Fruit Bats: The Truth

mrs househusbandnot and I watched a re-run of one of Fanny Craddock's cooking shows last night. Fanny was producing some of the nastiest food on earth - all in black and white tv which didn't help - and coughing her way through the programme like that guy in the shed on The Fast Show. Last night, Fanny was telling us that we should leave our mashed potato to 'settle' for 24 hours before we piped it into our scallop shells. Bleah. And she arranged a fruits de mer - "All lovely English seafood [cough]" - that looked like a science project on how the food chain works on the ocean floor off Dungeness. I remember watching this show when I was small with my mother taking notes so she could impress her less adventurous friends with these exotic and exciting recipes. It all looked like very nasty school food last night (and I mean school food before Jamie Oliver got his delicate hands on it).

Mind you, my English friend who lives in San Francisco was on the email the other night after a recent trip back to England: "BUT where did the pub go? They have all become restaurants. All over. Where is the ploughmans and the fish and chips? It's all pork tenderloins in a fig and port wine reduction. IT'S A PUB FOR CHRIST'S SAKE??? What is happening to England?"

So I guess food-wise we have progressed beyond Fanny and her exposition de mer and her aged mash. But my mate has a point, and this is coming from someone who lives in California where it takes the waiters quarter of an hour to explain how chef thought up today's specials on a Buddhist retreat in the Napa Valley, and where your aged mash - or potato ancien I should say - would be served on a duvet of wilted lettuce with a saki and juniper gravy.

Talking of food (and I know this is a weak link), I had lunch with a friend of mine yesterday who is on the board of the London Zoological Society. I asked her about her thoughts on fruit bats and another friend's recent accusation of me being an unreliable animal witness with my description of them. She assures me that fruit bats are as I described them - vast, snouty, vampire-like, almost wolves with wings. She even suggested that these beasts may well not eat fruit at all, but were given their benign name because the horrific truth about their diet is too frightening to contemplate, and that Small Oxen Bat or Sheep Bat would have villagers out with their rakes and muskets seeking to cull this monster of the skies.

So, English food is...what it is, but I have an (unofficial) endorsement from the Zoological Society as a reliable animal witness. I'll put in on my CV. (And there was me complaining about bloggers' self-validation the other day.)