129. What Is Lunch?

 

Birmingham - The 1890s - no school lunches then.

  

So what is lunch? For most, I suppose, it is the meal between breakfast and dinner though you might slip in tea, or what now has to be afternoon tea, between lunch and dinner. Of course lunch in some parts of Britain and among some social groups may still be dinner, in which case dinner becomes tea but not afternoon tea. Then there’s supper which has all sorts of meanings depending still, I think, on social status.

  These are the dark, dull, damp, dreary days of mid-winter in the midst of a third nationwide ‘lockdown’ (a noun which nauseatingly often does not seem to require either a definite or an indefinite article  especially when employed by the increasingly tiresome producers and announcers of the BBC who strive to bowdlerise English at every opportunity available to them). Our restaurants have been banished to a shadow dimension but food still makes the news. And particularly lunch it seems.

  These dark days of this present Lockdown have been brightened up for me by picking up and diving into, a chapter at a time, a copy of Pen Vogler’s recently published Scoff, a master work of the history of food in Britain and its relationship to class. Perhaps it’s a little light, I’d like a great tome myself with the sketches extended into highly detailed facts, every page a Eureka moment; the author clearly has a compendium of knowledge she could impart in several volumes of a British food encyclopaedia, but this book, with its rather pretty dust jacket, does indeed deliver those instances of ah ah! regularly throughout its 470 pages to make me keep coming back for more. Here indeed is the history of the British restaurant which I should love to see expanded from a chapter to a book and there there is the tale of why the British eat in the way they do now and again here’s the story of the way certain foods found their way on to British plates and sometimes off again. Pretty good stuff. And written with a playful irony and sense of humour and generously restrained hint of contempt for the worst sort of food fashions such as the numerous food intolerances that have been experienced by astonishing numbers of the middle class in recent years.

  And then there’s the fascinating chapter on lunch. Or is it dinner. Well, once it was dinner and for some it was breakfast and it seems those who like to call it luncheon may be on a sticky wicket, better to call it nuncheon if you’re not going to call it lunch or dinner. And just what it should be made up of and how much should be eaten during it is a puzzle wrapped up in a riddle wrapped up in a conundrum in itself.

 

 It is coincidental to my reading of Vogler's book that lunch has been such a big national issue recently and has been intermittently for several months that I really must mention it to fit it into this intermittent history of Birmingham food. A great national outpouring of outrage was unleashed when the government announced that it would not provide free school lunches for children who were not at school on a half-term holiday. It was not felt right by those who like to be outraged and those who are frightened of what the outraged may say that parents should be responsible for providing food for their children if they were at home causing a general nuisance to their parents by being there. The government’s resolve to make people pay for one week at least for their children’s food soon collapsed in the face of the universal outrage and they agreed to either providing food vouchers to enable the families to pay for their food or alternatively provide packages of food so that the family could prepare their own children’s food whether or not food preparation was something that families ever got involved in doing normally. 

  Provision of food packages was a gross error on the government’s part since packages turned up which the Outraged claimed were inadequate to sustain a child for 10 days (they were intended to cover 5 lunches). One furious mother delved into her child’s food package, lay the contents on the floor and set about photographing the resulting still life and then published the results of her photographic efforts on one or a number of the social media. The photographic challenge was soon taken up by other members of the Outraged and for a few days social media was full of photographs of loaves and potatoes and tins of baked beans and government ministers in a panic rushed to denounce the inadequacy of the contents of the boxes.

  So just how miserly and Scroogeian were these lunch boxes (remember they were meant to provide lunch only for 5 days and guidelines stated that they should not include pre-prepared food or take up space in refrigerators and obviously everything in them should be considered to be ‘healthy - which are quite limiting criteria when someone is trying to work out what to put in them)?

  The photograph taken by the first outraged mother is shown below. There are 2 potatoes which could be prepared as jacket potatoes for 2 lunches when served with half of the baked beans each time. There is a loaf which would provide more than enough bread for the remaining three days of sandwiches - one day of cheese and tomato and cheese on the other days. Alternatively half the beans could have been used to provide a filling meal of beans on toast and some of the cheese diverted for melting on top of a jacket potato for variety. However the package seems to have nothing in it to spread on the bread to make it more appetising. There is a piece of fruit provided for each day and the carrots can be peeled and sliced to eat as crudités. There is also a reasonably sized bag of pasta which is probably enough for one meal or possibly two (is this package for a seven year old or a fourteen year old.) and so generally this package is not quite so inadequate as a source of a single child’s lunches for five days when the contents are analysed and thought given as to what to do with the contents. But I should think the potatoes might be a little larger, some spread for the bread should have be included, 2 pieces of fruit should have been supplied per day, another tomato would not have been over generous and some meat as an alternative to cheese should have been offered for variety (though the colourful cylindrical packets may indeed be pepperami). 

  So there we are, a child’s lunch. Ironically, here in Birmingham several quick-to-outrage Labour councillors took to social media to complain about the adequacy of food packages sent to local schools to hand out but it later emerged that most packages to schools were actually supplied by the Labour-run city council itself and complaints ceased almost immediately.

  One final thought, I wonder if one of our leading chefs in the city might have ideas for putting together a children’s package for the rest of the present Lockdown - there’s a challenge but perhaps a little risky with the Outraged waiting to pounce.

   

118. Second Wave Art.

 

  It’s hard to think that any major Birmingham chef has come up with more imaginative ways to save his business than The Wilderness’ Alex Claridge. And now, as we enter the third week of the Second Wave ‘Lockdown’, with its fresh assault on the viability of countless businesses which have been the pride and joy of so many hard-working, inventive and self-sacrificing people, we find Claridge coming up with a new angle - the sale of new original art, ironic, humorous and related to his business. Great stuff. 

  I have been enthusiastic about our great local restaurants using art to promote their businesses - see Blogs 97, 100 and 101 - great cuisine is art even though since the 1980s there have been numerous attempts - more unsatisfactory than the modern experts would admit - to subvert cuisine into science. I think, at least I have a feeling that art is winning, and chefs are once more rejoicing in the art of gastronomy rather than the science of gastronomy. And a good thing too if you ask me.

  So why not use art to promote and celebrate gastronomy as well as using it as a means of keeping  businesses afloat during these COVID days?

  So this week, an e mail from The Wilderness arrived promoting a takeaway dish for those who are lost in the wilderness based on a Claridge classic to while away these COVID days and long dark nights - the Unhappy Meal - the source of the inspiration for the dish is undoubted. Described thus, “A limited edition of our much-loved ‘Big Mac’ dish. Taking inspiration from the most notorious of fast food, we’ve created a beef tartare dressed in a coal oil and finished with gherkin ketchup, aged cheddar custard, soy caramel and pickles. Paired with potato fries, and a maple, malt and cinnamon milkshake, this is the most extravagant meal deal you’ll find. For the adventurous and hungry, we’ve partnered with Exmoor caviar to offer a supplementary supersize with Exmoor Royal Beluski caviar. Priced from £30 foot 2 people. I’m loving it”.

  The accompanying photographic portrait of the dish is full-on food porn and enough to drive lusty men insane with desire. Lusty women too for that matter.

  But I like the accompanying offers. The Wilderness is also offering for sale 2 pieces of art connected to the Unhappy Meal 2020 culinary gem. The first, which most appeals to me, is a splendid unhappy Clown (vaguely recognisable I think) photograph with the colourful subject, glum, forehead pressed to knuckles, sitting in darkness surrounded by discarded cardboard milkshake cups and used fast food packaging looking for all the world as though he has had a pretty depressing lockdown and the weight of the future of his business weighing on his mind, no doubt allegorical of the state of mind of many restaurant owners, chefs and all their staff. The photograph is by Emma Tronson and is sold in an edition of just 10, signed by the photographer, Alex Claridge and Marius Gedminas. I managed to secure the last unsold photograph.

  There is also a limited edition (of 10) giclee print of an illustration by Liam Kerr titled, not surprisingly, ‘Unhappy Meal” which depicts a fairly familiar clown figure with a ‘W’ badge on his chest, dropping, apparently in disgust, a paper bag which presumably is one used for takeaway fast food. An interesting item and pleasingly priced at just £15 unmounted.

  Claridge not for the first time has brought art not just into his food but his whole way of doing things.

  While I’m on the subject of signed photographs (which I was at some point above) I so far have failed to mention that Glynn Purnell’s book A Purnell’s Journey There And Back Again, described in Blog 116, was sold with a signed photograph inside depicting Purnell looking, er, well I’m not sure but maybe his feelings at the time were somewhat coloured by standing in the St Andrews football ground where the Birmingham City Football team does its best on a regular basis to cause pain and anguish to its supporters of whom Glynn Purnell is currently one of the most notable.

  There’s art everywhere at the moment. Fine dining restaurants have been selling high class takeaways throughout the ‘lockdowns’ and in between them, and Carter’s of Moseley has been right in the lead here in Birmingham in using this alternative means of keeping the business going. In one of the online communications about available reservation times the restaurant used a modern version of a Bertie Bassett lookalike picture mounted on one of the restaurant walls with the inscription, obviously heartfelt, “CONTROL + ANXIETY 2020”..

  Brad Carter has previously written a book, Staff, with recipes not from those of his restaurant but something a little more doable in the home setting. The book has now been reissued in an expanded format and retitled Staff - Expanded B-Sides. As I haven’t seen the original version and not yet received my copy of the revised edition I shall have to report back when the parcel deliverer knocks on my door with what may just be something quite interesting.