Peter Bear

Pity the poor lumpfish. It’s lumbered with an unflattering name, or its equally unattractive moniker: ‘Sucker fish.’ It also looks unappealing. The blighters are endowed with a stubby nose and knobbly, spotty, tubercular skin that gives them their lumpy look. With a carbuncled, ridged back, bulging eyes and a suction disc so it can attach itself to rocks, it hardly cuts the sexiest figure. But God bless the lumpfish, it does deliver poor man’s caviar in spades. It couldn’t look more different from the king of caviar, the sturgeon, which is the most elegant fish in the ocean. Long, sleek, silver, the sturgeon flows effortlessly through the water like Concorde flying through the sky. It has handsome stitching along its body.

‘I’ll swap you two of my rolls for three of your spogs.’ That was the sort of thing you’d hear round the tuckshop in morning break when we schoolboys swapped and bartered our Liquorice Allsorts. We all had our favourites, spogs being the round pink or blue jelly buttons that had a coating of tiny sugar grains, while the pink or yellow coconut rolls featured a plug of liquorice surrounded with coconut ice. Another schoolboy favourite was Pontefract Cakes, allegedly one of, if not the,oldest commercial sweets in the world. In the 11th century, Benedictine monks introduced liquorice to Pontefract, Yorkshire. At that time, the plant’s roots were commonly chewed to soothe sore throats, ease coughs and help digestion.

The British used to love offal but now we tend to be a bit wimpy about it, unlike the French or Italians, let alone the Austrians. (I once ate a pig’s lung in Vienna. Its texture was rather like an Aero bar.) In the UK you’re unlikely to find a restaurant that would serve you andouillette or tripes à la mode de Caen. Even that traditional British staple steak and kidney pie is a rarity these days. Mind you, I did once eat bull’s testicles in an Italian restaurant – Macellaio on the Old Brompton Road. They’ve since been given the chop from the menu. In Italy, particularly Venice, they cook their liver with thinly sliced red onions and red wine: Fegato alla Veneziana, delicious. In Piedmont you sometimes see Finanziera on the menu. It’s not for the fainthearted.