Tripe, Blackberries, an onion and the Red arrows. (Gourmet & Speciality Foods in general)

Member Name: Celandine

Product:	Gourmet & Speciality Foods in general
Date:	30/06/01 (1042 review reads)
Rating:

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One person's baked beans on toast, is another's haricot casserole simmered in sun-dried tomato sauce with ciabatta croutons. Caviar or Cods roe? Shippams fish paste (the sort in the teensy little jars) or Gentleman's relish ( the sort in the smart white pot, labelled 'Patum Pepperatum'. Gourmet? What on earth does it mean? It's all to do with taste, yes, but also fashion, where you live, and what 'food' means to you, as an individual.

My grandfather, born and bred in Yorkshire, used to sneak out, when my Nanna wasn't looking, and buy thin white slices of tripe from the local butcher. He'd prepare them, with great care, peppering them, flouring them, and slicing onions incredibly finely with a very sharp knife. Then he'd fry them slowly, with milk, treating his audience of one small girl to a culinary demonstration you'd find surprising in a burly miner. This meal, together with little pots of cockles and winkles bought from Doncaster market, eaten with a little wooden fork, was his 'gourmet' food of choice. To me (and yes, I ate it - strange though that might seem in a budding vegetarian, but how could I refuse something so lovlingly prepared from my adored Grandpa?) the tripe tasted like bits of inner tube with a sort of milky dressing. I doubt many people would call it 'gourmet', but, then, I've eaten snail, and that tastes like little bits of blu-tack in a garlic marinade. So there you go.

I wasn't allowed to eat the winkles, but I'm told they're a bit like chewing vinegar. You're meant to swallow them whole, like oysters, and really, apart from the social connotations, and the vinegar, I can't see how the experience can be that different. Oh, except I don't think they sell winkles in The Oyster Bar.

It isn't just where you buy food, or how you prepare food, but it's where you eat it, as well. I can count the amount of times I've di
ned at really posh restaurants on one hand, but once it was Bibendum, where I ate, errr, a baked onion, for part of the meal. Now, it was a lovely baked onion, and beautifully cooked. It was probably a prince amongst onions when raw, but it was still a baked onion. My Mum did baked onions with our Sunday Dinners when I was a child, for goodness sake. Why was this, particular onion, suddenly billed as 'gourmet'? When I think of it, the onion was a bit smug. It sat there, in it's bakedness, looking all pretty with a plate to itself, and proclaiming that, somehow, it was a cut above all those other onions I'd eaten. I don't even particularly like baked onions, for goodness sake, but I'd had to order this one, just to see if it was somehow different, like Cinderella's pumpkin coach.

By contrast, something like Paté de foie gras, or truffles, is pretty dead cert gourmet, the former because of the weird preparation (see peel.rebekah, if you want to know the details) and, in the latter case, the rarity. I could class asparagus in the same breath, but I'm loath to. I mean, little tender fresh asparagus tips could be classed as a gourmet food, but does that mean the slimy brine laded fingers of asparagus you get in tins at Tesco is gourmet, too? Maybe it's the quality of the product, that makes the eventual food a 'gourmet' one? I don't think it has that much to do with presentation, anyway. I've eaten some very bad, nasty tasting 'Duck with a black cherry confit' type things, served with what tasted like instant mash pancakes, presented on a huge white sparkling plate, and looking as if they'd come straight from the pages of a glossy cookery magazine. I'd rather go to Wagamama and slurp noodles at benches, thank you, and that experience isn't a gourmet one, by any stretch of the imagination.

So.....pretentious food is not necessarily 'gourmet' food, but then, it's difficult
to prove the case of tripe and onions as a 'gourmet' dish, regardless of its lack of pretention, freshness, and loving cooking. I don't, really, think my onion was 'gourmet' either, regardless of it's surroundings. I sometimes wonder if there's 'country' gourmet, and 'town' gourmet, and what's happened recently, is the lines have started to blur between the two, as posh eateries have cottoned on to the fact that food like a good raised pie, game soup, and puddings like apple charlotte and rhubard crumble, are both tasty, and, if presented carefully enough, can pass muster with the finickitiest critic. It's a fashion thing. I'm reliably informed by my Dad, that eating at Veeraswamys ( the first Indian restaurant in London, or so he says) was extra super-dooper trendy in the mid sixties. This was 'gourmet', as was (apparantly), pizza, and chianti in those weird raffia-covered bottles. (Oh, and Annello and Davide boots, and I'm longing to find out if anyone apart from my father ever wore them).

My argument is, here, that a good pizza could still be called 'gourmet' just as a good wine is a good wine regardless of the bottle. But.......then I remember the Parma ham, that came over from Italy with a flatmate, and how beautiful those thin, gorgeous slices were. That was gourmet.......maybe? That was a foodstuff that's billed as gourmet, and tasted lovely, but then, so does haggis, or black pudding, if you're so inclined. I've met people who think that a Little Chef breakfast is gourmet dining, and I've met those who won't eat outside the capital, because the country smells, and so therefore the food must, too. Me? I'm a fan of little country pubs, which serve home-made beef in beer pies, and mushroom risottos that taste like they've got some mushrooms in them. I hate Little Chef breakfast's, but then I hate lobster, too. I like deep, rich chocolate puddin
gs, with strawberries and cream, but I hate tiramisu, regardless of whether it's the 'real thing' as made on the premises of funky little patisseries, or the fudgey goo sold in motorway service stations.

So what on earth is 'gourmet'? I think it's a combination of things. You know those little flip books, made like the games of 'head and tails' where you have combinations of animals all jumbled up together - the trunk of a frog, head of an elephant, and bottom of a giraffe? Well, I think true 'gourmet' is when you get the mixture just right. The ingredients have to be fresh, gorgeous and good, to start with, and then they have to be prepared with love and care. I think, even though I hated it, that my Grandpa's tripe could maybe qualify for gourmet, but then I'm biased. I know what I remember as gourmet, from holidays at my Grandparents and that's eating peas straight from the pod in his vegetable garden, and taking the first tiny stems of pale pink rhubarb, dipping them in sugar, and eating them raw.

I've a recent 'country' gourmet experience, that probably isn't gourmet at all. Last Autumn, on one of those fine, goldeny crisp days, sort of tail end of the summer, but with a slight chill around because it's the early morning, I bundled up baby in her pram, popped on a big pink woolly jumper, and wellies, and set off on a long walk. We went down a track through to a little lane just outside our village, where we spotted an enormous blackberry bush. I don't know why they had only just ripened, so late in the season, but it was quite shady, where they were, and they'd just reached their peak. Loads of them. Huge, black, shiny blackberries. So, we picked them, carefully avoiding the bottom of the bushes ( dog pee zone, beware all fruit pickers).

While we picked, and scoffed, and got black sticky fingers and black sticky smudges on the pram blanket, the Red Arrow
s (yes, the aeroplanes) started to practise overhead. So we picked blackberries, in the sunshine, and were treated to our own private airshow, standing in a tiny country lane, miles from anywhere, with only a tractor in the distance for company. We took the blackberries home, and I made a blackberry and apple plate pie, offsetting the tartness of the berries with vanilla sugar, and sprinkling crunchy demerara on top. This wasn't a gourmet pie, but it's one of the nicest things I've eaten. I'll give you the recipe if you like, but I know I'm straying from the point, and going on and on (sorry). My point is, that if you like it, and it taste's nice, then it doesn't really matter whether it's gourmet or not. Food is to be enjoyed, whether that be in a posh London restaurant, a kitchen, or standing in a field in the middle of Lincolnshire.

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