Pouring oil over troubled waters

Jan 18 2008 by Bill Oldfield, The Journal

HOW times change. I’ve just returned from a week in Italy, and it was one evening, while asking the waiter for some olive oil to pour over and around my carpaccio, that I remembered the first time I came across this idea of oil being liberally applied to the plate for direct consumption and hearing howls of complaints from those around me.

I’d been given the job, as a relatively junior engineering officer in the merchant navy, of escorting a half dozen or so of the crew back to the UK, but this involved an overnight stop in Marseille.

On my travels I’ve always been happy to try and eat whatever the locals eat, even at the tender age I would have been back then. But my colleagues were insistent that they got proper British food and none of the foreign muck that they feared.

So negotiations commenced with the hotel kitchen and bacon and eggs were agreed upon. It seemed simple enough, but obviously the chef had never been to Blighty. The meat we received caused considerable suspicion because it didn’t look like any bacon we’d had before and it certainly didn’t look like it had seen a frying pan, or even been grilled, which I think the guys might just about have accepted seeing as they were in a foreign land. But none of us were prepared for the eggs which were cooked, and then encouraged to do the breaststroke, in olive oil.

I can’t remember if they were all right, or even if I tried them, because I had a mutiny on my hands. The general opinion was that the oil was disgusting and they’d probably die if they ate it. So I think they all went out, had loads of beer and went to bed without supper, which I, as the officer in charge, let them do.

But to put this into perspective, it must be pointed out that this was approaching 30 years ago and an awful lot has changed in that time.

First, if you wanted a special evening out, food was served from under silver salvers by obsequious waiters accompanied by patronising wine waiters. And then the wine, as likely as not, would have been something like Hirondel or Mateus Rose.

And while there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that it has to be admitted that choice was a little limited.

If you wanted a steak and were close to a town you’d go to a Bernie Inn; you’d have no idea where the steak came from and you wouldn’t, and probably couldn’t, order it rare.

Pub food was generally served in a basket, scampi was considered posh and a little bit exotic and chilli con carne was still only for the early adopters.

Nobody even considered where their food came from. In fact technology actually seemed to be answering all our prayers as we demanded ever cheaper food from the likes of supermarkets, and of course the precedent had already been set by the invention of sliced bread against which all further developments were measured.

But then, over a period of a few years, we underwent something of a revolution: there was more money, someone invented jet travel and the package holiday, people got richer and started to travel to exotic places and, as a result of all these things, demanded something more adventurous and exotic. They were answered with nouvelle cuisine which was definitely more imaginative but with smaller portions.

After people realised that they were being conned, chefs had to listen or this newly burgeoning restaurant industry was going to leave them jobless. So jus was invented and menus started to be liberally peppered with phrases such as “on a bed of” and “drizzled leaves”. Such was the excitement resulting from this revolution that the industry blossomed in the UK and even the French and Italians started to take us a little more seriously as we snapped up their ideas and Anglicised them.

But as I look around me at the industry in the UK, we seem to be returning to our roots. Not necessarily the vegetable kind, but back to the traditional dishes of my mother’s era and her mother’s before that.

However, it seems we’ve learnt a bit along the way, and we’re going to have to bow to the seasons to a greater extent and look to our local producers for supply. None of which, of course, is a bad thing. It’s interesting to note that Mateus Rose has made a recent comeback. But will we see the likes again of the chicken baskets?