Journeys end in fancy eating

[shewhomust]

The flight from LA to London was as good as an eight-hour overnight flight in economy can be. There was no queue at passport control, and D. collected us from Heathrow and drove us to King's Cross, which was more than kind of him. Since we had neither queued for hours to have our passports verified, nor spent hours dragging our luggage across London during a tube strike, we had plenty of time before our train, so we lunched at the Gilbert Scott restaurant in the St Pancras Hotel, as an end-of-holiday treat.

We were just too late for the (comparatively) cheap lunch menu, which was unfortunate not just because it cost more but because the pricing policy is that everything is extra, which is presumably supposed to gibe you the illusion that things cost less than they do, but has the opposite effect of putting me on my guard anf=d making me feel they cost more. To the prices on the menu you have to add a cover charge (this strikes me as both petty and old-fashioned, but there it is: an extra £2 per head) and service. If you want vegetables with your main course, that's extra too - you have to order a side dish. On the other hand, there was a cute little amuse-bouche, a miniature white china barrel of vivid green soup (leek and wild garlic), and my main course, a puff patry tart of artichoke pieces laid on artichoke purée was very good. Dessert was pleasant but less successful. I forget how it was described, but the words pear, walnut, ice cream, sandwich and caramel appeared - the dish was a disc of ice-cream sandwiched between two biscuits, with a smear of satisfactorily intense pear purée and served with a little jug of molten toffee. The biscuits were more shortbead than walnut, and didn't offer enough contrast to the ice cream; and the sauce didn't feel integral to the dish. Service was charming young people in crisp white shirt sleeves, bustling about and hitting a good balance between formality and friendliness - but we had to remind them we had ordered wine (we'd ordered a half bottle, because it was the only sauvignon blanc in the lower reaches of the list - Pascal Jolivet's 'Attitude', details hidden on their irritating website, lots of green vegetable freshness - and if they'd brought it more promptly we might have been tempted to order the other half, so perhaps it's as well they didn't) and each time our water glasses needed filling. Worth it, on balance, when you throw in a glimpse of the renovated building - another time I might reverse the emphasis and try to book the tour of the building which includes afternoon tea.

The train carried us north through well-watered greenery, fields decorated with pools of gleaming water and rivers in spate. We're not in California any more.

I even managed to do a little work that evening, which is just as well, because we had an outing ooked for the following morning: a trip to Hexham, where Claudia Roden was speaking at the book festival, about her new book on the food of Spain. The first cookery books I bought were by Elizabeth David: but the book whose influence is most evident in the way I cook is Claudia Roden's book of Middle Eastern food. My first copy was passed on by my mother, and I wore it out; its replacement, the revised edition, is showing signs of strain. I love Claudia Roden's Italian book; and after our trip last autumn, I'd love to know more about Spain. So although it made no sense to commit to an event so close on our return home, I wasn't going to miss it.

I'm so glad we went. She's an interesting and a likable speaker - the format was 'in conversation', which can mean anything, but the questions were intelligent and served to nudge a fluent speaker forward along her own lines. She talked about how much of her research involves asking people for recipes - which many of them clearly regard as a cue to tell her their entire life story - so I wondered whether she speaks Spanish, and was pleased when the question came up. And even more delighted at the answer, which is that one of her grandmothers was a speaker of the language she refers to as medieval Judaeo-Spanish and which I know as Ladino. She described being in Santiago de Compostela, and being offered a cake made of oranges and almonds which she recognised as a Sephardic Passover cake (it's one I cook from her recipe, especially if I need a gluten-free cake). Her hosts were thrilled at this connection, and insisted she appear on television to explain it: &quoy;But I don't speak Spanish!"

Food geekery and language geekery, what more could I want? Of course I bought the book (durham_rambler took the picture).

Comments

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

My mother makes that cake. It's one of the family favourites.

And yes, my cooking, too, has been deeply influenced by that one book of hers. I love her encyclopedic Jewish cooking, but it never took over my life in quite the same way.