The one question I was asked when I began my two-week ‘respite’ at the nearby BUPA Highgate Home was if there was any food I disliked. The question proved to have been rhetorical: in this establishment, which cost almost £250 a day, the menu offered no choice. It was a matter of take it or leave it.
Having grown up during the war, when we learnt never to leave anything on our plates, I have never been very fussy about food, though I blanch at the sight of red meat and can’t stand the taste or smell of mustard. Luckily, I have only once been confronted by the other two foods – anchovies and caviar – which make my stomach heave, and have always avoided the Grand Central Oyster Bar which my husband liked to go to any time we were in New York.
How anyone can enjoy swallowing another living being? Yet I haven’t baulked at eating lobster, fresh off the lobsterman’s boat in Casco Bay . . .
That it should be luxury foods – with the exception of mustard – that I can’t abide tallies with my realising that much as I love MasterChef, I would rather stick with sausage and mash or fish fingers than try most of their concoctions.
The fact that I wasn’t defeated by a close encounter with mustard was entirely due to a staff shortage at the Lyons Tea Shop where I was doing a holiday job. The manager got into a self-righteous rage – ‘hoity-toity middle-class girl’ is what he would have been thinking – when I said that I couldn’t empty the mustard pots. A denizen of the filthy basement kitchen was summoned to take over: I have never been able to forget him. Thin as a weed and covered in carbuncles.
Credit: Royal Pavilion and Museums Brighton and Hove
Another near escape and an altogether happier memory was going to spend the day with friends who, although not dog lovers themselves, understood we would want to bring our dog with us, and have him under the table when our host brought in a mountainous Nicoise Salad, lavishly garnished with anchovies. Over the course of what seemed an endless meal, I managed to slip the anchovies to Patch and no one was any the wiser.
Nor did my relatives in Tallinn notice the difficulty with which I ate the caviar – meant only for Party officials – which my aunt who worked for the Fish Board was able to get hold of and made an appearance at every meal during our visit. No hardship for my husband who had only two very modest food dislikes: for some arcane reason he had it in for sweet potatoes and for what he insisted on calling Jell-O.
We returned home, our pockets clanking with little pots of Black Caviar.
