Schmaltz

by Matt Mahon

An incomplete list of fats.

The fat that rises to the top of chicken stock, after you’ve skimmed the scum. If no one’s watching, leave it there and drop all the vegetables through it so they bob around coated to a high gloss. If someone objects, the fat is removed from the stock but is snuck back into the soup in the kneidl mixture.

The connective tissue and fat in a shoulder of lamb, rendered to the point that the meat can be pulled from the bone with tongs. My father always says, “The meat can be pulled from the bone with tongs!”

That same lamb fat in the bottom of the tray the next day. If the lamb was rubbed with spices, the congealed fat is grainy and fluorescent yellow, and the gravy is bitter. The hard sheets of fat can be lifted out nearly whole to be thrown away, but there’s always a remainder. Mix in washing up liquid and emulsify it so it doesn’t clog the drain.

The grainy fat in cold lamb sliced the next day, a fat which coats the roof of your mouth like a cheap pastry.

Jellified chicken fat, schmaltz, revealed as you lift the cold chicken carcass out of the pot the next day. Best if still studded with the roast carrots and fennel. Put it in a sandwich with the chicken, roast vegetables and with mayonnaise. The first foie gras was a by-product of the schmaltz industry, as Ashkenazi Jews who didn’t have access to vegetable oils began force-feeding geese to produce more cooking fat.

Other jellified fats: pork pies with enough jelly (hard to find) and piccalilli, beef tongue sliced with gherkins.

Rendered fat, and fat mixed with meat. I’ve inherited a preference for streaky bacon over back. The fat in belly pork. Çöp shish. Crispy fat down the length of tandoori rib chops and pirzola.

Lardo, sliced thin on thin toast and grilled clear, with creamy goat’s cheese added afterwards. I can’t cut it finely enough by hand, and Continental Stores has closed down.

The fat on pork chops. These were not often enjoyed in our house. We didn’t keep kosher, but unadulterated pork was sometimes a step too far. Pork chops were out, but in a nod to the Irish side, boiled bacon ribs were fine (most of the fat to be left behind on the bone), and always eaten with floury potatoes and greens covered in butter.

Butter. Butter in everything. Every recipe begins: fry onions in butter with a bay leaf and salt.

Miso Memory

by Hannah Gregory

We would go to the small mall on the corner. First up to the third floor, from the basement carpark to the video rental, then down to the second floor for the restaurant. At the video rental I chose things like Beethoven (I & II), Turner & Hooch, and the Macauley Culkin ones. The chat between them about whether or not she liked or had seen a certain movie or series was more interesting to me than choosing a film for myself, so I earwigged while browsing the video boxes, to their chat which was grown-up, without being dull, maybe even cool. I listened, to find out. Later I would watch the movies in the darkened front room, and was given a dessert pot of Mövenpick or a Häagen Dazs ice on a stick; just me and the two dogs – jet-lagged, alone, and, for now, just fine.

The furnishings of the restaurant were soft pinkish red with dark wood and papery screens dividing the dining booths around the edges of the room. I knew what I wanted right away – I suppose because someone had suggested I have it before – tempura udon soup, with prawns, or maybe just veg: sweet potato slices in crisp shells, lotus root, and something stalky and green; the prawns’ tails fanning out of their coats which fell off into the broth as I ate. Particulates of soybean paste sitting cloudy in the dashi stock, and sharp bright scallions scattered over the top, as I fished for the disintegrating batter with a deep soup spoon.

Digging down into the bowl the fat chewy noodles would stir, slippery noodles that you were allowed to slurp. I learnt this in a different noodle bar where the chefs behind the counter stretched and cut long lengths of elastic dough. I was wondering about the noisy eaters all around me, and he told me that slurping was, in fact, a technique developed to suck up the dripping noodles fast without burning the sides of your mouth. With chopsticks I was already proficient because she had bought me a training pair with rings to put your thumb and two fingers through on my first visit, somehow incredulous that this six year old was not already agile.

The miso with udon was the first I’d tasted and the only one I would know for some time – back in Nottingham in the nineties there weren’t any Japanese restaurants. When I returned to the grey concrete of my school playground during lunch break, I would crave the comforting warmth and saltiness of the broth, and the sweet bite of the prawns – that, or the feeling of being away, alone, and just fine.

 

Paris, parsley and pasta

by Sophie

I was in Paris when I received a text from my mum saying my dad was in hospital, again. As an alcoholic these hospital trips were no rarity for my father but the frequency and unsurprising nature of them did not reduce my anxiety. Repeatedly having seizures (in a Tescos car park, in the newsagents around the corner from my house, at home alone and falling down the stairs, breaking his leg and cracking his head open) were the cause but nothing would stop him drinking. When it was announced he might have pneumonia I had a quick google and found myself in a state of panic. 

Distance added to my worry. I normally live about 2 hours away but i wasn’t going home for a few more days and couldn’t afford another flight. I lay in bed waiting for my friend next to me to wake up and once she did spent my day thinking about what we would have for dinner. I find that food is the only remedy when I feel low, I spend hours watching ‘River Cottage,’ and browsing recipe books, but here I had none of my  usual comforts. 

The aim of the trip to Paris was to eat well so when I requested to make dinner my friend eyed me suspiciously. She is normally in charge of the cooking and is very good at it, she’d made steak with garlic greens the night before and it was a tough act to follow. We visited the local Monoprix and after walking around and eyeing up the fish counter, smelling the herbs in the vegetable section and thinking ‘carbs will help me here’ I decided what to make. Tagliatelli with prawns, chorizo, garlic and parsley. Quite a simple dish but it was the best meal I’ve ever made, my friend even quipped ‘I didn’t know you could cook’. I don’t think I will ever be able to make or eat the meal again but I always keep it in mind. 

Tahini and oranges

by Anonymous

I was feeding my baby and, as I often and rather obsessively do, smelling her hands. Whichever hand is free I reach it up to my face and drag it over my mouth and nose. The feel of the soft, sometimes tacky skin combined with the smell not only tells a tale of her eating but is also a powerful tonic for me. Sometimes she is bothered by my doing this and pulls away her hand. Other times, especially if she is falling asleep as she was on this occasion, the hand is all mine. On that morning I smelled tahini and oranges. In that moment those smells were ancient to me: earth, sand, river water, moonbeam, firelight, tree root, blood, tahini, oranges.

That’s quite a kick

by Anonymous

A family holiday in Slovenia when I was about 16 was my first time trying something wasabi flavoured, it was a large bag of wasabi flavoured crisps which I ate entirely on my own, revelling in the spicy kick they had. That night at dinner I thought the soup we were having tasted a bit strange, it didn’t seem to have any flavour. It tasted cold even though I knew it was hot. It took me another course to realise that I’d managed to damage my tastebuds and couldn’t taste a thing. It was 2 days before I was able to taste anything again. Since then I’ve not stopped picking anything wasabi whenever I’m given the chance.

Ming at Mermaid Ave

by Bre Audrey Graham

Sunscreen may be the first thing you smell, but sea salt is the first thing you taste. Standing on the top my balcony, overlooking the ocean you take one big breath in and you’ll taste the sea on the tip of your tongue.

I’ve lived away from my house for most of my life. Our family home sits at the top of a cliff on Mermaid Avenue in a seaside suburb in Sydney. The only way to describe it is that it’s paradise. When I land back home in Australia, I always have the same ritual. After the 24 hour flight from London and after the unfurling of limbs, my Mum takes me home via the slower scenic route.

It’s all about the first look. The glimpses of the ocean that I can catch from the car windows. They start slowly like little flickers of blue between the houses and then just before we turn onto my street, there she is. The ocean, the bay and rock pools I grew up on and all that salty sea air that is waiting to push itself into my polluted London lungs.

Last time I went home, the house was all but empty. With my parents living overseas, half the contents of our home was sitting in a house by the Rhine in Germany. With no drivers license and an aversion to getting on any form of Sydney public transport once it’s over 30 degrees outside, I walked 25 minutes uphill to the fish shop.

The walk was worth it for the brown paper wrapped huge prawns I left with inside a plastic bag filled with ice. Big green tiger prawns, prawns that you don’t see outside the southern hemisphere. As I walked home the ice dripped in the sun, soaking my leather sandals with every step as the heat beat down on me.

This wasn’t just going to be a meal for me. I was cooking for my Ming, my cat. Ming is my mirror in life, my little cat from Singapore that I miss every time I hear a bell ring or a cat purr. Ming has been my baby since I was ten. I was first handed her when she was a three-week-old kitten my mother had found left for dead in a plastic bag at the wet markets in Singapore during the SARS outbreak. I dripped water into her mouth and fed her the best things I could find.

Her fur constantly damp with my teenage tears, she knew about all the bullies and all the boys. And still, now, things feel real again when I can whisper them to her and tell her how I’ve changed in our years apart since I left for London at 18. She’s been there for it all and knows things that no one else has ever heard. The things she has given me, I give back to her in food. A slight cat, her appetite knows no bounds.

A strange cat, my Ming eats anything. From a long line of market dwelling street cats, she happily gnaws her way through plastic bags to get to a roast chicken inside and shreds paper bags to chew the corners of fresh baguettes. At 12 when we left Singapore and moved her to Sydney, I knew how much she missed the humid rain and sleeping under our mango tree and chasing the tropical butterflies that filled the air. So I as a bored and curious child left her out bowls of coconut milk to sip thinking it might remind her of the tropics she was from.

I’ve seen her lick at the lid of a jar of curry paste and we share pancakes and bacon and every Christmas Ming has her own plate of ham, turkey, and stuffing to suffice her dealing with a house full of children for one day. A tiny cat, she eats with curiosity, and a ferocious fear like it’s all about to be taken away. But after watching her lick her paws in the sun, she’s the perfect vision of contentment. I love watching her belly swell before she curls up like a little Russian hat and falls asleep.

So, after not coming home back to Sydney for a year, I knew I had to make Ming something special to make up for it. Chilli and garlic barbecued prawns to be shared with the love of my childhood in the garden of my family home. She sat on top of the kitchen bench watching me while I tossed the prawns in chopped red chili, garlic, lemon zest and olive oil. I heated up the charcoal on the barbecue outside and grilled them till they were charred and blackened.

The chili was strong and hot, and the olive oil dripped through onto the charcoal and hissed. Once done, I squeezed over more lemon and put them on a plate that balanced on my chest while my legs were stretched out on the table in the Sydney sunshine. With Ming sitting next to me, I peeled off each shrimps shell and made her up her own plate of prawn heads, legs, and tails.

My hands looked like I had been digging for diamonds. Ming didn’t care about the shambles of this scene. I ate each prawn one by one, with a sip of very cold white wine between each bite as Ming crunched her way through the plate of shells. Breaking through their brains, licking her lips after eating their little black eyes. She loved the chili, she loved the garlic. At the end when all our prawns were gone, I washed up and Ming and I lay out on the hot tiles and napped in the sun.

All that was left of the scene was an empty wine glass and two ladies sleeping. Both not as young or as foolish as when they first came into each other’s lives, but still the same under the Sydney sun very full with a lifetime of love.

bleu du vercors-sassenage and vedett

by Alex

It’s summer and we are both back in the town we grew up in. Not for long, for both us, but we don’t know that yet. I have finished my masters degree in librarianship and I’m commuting every day into Manchester, working on an cataloguing project: 19th century, private library. I learn a bit of latin, and feel uncultured and povvo compared to the rest of the staff and members of the institution. It’s shit money. I’m not eating a ton. The 40 minute train ride back into Yorkshire in the early evening is hot and stuffy each day and I spend most of it listening hard to music and biting back tears, because my world spun on it’s axis a few months before.

Anyway: it’s summer and we are both back in the town we grew up in. I was leaving town, years before, when we really paid attention to one another. Pretty soon we were glued to one another’s sides, total companions, quietly cheerful. Drinking a lot, arguing some, dancing some. He makes me feel fucking funny. We smoke, watch a lot of films, travel some, have no money. Lovely! I read books and listen to weird italo disco. He runs and listens to weird gabber tracks. It’s nice!

But yes, it’s summer and we are both back in the town we grew up in. I’m getting off the train and know he’s waiting. The air is cooler outside the city and we walk through the park, along the canal up to the fox and goose. It’s a member run, ramshackle old pub. They change the beers on a frequent-ish rotation. It is not trendy. There’s mildew on the walls, but you can sit on the roof and smoke and drink and look out at the dark satanic mills that our town is made up of. He just got back from Nantes, to see our friend Simon. I was supposed to go, too, but we are broken up now.

I always have a bottled beer, a lindeboom or tyskie or vedett. It’s so cheap. He drinks, as he always has, doubly faster than me. I have a vedett, and he pulls out some bleu du vercors-sassenage all wrapped in clingfilm, and a cheese knife. A fuckin cheese knife! I find these moments (there are many) so maddening because I am used to a tinny in the garden, a meat and two veg tea. Dinner is at lunchtime, tea is dinner. 5.30pm. I’m used to it because I know him. It feels comfortable. But I’ve been used to a chippy tea on a friday for longer so it’s still uncomfortable, a little embarrassing, a little jarring. Anyway we aren’t together but still tied together, not quite ready to be nothing to one another. He’s dating someone. We talk about it, our voices spiky. The cheese is delicious. I keep ripping off bits of it. The sun’s going down. We kiss, he walks me to the bus stop. I’m going to London next month.

Tinned Pilchards

by Dawn Foster
My mother came home one night from the evening class she attended at the local college with a man we’d never met. The Jobcentre, or Department for Social Security as it was known back then, had suggested she go to increase employability. She didn’t find a job, but she did find a new boyfriend: that night he encouraged us to jump on him, my sister and I were between the ages of four and six, and he threw us in the air as we all howled with laughter. Shortly afterwards, he moved in and never moved out. I wasn’t fazed by having a de facto stepfather, my memories of my parents’ short marriage were dim: I was a bump in the wedding photos, and they broke up for good shortly after my sister’s conception when I was two-and-a-half years old. She was lonely and often unhappy, as single mothers often are.

For all of us, the honeymoon period didn’t last long. My stepfather had a horrendous temper and was incredibly easy to anger. Quickly, many more siblings were conceived and born, and the house was full of children and the attendant trail of destruction, laundry and mess each baby and toddler brings. All of us had complex and extensive tables tacked to walls detailing the chores we must complete in the morning and evening on a rota basis. There was never enough time to complete the cleaning and laundry and since every minor failure on our part resulted in being sent to be early, it became impossible to do anything right. 

Anything that reminded my stepfather of his predecessor tipped him into a rage. It’s easy to hide or destroy photographs, but children are harder to discard. Perhaps it was because I looked more like my father than my mother, but I became the target for a lot of this anger, and as such was punished endlessly. But you can become acclimatised to suffering, and eventually even children can become used to physical pain, feeling it less as unendurable beatings and more as a physical form of background music, or a permanent buzzing in your ear. So the attacks had to alter, take many forms, not just being smacked, but hit with belts, different parts of your body beaten, cold showers for hours, solitary confinement in the dark, and finally, one particular battleground: food.

There was much to be done with food to inflict suffering: withdrawal of food for days was easy and effective, especially at the weekends or during school holidays, when the free school meals or snacks teachers slipped me because they knew what was happening were out of reach. But once we must have been given tinned pilchards on toast because my stepfather liked the meal. None of us did when we tried it, so from then on, any minor infraction resulted in a red tin of pilchards appearing from a cupboard and the offender being forced to eat one, two, three tins cold. The skin felt both slimy and rough in your mouth; the flesh oily and contrasting with the metallic tang of the coagulated tomato sauce; swallowing without chewing wasn’t an option because of the bones. Twenty years later I still can’t walk past a tin in the supermarket without shuddering at the memory of pilchards vertebrae disintegrating to wet dust between my teeth each time.

Food became a symbol of control and resistance. Everything that passed my lips was controlled by this man. We were poor, and essentially prisoners in the home, so never had any choice over meals. The children ate separately to the adults in terms of menus and space: we were in the kitchen, stood at the table (no chairs allowed, lack of comfort is another punishment) eating whatever we were given, and never allowed to leave the table until everyone had eaten. One sister, a very slow eater would often end up completely full but forced to stand at the table for hours with us all, once overnight, until she had finished. 

Hungry, nearing puberty and furious at the treatment, I became adept at shoplifting. Stealing from supermarkets, I could eat when I had been deliberately starved and had absolute choice over the food I ate. It was a revelation, and an utter joy, one I couldn’t explain to friends at school. I ran away from home endlessly, though was always caught, bundled into a police car and returned miserably to the house, with social services and the police showing no interest in why I kept fleeing. The days when I slept rough, in empty houses, barns, or woods were the happiest days I’d had in years. I was freezing cold, could barely sleep due to fear of being raped or murdered if someone found me, but could eat whatever I chose to and move freely. 

Eventually, I escaped: one day in a rage, my stepfather gave my mother an ultimatum – either “she goes, or I go” and my mother chose him. I was told to go to the police station and tell them I wasn’t wanted any more. The police officer on duty, didn’t believe me, rang my mother and couldn’t even think of a response when she confirmed it. I was free. I could see my friends after school, read what I wanted (my stepfather found me reading a psychology textbook from school and ripped it up, explaining prisoners read psychology in jail to outwit prison officers), but most importantly, eat what I liked.

For a girl in her early teens, having such a complex history with food and control was completely disastrous. Already at high risk of developing eating disorders, the “punishments” meant I viewed food as both an enemy and a symbol of my freedom. I oscillated between compulsive over-eating and anorexia, continued to shoplift because the idea of even being constrained economically when it came to food gave me panic attacks. I settled a little around the age of 16, getting a job that meant I stopped shoplifting, and my vegetarianism meant I was able to cook meals for myself and choose my own food at the supermarket, as “no one knows what vegetarians eat”. 

But my relationship with food was still dreadful. I overate, then skipped meals, and also had no real portion control. An ex-boyfriend told me he’d leave me if I didn’t quit vegetarianism, so I started eating meat again, and didn’t realise for years that most omnivores don’t eat meat with every meal. I still ate when I was unhappy and celebrated with food too. The pilchards remained stuck in my memory, causing at least four panic attacks when I saw the familiar can in aisles. At black tie dinners, I’d often find myself facing a plate of fish, and anything filleted gave me flashbacks to being forced to eat whole tins of the oily things. Anchovies appearing on pizzas when I hadn’t read menus correctly ruined an evening: even picking them off did nothing, and seeing the bones move and the flesh flake as I attempted to remove them killed my appetite entirely.

I assumed this was permanent: I would forever struggle with my appetite, weight and with explaining to friends and partners that food was often a minefield for me. To explain why, I’d have to explain my childhood, and even thinking about it tightens my chest, and no one knows what to say in response. You end up pitied but also considered “too much” and likely to be “a complicated person”. 

Then I fell ill: an illness that baffled the doctors for month, as I constantly vomited in bouts, resistant to every anti-emetic they gave me, with nurses staring with confusion as I projectile vomited with a drip in my arm giving me higher doses of drugs than cancer patients are prescribed. For three months I ate almost nothing but soup and toast. Eventually, a doctor diagnosed Cyclical Vomiting Syndrome, a disease usually seen in childhood but occasionally in adults, that causes clusters of extreme nausea, albeit with no cure. 

Once the worst of the vomiting died down, I had to think about food again. But rather than simply throwing together a quick meal or following a recipe, I had to walk around the supermarket for sometimes up to an hour, choosing food. I had no appetite so scrutinised everything, to find something that I might like to eat, because eating something mindlessly would invariably make me vomit. For every meal, I had to choose something I desperately wanted to eat, chew slowly and psychologically invest in keeping it down. Mostly, it worked: I’d eat, I’d feel sick shortly afterwards, and with a huge amount of mental energy managed to stymie the gag reflex. Patterns helped too – toast and coffee, followed by soup for dinner meant my body and mind became primed to expect those meals, after barely eating for months. For my evening meal, I’d research, experiment, and have something interesting, even if it was only what looked like a snack to others. 

For the first time in memory, I was listening to my body’s cues on food. I knew very well what small physiological signs meant I was in danger of vomiting. But I also started understanding when I was hungry, different levels of hunger, when to stop eating and when I wasn’t hungry, but bored. My palate too, changed: barely eating from November to March meant I’d essentially hit reset on my tastebuds. Suddenly I liked apples and taramasalata, but could no longer eat pasta or cheddar with any enjoyment. And I thought, if I can listen to both my psychological and physical reaction to food so well now, I can confront my fish phobia and consign it to the past. I started small.

At a restaurant with a friend recently, two dishes were brought out from a tasting menu: bream and sardines. In the past, I’d have felt dizzy and short of breath at the sight of a sardine. Instead, I served myself a small portion of the bream, tried a forkful and didn’t like it, but didn’t feel as if I’d failed or been defeated by it. I didn’t try the sardine; I considered it, looked at it and decided that today was not the day. But I will, in the future, buy a tin of pilchards. After I have slowly worked my way up to trying a sardine in a restaurant, putting an anchovy in a pasta sauce and enjoying it, I will try a pilchard, though perhaps not a cold one. Doing so will feel like a victory, and the laying to rest of the past. One of the things I’ve enjoyed about adulthood and ageing is how much there is to learn about human behaviour and decision-making. I had assumed my relationship to food was irreparably broken, when in actuality I had misunderstood precisely how my mind and body worked together. I’d also failed to grasp how much I was capable of controlling my mind, a fact which only came to light when I properly listened to psychological and physiological cues. But I can see an endpoint in my personal struggle and know that it is possible to reach this in my own time. I just hadn’t envisaged an improvement in the state of my mental health would manifest as a jolly red tin of oily fish.