adult questioning a child.
4. Write about the influence of another culture on your life.
5. Write about counting: sheep, fingers and toes, your blessings, anything you like.

Cannelés Bordelais

half a litre of milk, pinch of salt, 2 eggs plus 2 extra yolks, a teaspoon of good vanilla essence, a tablespoon of rum (I used Grand Marnier), 100 grams of flour, 250 grams of caster sugar, 50 grams of butter

Bring the milk to the boil with the vanilla and butter.
While that's happening, mix the flour and sugar, then add all the eggs and mix together.
Add the boiling milk and mix gently but thoroughly to achieve a smooth, silky batter.
Let it cool. Add the rum, stir, and put it in the fridge for at least an hour.

Put a baking tray in the oven and preheat it at its maximum temperature. My gas oven goes to no. 9.

Melt some more butter and brush the insides of the moulds.

Fill the moulds, to about two thirds full, with the chilled batter. Place them on the hot tray and cook for 10 minutes at that high heat.

Lower the thermostat to no.6 (180 electric) and cook for a further 40 minutes.

They should have a lovely brown crust, but don't worry they'll still be soft inside.

It's easier if you take them out of the moulds while they're still warm.

If you halve the quantity above you'll have enough for 2 moulds of 18. Otherwise you'll have enough for a second batch. What a hardship.

Back to school

I walked the route between home and Tir Morfa Primary School four times a day for six years. Heading there this morning, my mind automatically re-sets itself to the early 1960s and I start counting my footsteps as I leave my parents’ house. It’s rather satisfying when, at 55 steps, I look up and realise I’m walking past 55 Chrome Avenue.

I’m visiting the school as part of my research for Real Port Talbot. There’s a mural in the Assembly Hall by the Port Talbot born artist, Andrew Vicari and I want to photograph it for the book. 

The Tir Morfa mural is a product of its era – the stylised lips and eyes, the strong outlines – and perhaps more of a nostalgia trip for people like me than of any particular value to art history. It takes me back to a time of home knitted jumpers, when the toys we carried didn’t require a power source. The children feel unfamiliar to me but the faces of the women are the remembered mothers of my childhood: Mammy, Aunty Ruth, Aunty Phil, Aunty Beryl. They were the soapsuds and steam of a Monday’s laundry, the warnings of being in trouble when our fathers got home. Letting us stay up late on Friday nights for Bonanza. Women their daughters took for granted until they started to fear losing them.

I had my first school photograph taken in the Assembly Hall but it’s the Dining Hall, connecting the Infants and the Juniors, where memory overtakes me, transports me back 45 years.  The long trestle tables are still there and in the room’s emptiness, its mid-morning silence, I can see the table monitors with their long spoons sharing out cottage pie and cake from oblong aluminium tins. Over-heated mashed potato. Those squares of overly sweet baked sponge with jam. I discovered gristle for the first time when I persuaded my mother to let me have school dinners for a term. I was suspicious of the startlingly yellow custard and rice pudding, their thick wrinkly skins.  

Some kids didn’t complain although they had a right too when they were required to publicly announce their ‘free dinners’ status as the register was called out at the beginning of each week. And the rest of us stared at them.

Hungry Writing Prompts

• Write about counting things.
• Write about the women who lived in your street when you were young. 
• Write a list of things a mother does.
• Write about someone serving you food in a public place.
• Write about people looking at you.

Lovely ladies and the invention of the crisp sandwich

I thought that the first photograph I saw on the packet of British Rail’s complimentary crisps was serendipity: these lovely acrobatic ladies on the beach advertising lightly sea salted crisps made from a variety of potato called Lady Rosetta. 

But today, on my train journey back from Wales to London, the girl in the buffet car gave me the Cheese and Chive flavour, the packet decorated with another, no less lovely in their time, I’m sure, group of women:

Champions of cheese-making perhaps, or cheese-tasting, or maybe they’re the judges at a WI food market. So it seems that Tyrell’s marrying of potato variety, Lady Rosetta again, and photograph is deliberate.

I have yet to research (or Google, as we say these days!) if they make any other flavours using the  same potato variety and whether those packets also bear vintage photographs of groups of women engaged in an appropriate activity.  Or whether there’s a male equivalent. King Edward? Red Robin?  

The first crisps of my childhood were Smith’s. They were plain in a way that kids today could not conceive of: crisp potato slices, nothing else. But there was the excitement of searching in the packet for the little twist of blue paper containing salt so you could season to your own preference. The ‘twist’ became a sachet and then that disappeared too (except for a brief  revival in 1979 of Salt n'Shake) with the introduction of ready-flavoured crisps. Perhaps my early limited crisp experience has resulted in ready salted, or lightly salted, crisps remaining a favourite. Smoky Bacon, Roast Chicken, Prawn Cocktail —I tried them because of the novelty but the flavour never lived up to the promise written on the packet. They were, and maybe still are, heavy on the taste enhancers that found their way into every little gap in your teeth and hunkered there for ages afterwards. 

Occasionally I had Cheese & Onion crisps. They were my mother’s favourite but she never ate them when my father was around because he didn’t like the smell.

***

Salt & Vinegar crisps were the star of one particular December afternoon just before Christmas in the mid 1960s. These were the days of milkmen, bread vans, door to door rent collections and insurance men calling round to pick up premiums and my mother always had the weekly payments ready, counted out into plastic bags and tucked into a kitchen drawer.

Aunty Beryl-next-door had already alerted her to the over-excited insurance man who’d been toasting Christmas at a number of houses as he made his way down the street and by the time he arrived at no.73 he was, to be 1960s polite, rather worse for wear, but to use the vernacular of today, completely off his face.

Drunkenness wasn’t a state I was familiar with. I vaguely understood how ‘tipsy’ revealed itself. Or, if it was a man, ‘one pint too many’. But he had attained a state of jollification I had never witnessed in an adult. And he was giving away money – big pre-decimalisation bronze pennies stamped on the tail-side with Britannia. I was enchanted and couldn’t understand why my mother insisted that I give them back.

These were also the days before drinking and driving restrictions and offering a little Christmas drink and a few crisps was de rigeur behaviour but my mother also did her best to ply him with as much black coffee as she could.

‘Let me make you a sandwich too,’ she said.

And he accepted the bread and butter and proceeded to show me how to construct a crisp sandwich. My sandwiches had always come in single varieties from a predetermined list: cheese, corned beef, cucumber, tinned salmon. They were soft and flat. But here were sandwiches breaking the rules, noisy sandwiches, their filling crushed flat in his big hands and equally as noisy in the mouth. I joined in enthusiastically.

I couldn’t wait for him to call again the following week, the funny man who made crisp sandwiches, threw pennies around the room and made me laugh.

‘Do you remember what you did last time?’ I said cheerfully, when he came into the kitchen, receiving the weight of my mother’s glare, his sheepish downward glance, and the raw slap of having said something I shouldn’t have all at the same time. The fun was over.

And so was his job. As far as I can remember someone else took over his round shortly after that. We never saw him again. If he’s still alive I wonder if he remembers that afternoon? If he does, is it with regret, embarrassment or indifference? Would it mean anything to him that his story remains with me, over 45 years later and that I smile every time I remember him?

Hungry Writing Prompts

1. Write about a group of women all doing the same thing together.
2. Write about serendipity, a ‘happy accident’.
3. Write about a drunk.
4. Write about having fun as a child and having fun as an adult.
5. Write about your favourite sandwich.

Testing ground

When I arrived in Wales this week my great-niece told me about a blindfold taste test she was due to have in school as part of their science curriculum. They’ve already done ‘scents and smells’ during which she learned that sniffing too hard at a pile of curry powder isn’t something you want to repeat. 

The taste test wasn’t something she was looking forward to as a 6 year old whose tastes are rather regimented (although if anything comes with a Hello Kitty wrapper she’s more likely to try it) but the test was cancelled, much to her relief, and the class are moving onto ‘materials’ next week. I wonder if ‘Elf and Safety’ had anything to do with that?

‘Why don’t we do our own taste test?’ I suggest.
‘No,’ she says without a moment’s hesitation.
‘Come on,’ I coax. ‘I promise I’ll only give you things you’ll like.’
‘Okay,’ she says.
‘Sunday,’ I say.
‘Is that the day after tomorrow?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’

I made a list of things I know she likes and wouldn’t be alarmed to find at the end of a spoon: nutella, strawberries, grated parmesan. And then a list of things that she hasn’t tried before, or has refused to try, but I’m pretty sure will be a hit, or at least acceptable: ripe peach (without the skin), green pesto, honey.  I want to respect the trust she has placed in me, a trust I wouldn’t want to shake in the slightest, but at the same time I want to encourage new experience.

But today she changed her mind. ‘I don’t want to,’ she said. So we didn’t but then she tried the dessert I made, a mixture of tastes she hadn’t tried before, so we are now back on for the Great Taste Test sometime this week. Watch this space...

This is the dessert:

If you’re a regular follower you might remember that I posted the recipe earlier this month but forgot to take a photo of the finished dish! So if you’re avoiding desserts this early in the New Year, just enjoy the photo. Or click here to make your own.

Hungry Writing Prompts

Write about wearing a blindfold.

Write a list of all the things you like to eat.

Write about an occasion when you did something for the first time.

Write about changing your mind.

Write about abstinence.

Home from home: Roast Lamb with Marsala

I started the hungry writer in France when identifying a sense of home seemed more urgent, being much further from either Wales, the country of my birth, or England, my adopted country. Each week I tugged on a thread of memory from my childhood and pulled myself towards home.

France feels very far away now, emotionally, even though it’s only been less than three months since we moved back. I spoke to a friend in Antibes yesterday and she told me about l’hiver incroyable they’re enjoying: 18 degrees during the day and the usual Mediterranean blue sky. I thought I’d miss the easy climate, the light, the sea but the British winter has been so incroyablement mild too with lots of clear skies, and I get to see the sea every month during my trips to Wales. And there are not many better beaches than this in the world. Forget about heat, palm trees, sunbeds. I’m talking about good sand, space, the sense of being swallowed by the sea, the noise of a high tide at night hitting the sea wall. 

It doesn’t matter anymore that the Steelworks is at one end. Gone are the days of jumping little oil slicks and coal dust on your journey to the shore. Stricter regulations have enabled the beach to gain a Blue Flag rating. It’s tractored and cleaned every day. It really is a heart-opening experience to stand on the Prom and breathe. 

Finding home since I’ve been back has taken on a number of identities. The home I need to feel in my writing environment has eventually been achieved after living with boxes for 10 weeks with new shelving and a desk to replace ones left in France:

And I feel spoiled with homeliness as I travel between Kent and Port Talbot in South Wales too. A true home from home experience.

Foodwise, I am delving into home with lamb. There is nothing to compare to Welsh Spring lamb. I can’t even enter into a debate about it. Case closed. I’ve made this twice since I’ve been back, once for family and once just for me and Tony. Eating what you love with someone you love has to be right at the top of the list of good things to do, and the list of what makes you feel at home.

Hungry Writing prompts appear below the photos which are rather like a picture story strip so hardly need any written directions, except perhaps to say that I pour 100 ml of Marsala over the lamb at the beginning of the cooking time and another 100 ml for the last 20 minutes, then I use those juices to make a gravy.

Roast Lamb with Marsala Wine

 

  Hungry Writing Prompts

1. Write about the country of your birth.
2. Write about a winter you remember well.
3. Write about space.
4. Write about a book.
5. Write about someone preparing a meal.

The proof of the pudding

I discovered fountains during my pre-Christmas shopping. Not the water spouting out of a stone sculpture or dancing to music kind, but the firework kind you bung in the top of a Christmas pudding and light so it resembles a bomb you might associate with the Roadrunner and Wily Coyote. You know the type – round, with Acme stamped on it and fizzing with inevitable destruction.

I know, it’s hardly traditional, and I did pick a sprig of holly in the orchard on Christmas morning all ready for the brandy flambé performance. But the firework seemed like more fun. And I’d also had a mishap with flambéing in my mother’s kitchen a couple of weeks earlier when I melted the edge of her cooker fan (sorry, Mam!).

I think 'pudding' counts as 'soft, non-flammable material'.
 But I'd avoid adding brandy to a Christmas Pudding!

The fountains came in packs of three and I have one left. We liked the first fountain in the pudding so much we decided to light a second one. And this last one is destined for another pudding in the near future. Not necessarily pudding as in round and fruity but as in pudding after lunch or dinner. Dessert.

Words are fun. How we use them, where they come from, what they mean. We all have favourite words too… we do, don’t we? Some of mine are: orchard, kipper, deliverance. Don’t you just love how you feel yourself rolling out to the end of that last one as you say it?

I have treated myself to Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon. (It’s a pretty irresistible book as it is but at 99p for the Kindle edition it was a no-brainer for me.) The book springs from Mark’s Inky Fool blog and explores the strange connections between words, which brings me back to puddings.

You know the expression, ‘The proof of the pudding (is in the eating)’? Well, the use of the word proof relates to the word’s Roman origins and how the Romans used to test their theories… and found that they worked, or were found wanting.

A pudding, or dessert, that was thoroughly tested and definitely not found wanting at my dinner party on New Year’s Eve was Triple Layer Apple Crunch. Its greatest fan was a farmer friend who had three helpings; I could almost see his eyes glazing over as the pudding transported him back to nursery teas, grass tickling his little boy legs in short trousers.

For me it’s the textures of the pudding that are a great part of its success: the sweet heaviness of apple puree, a cloud of whipped cream, and the crunch of a cornflake toffee topping. Cornflakes! I hear a distant purist shriek. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

I wish I could show you the completed dessert but I’ve been annoyingly forgetful about taking photographs recently. I start out with good intentions…

…but you’re going to have to imagine the layers of whipped cream and crunchy topping. Although you can see how a glass dish is essential to the prettiness of this dessert.

I use dessert apples as there’s no need to add sugar but they do take a lot longer to cook down to a puree than cooking apples do. Add a splash of water or apple juice to the pan to get them going, and to avoid them burning, then cook very slowly, stirring occasionally. Leave the puree to cool completely before adding the cream layer.

I whip up Elmlea Double rather than a full animal fat cream as I find it a bit lighter.

For the crunchy topping, melt about 75 grams of butter with half a dozen generous tablespoons of Golden Syrup in a large saucepan. Once it’s melted pour in enough cornflakes to be completely coated in the mixture and pile on top of the cream layer quickly before they start to clump together too much.

Let the topping harden completely in the fridge. It’ll stay crunchy all day so it’s a dessert you can make quite a few hours in advance.

Now… stick in your fountain, light it, and fizzle towards your friends : )

Happy New Year!

Hungry Writing Prompts

• Write a childhood memory of fireworks.
• Write about setting fire to something.
• Write a list of your favourite words.
• Write about being irresistible.
• Write about making something for a friend.

 

Relax, enjoy.

The fridge is brimming with free range chickens and vegetables and enough Tesco Finest Wild Mushroom Filo Parcels to feed a small army. Some things are worth doing yourself (garlic and herb roast chicken and potato and celeriac dauphinoise), some things aren’t (stuffing little squares of filo pastry for hours).

Christmas is low-key at our house. We stopped buying ‘presents for everyone’ years ago and that makes life much easier. Unless 1) you can afford it, and 2) you know that someone wants something particular then Christmas presents can be a debt inducing, stress filled, disappointing activity and finale.

My present to the four people I’ll be eating with on Sunday will be a walk around the apple orchard to see the bouquet of pheasants (I just checked that on Google!) living in the wild there, followed by an afternoon of home cooked food (mushroom parcels aside), lots of laughter with a log-fire and a sparkly Christmas tree. I love Christmas trees. But real Christmas trees not joking ones. (That’s South Wales for ‘pretend’ or ‘artificial’, as in ‘Is that a real log-fire or a joking one?’)

I wish you your perfect day too whether it’s quiet or boisterous, whether it takes place this weekend or any other time over the holiday season.

Relax, enjoy.

Happy Christmas – Nadolig Llawen.

Eating with Real People

Steak and roast chicken, savoury sausage and baked salmon, wine and puddings, maple fudge and a custard slice. It has been a week of eating. When I arrive at my home town of Port Talbot in South Wales, within minutes of getting off the train, it’s the first thing I organise, and then organise again. And again.

Pretty cappuccino at
Cafe Remos, Aberafan Beach

Actually, the custard slice was only half a custard slice. I shared it with my sister at Café Remos on Aberafan Beach after we’d spent a couple of hours walking around the western perimeter of the council estate where we both grew up. My new book, Real Port Talbot, will include memoir (my own and others’) as well as local history and the only way to see an area, to notice what remains, and to remember what has disappeared is to walk it. Even if the wind threatens to take off the top layer of our faces as we turn the corners of the ‘colour’ streets near the beach. And, appropriately, it’s in Scarlet Avenue that my sister confesses to forgery.

‘I only had one ticket for the Naval Club Disco,’ she says, ‘and I wanted my friend Veronica to come with me so we made another one.’

I’m impressed. She was only 12! Think of what she could have achieved if she’d capitalised on this talent.  

I confess that I once stole a monkey nut from the greengrocery section at the Co-op in Fairway. I could feel the dare rising up in me as I realised it would be small enough to fit into my eight-year-old hand and I brushed my fingers over the top of the pile and closed them around one. 

In the warmth of Café Remos we watch the whip of the sea and the rain slap against the plate glass windows. Opposite us a man is reading a  black leather bible and making copious notes into a spiral bound notebook. I wonder what his reaction would be if he knew he was in the presence of a forger and a thief?

At this point my sister and I would like to point out that we were not encouraged by our successes in these fields and that these were our first and only attempts at deceit for material gain. And I didn’t even like monkey nuts.

12 Cafe, 37 Commercial Road, Taibach, Port Talbot

You could pass 12 Café in Taibach, a community to the east of Port Talbot town centre, and be excused for thinking that this was a contemporary café more or less like any other. It offers leather sofas at the front, plenty of bright, clean tables and chairs, and free wi-fi. All the food is prepared fresh every day as the intoxicating, savoury scent of baking proves as you enter.

I’ve come in with Allen Blethyn, a retired carpenter and joiner who discovered his passion late in life for local history, for researching the people and the places and the events that make us who we are now. Allen has shown me copper slag coping stones, chapels and old butcher’s shops and now he takes me into 12 Café because he understands that the Real Port Talbot will be just that: a real account of the town as it is now as well as a record of the past.

12 Café is a social enterprise run by West Glamorgan Council on Drug and Alcohol Abuse Limited. You can read more about the project and its aims here.

While I am sure there are lots of different social enterprises providing valuable help to people and communities this one, revolving around the preparation of food, of people eating together, particularly appeals to me. The whole ethos of cooking is about transformation and understanding. It’s about self-confidence and contributing to the enjoyment of others. And one cheese and onion toastie and a café latte later it is obvious that 12 Café has all these ingredients and more. 

I currently have two stamps on my loyalty card. I reckon I’ll be getting my free coffee very soon. But if you're too far away to pop into 12 Café you can Like them on Facebook and tell them what a great job they’re doing.

Hungry Writing Prompts

1. Write about something that has disappeared from your life.
2. Write about a crime.
3. Write about something you remember from your past that has affected your present life.
4. Write about a particular smell that you associate with a particular place.
5. Write about a favourite cafe.

The cooked and the cruel

Where does the love of food end and cruelty begin? I’m sure there will be different boundaries among us, and contradictions too. I’ll start with myself: I will only buy free range eggs but I ate foie gras several times during my four years in France. I refuse to buy the battery chickens from the supermarket but I don’t question the source of the pork in Tesco Finest Cumberland Sausages.  Actually, that sounds more like hypocrisy than contradiction.

I am reading Breakfast with Socrates by Robert Rowland Smith, a series of philosophical commentaries on the ordinary content of our day to day lives, from getting ready to go out, sitting at a desk, going to a party, to falling asleep at the end of the day. In the chapter, ‘Cooking and Eating Dinner’, he describes the French penchant for ortolan, a ‘delicacy’ I’d never heard of that has been illegal in France since 1999, although the laws have only been properly enforced since 2007. I should warn you that it doesn’t make for easy reading:

The ortolan – a bunting, the size of a sparrow – is trapped and incarcerated in a windowless box to be fed figs; when it has fattened, it is literally drowned in Armagnac, its minute lungs flooded with the rasping liquor. Now dead, it is plucked, roasted and served whole – bones, guts, pluck and all – with only the head to be left dangling untouched beyond the eater’s lips.

François Mitterrand, the former French president, ate ortolan at his ‘last supper’ while terminally ill with prostate cancer, with his head concealed beneath the traditional napkin. The reasons for this are disputed: it’s a messy business crunching through bones and innards; it preserves the aromas; it hides your face from God. Mitterand died eight days later.

Of course I prefer to think that my unquestioning purchase of pork sausages is on a different level to Mitterand’s ortolan feast. And perhaps, to some degree, it is if I believe the supermarket’s claims about animal welfare.

But the ortolan story has been playing on my mind since I read it.

… just as either the overripeness [pheasant, cheese] or the rawness [sushi, steak tartare] of what you serve can speak to your cultivation, to your acquired level of artistry, so cruelty can exhibit your refinement.

So what will I do the next time I’m in a restaurant and fancy ordering the foie gras? Ask if it comes from a duck or goose that hasn’t been subjected to gavage or force-feeding? Some top chefs, including Anthony Bourdain, have supported foie gras production from humanely treated, properly raised ducks so, in theory, it should be available. But could I be sure? No. I’ve said in other posts on this blog that the world needs more kindness.

There’s a Michelin star restaurant in Reading, England, called L’Ortolan although the little bunting on their logo looks quite happy and there’s no trace of the barbaric dish on any of their menus. Still, personally, I’d think about a name change.


Hungry Writing Prompts

1. Write about the one item of food you couldn’t do without.
2. Write about an instance of cruelty.
3. Write about ‘a last supper’.
4. Write about watching someone eat.
5. Write about an aspect of yourself that you don’t like.