Food

The most British sounding thing yet said to me since arriving in the United Kingdom was said over breakfast. It was this.

"You are lazy with the knife."

The comment was made back in November, just a couple weeks before I headed over to Arizona for my 2 month long project in Phoenix. I was invited out to breakfast by one of my flatmates, Pete. He had a girl visiting him from San Diego, California, and the three of us, along with another flatmate Chris, went out to eat.

I ordered the full English breakfast, which is oft known here as a "fry-up." The full English breakfast includes eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, toast and tomatoes. At least, the one that I ordered had those things. Technically, a full English breakfast should include blood sausage, however many places seem not to include the blood sausage any more. Apparently the thought of oatmeal and pig's blood isn't even appetising to the Brits anymore.

As an aside, or rather a second aside seeing as the whole blood-sausage-thing wasn't really pertinent to the story, Bacon here is different than in North America. Bacon, as we know it in North America, known here as "streaky bacon." Streaky bacon comes from the belly of a pig, comes in thin strips and is heavily veined with fat. British bacon, on the other hand, is back bacon, coming from the loin of the pig. It is claimed that this is the same as "Canadian bacon," though I've had both Canadian bacon and bacon here in the UK, and Canadian bacon always tastes more like ham to me. I think it is because Canadian bacon is usually trimmed into a circle with no fat, whereas British bacon is left as an oblong piece of meat and fat. The long and short of the bacon discussion is this - I miss streaky bacon.

Back to that breakfast in early November, I was eating my eggs, sausage and bacon when Chris said to Pete's visitor that she was, "quite lazy with the knife. Is that an American thing? I notice that Greg is quite lazy with the knife as well."

I looked up from a bite of sausage and said, "wha?", probably spewing bits of sausage from my mouth.

"You are lazy with your knife," Chris repeated.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"You tend not to use your knife, smashing food into bits with your fork instead of cutting it with into proper pieces with your knife," Chris explained.

I looked down at my plate. He was right. Other than the sausage, I wasn't using my knife for anything. The eggs and bacon I was using the side of my fork to tear apart. Even the sausage, which required the knife, I had cut into little bits right at the start of the meal, and was now just picking up the pre-cut pieces.

It wasn't always like this for me. After all, I came from a good British background and so I learned as a child how to eat like a proper British person. Over the years, though, living as a bachelor and spending a lot of time in the USA, I've adopted American eating habits.

Since that breakfast and getting called to task for it, I have tried, when possible, to eat more like a Brit, and be less lazy with my knife.

So, how do you eat like a Brit?

First, you need to ensure that your elbows don't touch the table. After years of working in the United States, I tend now to eat with my elbows planted firmly on the table. My fork and knife stab downwards from there, kind of like Jason from Friday the 13th stabbing at young campers in the forest.

In Britain, you need to hold your elbows off the table, almost like you are about to break into the chicken dance. Elbows out, arms parallel to the table.

The knife goes into your right hand, the fork in the left. You cut your food by holding it down with your fork while slicing with the knife. Once you have sliced off a bite sized portion, you put the knife down, switch your fork over to your right hand before bringing the food to the mouth.

Once you finish chewing, you put down your fork to take a sip of your drink. Then you can pick up back the fork and the knife and move on to your next bite.

That is how you eat like a Brit.

...or, more correctly, that is how I was taught as a child to eat like a proper British person. Looking around, though, I am not sure that is how British folks really eat any more. In my examining how others eat, I have made some observations.

Brits do eat slower and more deliberately than North Americans. They aren't lazy with their knifes, they do properly cut their food, rather than tearing it apart with the fork. No more, though, is the restriction against elbows on the table hold. I'm fine with that, because it's always nice to lean against something. If the British are going to make me be less lazy with my knife, than at least I can be a little lazy with my elbows.

No more, either do folks switch their forks from their left to their right hands. As a kid, it always struck me as being as waste of energy. After all, my left hand is as good as my right to bring food up to my mouth. So the fact that the Brits have caught on to this, and now no longer switch forks between hands makes sense. It shows they are able to learn and make improvements. It is the same spirit of innovation that brought about the industrial revolution, the Spitfire, the flush toilet and curry as a late night snack food. Okay, that last one was more a transfer of an existing food to a drunken, late night snack, but still, it is impressive.

There is, though, one problem with not switching the fork over to my right hand. My right hand is more coordinated than my left, and thus there are times when my clumsy left hand winds up dropping food on my shirt. In those cases, using my stronger hand probably would have made more sense. Ah well, I am a North American, after all. Occasionally I need to eat like a slob, otherwise I'll shatter the finely-crafted feeling of superiority that the Brits have developed over us North Americans and our lazy knifes.

People in Northern England are nice. That’s what I had heard, and my first couple weeks in Sheffield have certainly proved that assertion. When people come into the office, they inquire as to how everyone is doing. They are all very friendly and concerned with what is going on in your life. It has certainly made getting into the swing of working here in the UK easy.

All this friendliness does have one major drawback. It has to do with what happens whenever anyone gets up to head to the kitchen.

“You want something to drink?” they will offer, and they aren’t just being polite.

Nope, whoever is heading to the kitchen will offer, and anyone who wants a drink says, “Yes, please.” The person heading to the kitchen will return a few minutes later laden down with cups and glasses for the team.

The drink most often requested is a cup of tea, and that frightens me.

I was never much of a tea drinker back in Canada. I had tea a few times a year, and mostly when other folks made it. Here in England, though, I have been drinking tea more and more. It is constantly on offer and everyone is drinking it. It is hard to avoid. Not that I mind drinking it too much. A decently made cup of tea with a touch of milk is a very tasty thing.

The problem is that while I enjoy a cup of tea made by others, whenever I make the stuff, it tastes like swill. I don’t know what I am doing wrong. Perhaps I leave in the bag too long, or not long enough. Perhaps the water is too hot or too cold. Perhaps I add too much milk, or not enough, or too soon, or not soon enough.

I don’t know what I am doing wrong, all I know is that my tea doesn’t taste like the tea other people make. It tastes bad, and that is my problem. See, whenever I find myself thirsty at work, I can’t just get up and head to the kitchen, because then I would have to offer to get drinks for the team. They would ask for tea, and I would be forced to make the brown-coloured bog water that seems to result when I put a tea bag in hot water.

Like I said, people in Northern England are nice, so I am sure they would drink the tea I make, put on a brave face and make yummy noises. “Good tea,” they would say, but it wouldn’t be. It would be awful, but they wouldn’t want to offend me, so they would say it’s good. They would think that Canadians can’t make tea. Some Canadians probably can make tea, but I can’t, and I don’t want to be the cause of half of Sheffield thinking that Canadian tea tastes like bitter water.

Of course, now I feel guilty whenever anyone else gets up to get a drink and offers. I can’t say yes, because I never get up and get the tea myself. The Sheffieldites would see me as the greedy type, always taking and never returning the favour.

So instead I sit in my seat, thirsty and frightened, and count the hours until lunch, when I can get out, run down to the deli and buy myself a decent cup of guilt-free tea.

I once read an article that suggested that deja vu, the feeling of familiarity with a situation or place that you haven't been before, is simply a case of memories being stored out of order. Instead of the usual case where something gets put in your short-term memory, and then if it is judged worthy, moved to the long term memory, a case of deja vu is when something is put in long term memory before short term memory. Therefore, once the memory is put in your short-term memory, your brain finds it in long term memory, but can't link it necessarily to any actual event in time or space. Instead, it just comes across as a weird feeling that you've been here before.

Yesterday, I was out looking at a flat in the west-end. After checking out the place, I went for a walk around the neighbourhood, and after checking it out, wandered farther afield. I walked for nearly 45 minutes before wandering into a pub on Gloucester Street called the Gloucester Arms. I ordered a pint and started looking at the menu. Looking around, something seemed really familiar about the place. The set up of the tables, the weird angle of the one wall, the flat screen TVs mounted high on the walls.

"Do I know this place?" I wondered. It seemed unlikely, I hadn't been out this way in ages. In fact, I hadn't been in this area of town since moving to London.

In August of 2007, though, I was in the area. I stayed at a hotel just a 10 minute walk away, and once I realized that, I knew when I had been here before.

It was here that I had my bangers and mash in August of 2007. In my blog entry for my trip to London, I wrote about the pub meal I had at the Gloucester Arms after being told that food in North America was bad for you.

The next day, I ordered bangers and mash in a pub. I am not certain that 4 sausages with a side of potatoes flooded in gravy is exactly health food, but who am I to argue with the nutritional expertise of a drunken drywaller in a London pub.

I skipped the bangers this time, and order the Chicken Kiev, and reflected on the fact that some times that old familiar feeling is because you have been some place before, it just takes a minute to remember it.

Given my recent luck with flights, I suppose it was only a matter of time before it would occur that I couldn’t leave a place before I needed to be back there.

And so it was, on Thursday of last week, that my flight to Toronto was cancelled, and then the flight I was put on later in the day was cancelled as well. I got a flight on Friday, which was cancelled mid-day Friday, and I was put on a flight on Saturday morning at 6:25am.

Around 6pm on Friday night, I got a call from Air Canada. “Hello Mr. Wesson, this is Robert from Air Canada,” said the agent, a touch of trepidation and fear in his voice. I can only imagine that he had to deliver the same line to a number of travellers in the past few minutes, and had probably taken a few amount of abuse for it. “I’m sorry to say that your 6:25 am flight tomorrow has been cancelled.”

“Of course it has,” I said. I had expected no less. Given that every flight on Friday was cancelled, it would be impossible for my flight to leave at 6:25am in the morning. For a flight to take off, you see, they need an airplane, and with no flights coming into Newark, there would be no airplane upon which to put passengers at 6 in the morning.

“We have you rebooked on a flight at 10am on Sunday,” Robert informed me. I, knowing that I had a 7am flight on Monday to take me from Toronto to Newark (where I was standing at the time), did some quick math. I’d land at noon on Sunday, assuming there were no delays, which wasn’t an assumption that I would have put much stake in. From noon Sunday until 7 am Monday is 19 hours. It hardly seemed worth flying home for 19 hours, especially when I would spend 6 of them sleeping, and 3 or 4 of them in the airport in Toronto.

Instead, I told Robert to cancel the Sunday flight and send me a refund. I then spent a couple of hours securing myself a place to stay for the weekend, and changing my flight and car reservations for the Monday morning. By 8pm on Friday, it was confirmed that I would be spending the weekend in Jersey City, New Jersey, just a two stop subway ride from Manhattan.

Jersey City is a nice enough place, at least by the water in the “Newport” area where I stayed. Newport is a recently developed area of high rise condos, trendy cafes and restaurants, high end shopping, a number of high-rise business buildings and a nice little harbour. My hotel, the Courtyard Marriott Newport was right beside the entrance to the NY/NJ Port Authority’s subway system, the PATH. The PATH is a 24 hour train that runs from Newark into Manhattan, one line running to the World Trade Center site, and the other line passing through the Greenwich Village before heading north up 6th street to wind up at 33rd, just a block or so from the Empire State Building.

I didn’t do too much on the weekend. I had to shop for some clothes, as I had nothing but business attire and the weather called for shorts, sandals and a t-shirt. I wandered around Newport and downtown Jersey City, plus spent time in Chinatown, Little Italy and Greenwich Village in New York. I rode the PATH subway back on Saturday night at 2:30am, which was an interesting study in levels of drunkness of the passengers, from the joyously buzzed to the passed out sleeping.

Sunday night I had dinner at Les Halles, a French brasserie on Park Ave in mid-town Manhattan. It was very reminiscent of my time in Paris last year, in both cuisine and atmosphere. I drank Kronenberg 1664, a beer that featured quite largely in my Parisian adventures. I had a starter of the Terrine Du Jour, and a main of the Steak Frites, billed as the signature dish of the restaurant. Steak Frites is very common in Paris, consisting of a thinly sliced steak with French fries and a salad. Les Halles’ version of the steak frites was good, but I made the mistake of ordering medium rare, which spoiled the illusion of my meal in Paris. When I was in Paris, I was never asked how I wanted my steak, and it was always brought bloody red rare.

I was drawn to go to Les Halles for its former executive chef, Anthony Bourdain. Chef Bourdain, in addition to being a cook, is also an author of fiction, non-fiction and cookbooks and host of Food Network TV shows like A Cook’s Tour and No Reservations. I haven’t read any of his fiction (I’ve heard it’s not great) or his cookbooks (I don’t cook much myself), but one of his books has a major place on my reading list. A Cook’s Tour documents his journey’s while filming the Food Network show of the same name, where Tony and a camera crew travelled around the world in search of “the perfect meal.” The chapter on Tokyo and Japan, in fact, was one of the two reasons I choose Tokyo as my last vacation destination – the food just sounded awesome and the experiences alien to North American palates but also familiar and friendly and comforting. I have read and re-read the book, and have not tired of it yet. It is a common travel companion with me, and has been in my backpack or suitcase as I have visited 10 countries across 4 continents.

In the end of the book, Chef Bourdain discovers that the perfect meal is no one set meal, but is rather any time the combination of food and atmosphere and company and timing is right. It can be as upscale as a multiple course meal at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in Napa Valley, or a casual as bare-footed toes squishing sand at a beach bar in the Caribbean.

I think it is that way for many travellers. People, especially those that go on cruises or to all-inclusive resorts often ask me what was the best thing I’ve ever eaten while travelling. It’s too hard a question to answer, both because there are so many choices and also because it has seldom been the really expensive and classy restaurants. I have had a few really good, expensive meals in my day, from the Palms restaurant in San Antonio where we ran up a $5,000 tab for 14 people to a night at the Senator in Toronto that started with rare steaks and ended with cigars and Remy Martin’s Louis XIII cognacs. But those meals are more impressive for the sheer ostentatious size of the bill than any other reason. The meals and food I remember tend to be much more simple. Fresh fish fried for breakfast by my uncle, special because I, as a 10 year old, caught it on a misty lake at 6:30 in the morning. Eating Thanksgiving dinner off a picnic table dragged inside my uncle’s cottage, as their weren’t enough indoor tables to hold my extended family. Hot dogs and beer at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, connecting my Canadian hockey loving heart with the American passion for baseball, and driving a desire to see more baseball games in person. Deep fried Turkey and football at an American Thanksgiving celebration. Slipping the waiter a twenty dollar bill at a beach restaurant in a resort in Cuba, which brought the table all-you-can-eat Steak and Lobster. A 1/2 bottle of wine, a sausage appetizer, a 10 oz filet (that was the small one!) and a side salad at El Boliche de Alberto in Bariloche, Argentina, for only $16. Trying durian fruit in Tanzania, which made my pee smell like rotting flesh for the next two days. Sharing freshly grilled skewers of seafood with a mangy looking cat at the Forodhani market in Stone Town in Zanzibar. And, most recently, sitting at a Yakatori bar underneath the train tracks in Tokyo, feeling like Deckard from Blade Runner.

Eating at Les Halles put me in mind of Anthony Bourdain’s book, and I spent the evening thinking of all those great meals (and many more), including a meal at a Brassiere with a similar look to Les Halles last September in Paris. I was sitting outside, at one of the dorky little tables all the cafes in Paris have, facing the street (as all the seats face the street). I had finished off a stringy piece of steak with soggy salad, and was now enjoying a cool night reading and drinking pints of Kronenberg 1664. The book was short travel stories, and I was reading about a hiking trip into the wilds of Patagonia in Argentina. It reminded me of my own trip to Patagonia, and I was suddenly struck by the fact that I was reading about an amazing place I had been (Argentina) while sitting in another amazing place (Paris), and knowing that I would soon be travelling on another amazing trip (trans-Mongolian to Russia, Mongolia and China), and I was so happy that I actually almost cried. Sitting on a busy street in Paris, eating and drinking and enjoying life, it was the perfect meal, at least at that moment.

I couldn’t help but compare my Les Halles experience with that Parisian meal, and while the food was much better at Les Halles, it lacked the atmosphere and timing of that meal in Paris. Les Halles was good, and I would recommend it to someone looking for a good meal in mid-town, but it probably won’t go down on my list of memorable meals above.

Now, if Anthony Bourdain had been at the restaurant, and he’d sat down at my table and we spent the night drinking beers and swapping travel stories, I bet that would have made the list.