POOR FOOD

EATING WHAT YOU LIKE, OR WHAT YOU MUST.

           

The first time I visited Hydra, the Greek island was just a backwater at the end of a  four-hour  boat  ride from Athens. The little kafaneon where I stopped for lunch, hardly more than a hut with a brushwood shelter and some benches, was the only one open;  as the daily ferry steamed away,  all the glamorous cafes along the harbour closed until next day.

            Back then, Greek restaurants still let you into the kitchen to check what was on offer. But in this case the cook, a gaunt woman  in  an  apron  with  enough stains to feed a family for a week, tried to talk me out of my choice, a dish of tourlou simmering at the back of the stove: zucchini, eggplant, onion, potatoes and tomatoes,   richly  oiled, herbed and garlicked, then braised with a little water.

            Tugging my sleeve, she drew me to the back door. Just outside, a scrawny sheep revolved on a spit over hot coals.

            “Lamb,” she said encouragingly. “Is good.”

            I'd already eaten enough stringy lamb to last a lifetime. Shaking my head, I pointed to the stew: “This.”

            “No, no. Zis...zis is...” She groped for the words. “...poor food.”

            She didn’t mean it was bad. Rather that it was what the cash-strapped locals ate.

            Reluctantly she served me a plate.  With  pita to mop up the sauce and a carafe of demestica,  I  couldn’t  have  asked  for  a  better meal. My appetite  won  her over, since she plonked down a battered pot of metrios—fragrant, sweetened coffee—and a homemade baklava, oozing honey. Briefly, I had become one of them, the eaters of “poor food.”

            Nothing in this meal was novel or exotic to me. This was the culinary world in which I had been raised in rural Australia. For people  like  my  parents, who’d endured the Great Depression and World War II, a joint of meat was  a  luxury  reserved  for  Sundays,  when  a chicken or a leg of lamb provided  the  week’s biggest meal.

            We  lived  at  the  edge  of  town  in  a clapboard bungalow roofed in corrugated  iron.  On the acre of ground behind the house, tomatoes and lettuce grew in summer, carrots and potatoes in winter. A dozen fruit trees, ancient and  gnarled,  provided  tart apples for pies and bitter, thick-skinned oranges for  marmalade. There was no trendy adherence to a locavore ethos in our reliance on homegrown produce; it was how we survived.

            Once I settled in the United States, the concept of “poor food”  became  increasingly  remote. I never  expected to see it in Georgetown, the  most elegant neighborhood of Washington  DC, and least  of all in the home of a former high government official. He’d lost his  job  in a change of administration. The family hung onto its silver and  porcelain, but times were so hard  they sometimes survived on food stamps. Nothing, however, would force them to lower their standards, least of all for Christmas dinner.

            I'm not sure anyone else noticed that the crystal was Baccarat  but the wine Gallo’s supermarket burgundy. Our host carved the rolled, stuffed lamb shoulder with such ceremony that one  didn’t  notice the thinness of the slices and how liberally each plate was piled with cheap side dishes: scalloped potatoes, canned-tomato casserole,  corn pudding, and that Southern specialty, Mock Oyster, in which  eggplant  baked  with  eggs  and  Ritz crackers assumes the flavor and texture of an oyster casserole.

            I thought again  of the cook on Hydra. Why be ashamed of using modest resources with  intelligence  and  creativity? “Poor food” shouldn’t be an apology, but a boast.

            And  then  I  moved  to  Paris.  My French  wife, belying the stereotype, never learned to cook. She loved to eat, however, particularly  the  dishes  of  her  childhood.

            “Pot  au  feu,” she rhapsodised. “Endive fromage et jambon. Hachis Parmentier.

Blanquette de veau....”

            But Pot au Feu was just cheap cuts of beef simmered with potatoes, leeks and  turnips , and   Hachis Parmentier that old stand-by  Shepherd’s  Pie—minced  leftover  lamb  baked under a layer of mashed potato. For Blanquette de Veau, one stewed tough cuts of veal and thickened the stock with egg yolk. And few  vegetables  were  cheaper than endive, even if you rolled each in ham and baked it in a cheese sauce.

            Poor food!

            Not  to  the  French, however. To transform pig’s blood into boudin noir, duck livers  into  pâté and baked snails into a delicious dish as well as a national icon wasn’t economy, but art. It seemed there  was nothing  they could not make delicious.

            Well, almost nothing.

On  my first visit to a Parisian market, my guide was my wife’s friend Clare, who  prided herself on her English but, like many French people, struggled with the  letter  “h”. Deciding that if you use it often enough, you’re bound to  be right sometimes, she scattered “h”s indiscriminately. That  day,  a  charcutier  was  handing out samples from a large sausage. “Is andouillette,” Clare explained in her fractured English. “His very good ‘ere.”  

          Most  sausages  are a jumble of chopped meat and fat, tinted a meaty pink, but this  one  was grey, and filled with grey gelatinous meat.

            “What’s in it?”

            “Les tripes.”

            Tripes, I knew, meant intestines. I nibbled. It tasted a little...well, musty.

            "Zer real andouillette is made à l’ancienne," Clare explained. "Zer old way. ‘e use zer...comment se dit… ? Zer trou du cul.”

I looked blank.

“What  is  zis?”  She  rummaged  through  her  vocabulary.  “Ah  yes.  Hi  ham remembering now. Trou du cul Is zer hasshole!”

I’ve never eaten andouillette since. Some food is too poor, even for me.