Spectator Life

Some things from the 1980s, such as pasta salad, and B-52 shots, should never, ever be revived. Nevertheless, I decided I would give my old friend, the five-litre wine box with the plastic bladder inside, another try. Wine boxes became stigmatised as a result of being seen at student parties, secret schoolkids’ drinking sessions in the park, and – probably most damagingly of all, Australian soap operas. Boxed wine originated in Oz, and the product made regular appearances in Neighbours as part of a drinking game called ‘goon pong’ – the plastic bladder is known as a ‘goon sack’.

For generations we relied on the good old flat-capped honesty of the onion. It was unpretentious, predictable and perfectly content to hide in a bag at the dark recesses of kitchen cupboards until dragged out, to be chopped into the bottom of a mince or fried into submission as the ‘healthy’ garnish in a bapped burger. Onions knew their place.    But over the last few months, an allium armada has breached our shores. An aggressive amphibious landing has invaded Middle England’s supermarkets and thus the showier parts of my kitchen units. These are shallots: small pink immigrants arriving in vast, unstoppable numbers.

In Ian Fleming’s short story Risico, Bond scans the bar of the Excelsior in Rome for his contact Kristatos. He has been told to look for a mustachioed man drinking an Alexandra cocktail. Amused by the ingenuity of the signal, he spots the concoction of cream and vodka sitting on a corner table: ‘The creamy, feminine drink was so much cleverer than the folded newspaper, the flower in the buttonhole, the yellow gloves that were the hoary, slipshod call-signs between agents.’    While Kristatos went with vodka, the Brandy Alexander (derived from the gin-based Alexander) has long been the standard version of the cocktail. The recipe is simple. Grab 50ml of brandy, 25ml of crème de cacao and 25ml of cream.

I am a big fan of MasterChef, and particularly love the Australian version. It features fewer foams and tweezer-assisted arrangements of wildflowers, and more actual food. They have fun – and they don’t take themselves as seriously as some British contestants do. So when I heard that Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, was to make a cameo appearance as a guest judge on the programme, I was appalled, and yet intrigued. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but the duchess is a woman who, if she had fewer brain cells and any less charisma, would need watering twice daily. I’ve often noted that vacuous people tend to enjoy vacuous food – but not, apparently, Meghan.

When I think of my childhood summers, I think of Mr Whippy. I think of those familiar, distant Pavlovian chimes, carrying the promise of frozen, sugary goodness. I think of the zombified children sprinting across the common towards a tutti frutti Mercedes-Benz Sprinter. I think of 99 Flakes with all the toppings, of oyster delights half-dipped in chocolate, of plastic cones filled with radioactive-blue soft serve and gumballs… The ice cream van has been dying a slow death these past 30 years. In the halcyon era of the soft-serve automobile, it was estimated that there were more than 30,000 ice cream vans roaming the UK. Today, that figure sits at around 2,500, with some estimates as low as 1,500.  If the ice cream van is a rare sight, its siren call is even rarer.

Every time statistics are released about our lunching habits, I become ever more depressed. Apparently, as many as seven in ten of us fail to leave our desks during so-called ‘lunch hour’, miserably chomping on our identikit meal deal or Pret sandwiches. And, of course, very few of us ever manage to take anything like the amount of time we’re supposedly due for our lunches. A recent survey revealed that the median amount of time that we have as our midday breaks is a trifling 34 minutes. But, from a legal perspective, this is more than our due. Government guidelines declare: ‘Workers have the right to one uninterrupted 20-minute rest break during their working day, if they work more than six hours a day. This could be a tea or lunch break.

Is there a greater scam than the ‘ripen at home’ punnets of fruit that the supermarkets flog? Flimsy netted plastic of peaches, plums and apricots promise so much and deliver so little. When ripe, they need nothing doing to them at all; even cutting them with a knife feels like overkill. But, when they don’t, the result is miserable: their wooly flesh clings to the stone for dear life, and to call the flavour lacklustre would be giving it too much credit. In theory, these fruits should be a joy: representing the bounty of the season. All they should need is a day or two on the counter before they’re ripe for the taking.

Keir Starmer is fond of a beer. We knew he liked beer when we knew nothing much about his policies except that they were in favour of everything that was good and against everything that was bad. We could be excused for feeling that the impending coronation of Andy Burnham offers more of the same. A Labour MP told the Today programme that Burnham explaining his policies was irrelevant given he’d ‘already shown he’s a very successful politician’. What we do know is that Burnham, too, likes beer. He and Starmer eagerly lean on the one point where their pose and their personality agree - Guinness for Burnham, real ale for Starmer.

If you’ve ever lived in Marseille – where the habit of exaggeration is imbibed with mothers’ milk – you’ve heard about the sardine that blocked the port. But that’s nothing compared to the pistachio that took over the world. In late 2023, Dubai chocolate, a new kind of chocolate bar filled with pistachio cream, tahini and crunchy, toasted phyllo pastry, went viral. Chocolate brands, bakeries and purveyors of fine foods were quick to jump on the trend. Coffee chains began offering pistachio chocolate drinks (iced Dubai-chocolate matcha, anyone?) and delectable pistachio bomboloni – soft doughnuts filled with pistachio cream – came back on the menu in Italian restaurants.

My grandparents’ home was a proper house, on the cusp of the Hampstead Heath Extension, with roses and flagstones at the front. It was the sort that looked like it housed a robust wine collection – solid on account of good, aged European bottles, bought at a time when standards were, one assumes, higher.  There was one bottle in my grandfather’s possession that came with particular fanfare: a 1974 Bordeaux whose label was so far gone you couldn’t see exactly what it was. As a treat, I arranged to have the sommelier of the Connaught Hotel examine and open it. Once the cork gave way, a thud of brown sediment rocked the bottle. It was decanted and it breathed – inasmuch as a long-dead thing can breathe. Still hopeful, we tried the sherry-looking stuff – and it was nasty.

I was, aptly, in a pub when I heard the news. Owing to the time difference between Britain and North America, Sir Keir Starmer had confirmed that licensing laws would be relaxed for this year’s Fifa World Cup, allowing pubs to stay open later into the night.  Shortly after the announcement, I found myself wondering about licensing laws generally. Like most Britons, I had long regarded them as part of the natural order of things; as permanent a fixture of pub life as sticky carpets. But what were these laws’ impact on my own relationship with alcohol and those of my fellow countrymen? Why is it, compared with so many other countries, we feel the need to binge drink? The stereotype of the drunk Brit is by now internationally recognisable.

Many of us have been flirted with by fruit; perhaps it can’t help being fruity, following the principles of nominative determinism. ‘PLEASE DON’T SQUEEZE ME TILL I’M YOURS’ blushing peaches on market stalls used to beg, lest we bruise them with our greedy paws. ‘UNZIP A BANANA’ leered a television commercial, so typical of the licentious 1960s. As if knowing that vegetables can never be as sexy, fungi could only fight back with the highly uninspired ‘MAKE ROOM FOR THE MUSHROOMS’ slogan of the 1980s - a limp retort at best.   What they all had in common was the anthropomorphisation of food. It seemed like a bit of fun at first.