A strange book arrives in the post. It’s called 1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die, and is a follow-up, if that’s the right word, to 1,000 Places To See Before You Die. My first thought is: how exhausting. On the press release, the American chef and TV star Anthony Bourdain is quoted as saying it lists 1,000 foods we need to eat “urgently”, as if we are all suffering from some weird, life-threatening ailment that might only be cured by scoffing down a plate of Middendorf’s thin fish (a farmed catfish popular in the Mississippi Delta) or a bowl of hideg meggyleves (a Hungarian cold sour cherry soup). My second thought is: ugh, how grotesque. It’s too much, this global all-you-can-eat buffet. I can’t think I’ve ever had a particular longing to eat fenalar, the salted lamb beloved of Norwegians, or shav, the cold Ashkenazi soup made from sorrel. But even if I had, my desire would soon cool faced with this super-sized smorgasbord. Turning the book’s pages, what I feel I need most is a bowl of plain boiled rice and perhaps a side order of Pepto-bismol.
Foods are a bit like friends: there are only so many you can fit in your life at one time. Old ones – mashed potato, tinned tomato soup, orange-flavoured Jacob’s Clubs – are always lovely, there to fall back on when you’re glum or just starving, though occasionally, of course, you do outgrow the odd thing or two (in my case: Findus Crispy Pancakes, instant coffee, sliced white bread). Sometimes, a new one will arrive on the scene, and it’s love at first sight: you pal up, and gorge yourself. A lot of us, a few years ago, went through this with green curries, with the result that lasagne all but disappeared for a while, having been culled to make way for this new, supposedly more exotic dish. (I still miss lasagne, for which reason I was oddly stirred – you might say moved – to see it the other night on the menu at Angela Hartnett’s swanky St James’s restaurant, Cafe Murano) Other foods, meanwhile, one can cope with only infrequently, in small doses (again, like certain friends). Craving something seriously hot, you take yourself out to somewhere that does Hunan or Sichuan cooking, and in the heat of your lust, over-order by about eight dishes. But then the food arrives, and you remember the last time you did this, you thought your tongue was going to spontaneously combust and your husband refused to sleep in the same bed as you for eight days. Even before you’ve laid down your chopsticks in defeat, you’re overcome with chilli-fatigue and remorse.
Nausea aside, this is also an immoderately dumb take on the world’s culinary habits: hackneyed and out-of-date. Remember at school, when the Frenchmen in text books were never pictured without a baguette tucked under one of their arms? (“Monsieur Navet est trop gros pour l’autobus!”) Well, this is a bit like that. The book’s author, Mimi Sheraton, a former restaurant critic of the New York Times, has designed it geographically, grouping foods according to country. So I turn to Britain to see what the tourist hordes inspired by 1,000 Foods to Eat Before You Die might soon be trying to hunt down on these shores. In my mind’s eye, I have a rather pleasing image of a load of foodie Brooklynites, their rucksacks stuffed full of Tupperware, boarding the 10 o’clock East Coast service from King’s Cross to Newcastle, the better to try and bag themselves some real pease pudding. “It’s kinda like hummus,” they would say to each other, as they flew past Darlington. “Only way, way better!” (This is an opinion with which I half concur, given the general nastiness and mucked-about-ness of the hummus most people eat.)
But, no. Among the cliches – sorry, I mean “transcendent tastes” – to be found in Sheraton’s British section are: roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, fish and chips, Cornish pasties and jellied eels. There are also mentions for cheddar, biscuits (she recommends Carr’s and McVitie’s), currants (we love currants, apparently, and stick them in all manner of “pies”) and smoked salmon. It’s as if Dick van Dyke had gone mad in Tesco. I think again of my Brooklynites, though by now they’ve morphed into Texans in baseball caps and mustard golfing pants. “Driver! Take me to somewhere I might try these famous jellied eels of yours!” I suppose it could happen. I mean, I wish it would. Truly. But I don’t, in all honesty, believe that Manze and London’s other beleaguered pie and mash shops should be preparing for a sudden transatlantic rush.
