I have several categories of food that I like to distinguish. Many people have a basic system of ‘good’ food and ‘bad’ food and I often hear how people play out this dietary dichotomy, dividing up calendar days to the virtuous or evil. I wonder if assigning comestibles with moral qualities also generalises to all behaviour on those ‘cheat’ days? Does eating chocolate bars and having fries coincide with dishonesty and stealing? Activities otherwise unconscionable on alternate days are all-okay on ‘cheat-day’? Does it allow for ‘cheating’ by taking the bit on the side with the big rack to the local steakhouse for extra sides with a rack of ribs?
Such quandaries aside, every day is a food day for me. Each day is a hunt for nourishment, deliciousness, distraction and high doses of sugar. In an effort to rein in my waistline and spending, I have times when I try to ‘reduce’. These sorts of periods are not marked by piety but profound sadness. Sometimes I even feel the experience of basic hunger: a feeling I’m not acquainted with. It’s horrible.
All things being equal, my food categories would be the aforementioned ‘sick-foods’, ‘excluding-breakfast-edibles’ (this is conceptually the inverse of “all-day-breakfast”: eggs Benedict for dinner is okay; ditto hash browns at lunch; cereal for dessert is tasty and ingenious but roast duck or a dozen oysters first thing in the morning is crazy and definitely E.B.E), ‘wine-chaperones’ (self-explanatory) ‘mutually-exclusives’ (non-pairing flavours/ingredients), ‘shame-foods’ (moral dimension based on a variety of factors not just caloric value), ‘retrotasties’ (delicious things from childhood), ‘insta-meals’ (e.g. this includes sushi train, burritos and pre-packed sandwiches in the refrigerated section of a service station or supermarket) and ‘invisible snacks’ (basically soft drink with artificial sweetener and; candies and breath mints that can induce bowel activity if consumed in excess [which is never quantified]).
Today I had an afternoon tea of herrings, home-made seeded pumpernickel, sauerkraut and Assam tea. This is a ‘pantry-meal’. Also known as a CBF-snack and possibly mistaken for a ‘sick food’ (which it couldn’t possibly be because the bread is hard to make and the result was also hard to chew). Pantry-meals are the result of culinary resourcefulness; bringing together a disparate group of food-stuffs to make one complete meal. Its success is based on how edible and filling it is. It should be a reasonably balanced (in flavour not nutrient value) meal created solely on existing groceries in the kitchen cupboards. This may be because one is house-bound, not able to muster up the requisite motivation to go to the local shops or is awaiting payday.
My father was the master of the pantry-meal. I used to see him take a break from work to eat a lunch of white baguette, tinned tuna , grapes, left-over spring rolls and Vietnamese dipping sauce. Then he would have a coffee and a cigarette and go back to work. The ingredients varied with what was in-season and what was left-over from dinner. He always made it look very tasty, setting out the separate components like a tasting plate and he would always sit down at the table to eat it.
So, I continue the tradition of the pantry-meal. If I were a famous person, I would be very pleased to have a meal named after me. Or a cocktail. But I think it would also be neat to have a unique form of repas specific to one’s vocation, such as the Ploughman’s lunch, or Fisherman’s soup. How about the following?
- Middle-Management-1-minute-meatloaf
- Executive Eggs (I imagine it to be a something in-between the Snow Egg at Quay and a raw egg cracked into a tall glass of scotch that’s laced with gold leaf/truffles/Beluga caviar/cocaine/saffron/shareholders’ tears)
- Secretary’s Spread (I have to work on that one)
- Retail Repos-to-go
- Procurator’s Prandium
- HobNobber’s Nosh (for marketing and PR professionals)
- Cabbie’s Khana (not racist, I swear)
- Pre-huddle muddle (lean, agile, liquefied and lo-cal)
- Rector’s Refection (should definitely involve bad-foods)
Please feel free to add a new name or create a recipe for these exciting additions to our culinary nomenclature. Alliteration is not required, but it seems to be my only literary trick.