‘Through all of my youth I was looking for you,’ wrote yet another American poet you probably haven’t heard of, ‘Without knowing what I was looking for.’
Bear with me, this is not about poetry. W.S Merwin managed two more Pulitzer prizes in his 92 years than you and I have managed between us so far, so we can probably afford be intellectually idle, and just agree with him.
In my case, it is cheap cuts of meat that it turned out I didn’t know I was looking for.
Through the coming together of the extra time that has been loaned to me by a year of lockdowns, and the fact that I am researching a book on cows, I have become a bolder and better cook.
A friend put this side of current life rather well on Facebook this morning: ‘I am not doing, I am merely being.’ He said. ‘Why do when you can just be? And doing less and less each day, I find that I am never bored.’ I agree. I can’t go anywhere, so I just potter. I have read nine or ten books this month, ‘been’ at two conferences, and spent hour upon hour staring out at the bird table outside the kitchen window, which may well be what I was put on earth to do. Sometimes, I just get up at five o’clock because I am awake, and don’t have anything else to do. You know, I get up at five and then just watch the highlights of Stuart Broad’s 8-15 at Trent Bridge in 2015. I have studied for ages how the rain falls off my gutters, and the funny paths it takes while running down my office window. If it is possible to be anxious, relaxed, depressed and content in the same month, you have my January in a nutshell. But like Marcus, I have finally learned to just ‘be’.
I have even tried to look inside my own soul, and find out who the hell I am. The time will come when St. Peter will need this information.
Anyway, one of the answers I will give him is ‘a much better cook than I ever thought I could be’, and I will probably offer him one of my saffron risottos, or quite possibly my tarte Alsace, on receipt of which, he will fling open the Pearly Gates and insist that I get my backside in, and in double quick time.
But if he had eaten my flash-fried beef skirt with broccoli and ginger in a tamarind and hoisin sauce last night, I think he might have even circumvented the whole unpleasant business of death, and just invited me up to take my place in the celestial kitchens there and then. That bit of beef skirt cost £7.22 from our butchers on Friday, and it will feed Caroline and I three times, and three different ways.
I am working my way around the cheaper cuts of beef by way of research. As a rule of thumb, the further away from the upper backside you go in a cow, the cheaper it will be, and the longer you will be advised to cook it for. It will also probably have bags more flavour That’s why expensive and unambitious restaurants so often just sell something like fillet or rump steak as their only meat choice, because not even a second rate chef can mess it up. And why the very best restaurants will have the most obscure and forgotten cuts of meat to choose from….because their talented chef can delight and thrill his diners with his skill and sense of adventures. When there are 200 registered breeds of red-hot cattle in the UK, and around fifteen primal cuts, it seems very sad that we have largely reduced this to two breeds (Holstein-Friesian for milk, and Limousin for beef), and about three cuts.
All those years of French holidays when I sat in bistros and wondered what the hell onglet was, or jumeau, or semelle, or chateaubriand, and why it even mattered, they are over. Now I know.
One of the things that Covid has indirectly taught me is that, animal, vegetable or mineral, my everyday world is far, far wider than I have ever allowed it to be.
And I like that.
It’s like sailing to the shores of white sand.
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