» Foodie for thought
Katie likes her food posh, plentiful and served on somebody else’s expense account
When I was little my mum used to make me eat pilchards. Spooning the greasy brown fish from their can she’d warm them in their acid tomato sauce and plop them out onto wholemeal toast in front of me.
I used to assume she did this because she hated me (even if she claimed the fish were good for us), but in hindsight I suspect she did it because we were broke.
My mum eats food Gordon Ramsay would call ‘rustic’. Or f****** rustic. Stews, casseroles, pies, puddings -– hardworking, family meals. But personally, I’ve always liked my food posh.
To rebel, as soon as I left home I became a food snob. Sitting in student rooms, damp peeling the paper off the walls, the electricity meter empty, I’d feast on olives, artichokes, fresh mozzarella, baby tomatoes, fillet steak and dark chocolate. Sucking fresh figs for pudding and downing the lot with a bottle of chianti.
Even at times when I have been most impoverished I have always made sure there was enough money for Parma ham. The day I lost my virginity, we ate caviar.
Foodwise then, moving to London was a joy.
“I used to assume she did this because she hated me… I suspect she did it because we were broke”
In London I eat fancy as I like. Spurred on by the freebie nature of journalism, I’ve found a genuine smorgasbord of culinary opportunities there for the taking. Sashimi for breakfast, salt beef bagels for lunch and god-knows-what-it-is for dinner.
Since I moved into my new flat three months ago I’ve yet to manage a single shop – surviving instead solely on a diet of swanky dinners, lavish banquets, generous buffets and fancy canapés. All – stupendously – in the name of work.
For the past year I’ve dined like royalty – sometimes with royalty. I have eaten my way through a fistful of foie gras, necked enough oysters to make me vomit and piled plates high with shiny Russian caviar from bowls the size of a baby’s bath.
Sometimes we go to the Ivy, sometimes to the Tate, sometimes to that place where you eat in the dark – served by blind waiters, with no idea what you’re getting – and sometimes to Harrods to eat sticky Dunkin’ Donuts and crispy, coloured macaroons.
In a Japanese place in Soho you can eat sushi while the only sake sommelier in the country tops up your glass. And order plates of freshly cut sashimi, spread out like a beautiful exotic aquarium and served with flower tea that blooms open in the cup.
In the Savoy they arrive at the table wheeling whole sides of beef, huge sizzling roasts served with plates of steaming veg and lashings of gravy that would have made Enid Blyton foam at the mouth.
And at party after party, intricate arrangements of exquisite canapés arrive. Chorizo on flatbread, deep fried courgette flowers, grilled asparagus spears, mini cottage pies and skews of spiced chicken drift across the crowd, rarely making it the length of the room before the trays are whisked back to the kitchen to be restocked.
If you want it, you can eat it (as long as you appreciate that while you’re not paying for it, god knows how much you will get or when it will appear). So I arrive in London and I eat. I try everything. I am the culinary chameleon. Life tastes good.
And then a funny thing happens. When you have eaten all the rich food that other people’s money can buy, and you have spent a month downing bottles of champagne and ordering á la carte on someone else’s expenses, one day you’re walking home and there’s only one thing in the foodie world you’re craving that the whole capital can’t supply: a home cooked meal.
So I buy a tin of pilchards and have that instead.
