Food and Drink

The grandest compliment ever paid me came near the end of a small dinner party last winter from guest and friend Jeffrey who, on settling into an old wing chair as his host stoked the fire with coal, remarked: “I feel like I’ve just stepped into an Evelyn Waugh novel.” It was, he said, the coal. About as close as anyone these days will have come to a domestic coal fire is the screen image of one in Downton Abbey or its predecessor, Upstairs Downstairs. Those television “fires” were all actually gas ones made to imitate the look of coal. In Waugh’s time in houses like that, they all would have burned the real thing.

In a world full of muffins, they say, be a cupcake. As an inspirational saying, it’s a good effort. But handsome is as handsome does: for solid worth, texture and deliciousness, give me the muffin every time. I remain open-minded and willing to be proven wrong, but it seems to me that however gloriously frosted, sprinkled, beflowered or bedazzled the exterior of a cupcake may be, its interior texture is always trying, in a socially anxious sort of way, to be cake. All the icing in the world can’t hide the strain. Allow me to suggest an alternative: in a world of Christmas cookies, be homemade shortbread. The last word in simplicity, shortbread is the Hermès scarf of the cookie world. It has confidence, identity, classical elegance.

The Indians, as we innocently called them in the days of my youth, put their name to it: “Indian Corn.” Somehow, “Native American” or “First Peoples Corn” just doesn’t do it, so here let us observe this now-verboten usage. Technically, Indian Corn (known as calico or dent corn too, for its coloration and dents in the kernels) is one variety of maize, first cultivated, they say, in Mexico thousands of years ago. Columbus, who called the natives “Indians” because he was looking for India, brought back seeds to Europe in the 1490s; they did not take. The Plymouth colonists in the 1620s, from whose early travails the American feast of Thanksgiving emerged, grew Indian corn courtesy of the local Wampanoag tribe. It no doubt helped them survive when the English peas ran out.

If I’d known what a whole monkfish looks like, I would never have ordered it. It was only weeks later that I saw a picture of the horrid creature: small, wicked eyes, prehistoric head, skin like rusty medieval armor and a gaping mouth overflowing with jagged teeth. Truly the stuff of nightmares. We’d popped over the border from France into San Sebastián, Spain, for a bite of dinner, selecting a spot a stone’s throw from the Baroque exuberance of Santa Maria del Coro. The daily special was monkfish, and for some reason — perhaps an excess of sun that day — the image that came to mind was, inaccurately, that of the innocent red mullet. The daily special in a fishing town is bound to be fresh, so it seemed fair to give it a try.