A Word in the Professor’s Ear!

It is an old and worthy saying; “A cobbler should stick to his last!”  This has nowhere been better illustrated than in a book I am reading with the simple title, “Understanding the UK.”  A learned professor, who lays claim to “Twenty-seven years of studying the subject and twenty-four years teaching it,” wrote the book.  I was impressed.  He also states, “I lived in Britain on several occasions, and I have crossed the Atlantic a total of twenty-four times so far.”  

Notwithstanding his many discussions with “diverse and varied British people” (that piece of tautology should have given me a clue!), he says his most informative insights came from conducting six student tours to the UK and Ireland.  He does have some insights that are on the money, but other of his ‘insights’ are mere fumblings that no more represent the UK than the Ku Klux Klan represents America.

I will refer to the august professor as “Hank,” which is probably what his intimates call him, and will not divulge his real name because he might still be foisting his particular brand of cultural vandalism on unwitting and eager students who sit at the feet of the horse’s mouth at Colorado State University.  

Hank is, or was, Professor of History, and his understanding of British history seems sound enough, therefore I do not take issue with him on that score.  However, he reveals his incredible short-sightedness when he advises American tourists not to “traipse over Britain to look at scenery when so much of it abounds in America.  … There is nothing at all to match the Grand Canyon, the deserts of Arizona, the multicoloured plateau of New Mexico, the majesty of the Rockies, the thick forest of the Great Smokies, the swampland of Florida or the brilliance of New England in early October.”   

He later goes on to say, “America is probably the best endowed country in the world when it comes to scenic areas.  Britain is far behind in this category.”  He specifically draws attention to, ”The Lake District in the north-west of England where famous poets sat about chilly shores in the drizzle.”  

What a vision!  And how far removed from the reality of the Lakeland Poets.  This group included William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and others. There are also several poets not usually associated with the Lakes but whose work was influenced by visits to the region, such as John Keats, who travelled through on his way to Scotland in 1818 and recorded his impressions of its majestic landscape in his ‘Hyperion.’  John Ruskin accompanied his family to the Lake District as a child and was inspired by its outstanding beauty to write his earliest published poetry, and Matthew Arnold composed some of his best-known verse after he had made a pilgrimage to the grave of William Wordsworth.  

It is apparent that what failed to inspire the vulgar dogmatist, gave rise to a significantly different effect in the sensitive souls of those who sought profound spiritual meaning rather than brash grandeur in their surroundings.  His failure to see and feel what they saw and felt in that place is his tragedy, and ought not to be visited upon the innocent.  

Of other places of beauty that have inspired poets, composers, artists and writers, he blasés, “All of this is very nice but unspectacular.” 

This from a man who has never liquidly quivered in awe on the very brink of Longwood Edge’s highest point, watched in the early morning as a white mist rolls up the Wrekin, delighted to see Dedham Vale change aspect and colour as the day moves from moonlight into sunlight in a green springtime, viewed a fiery sunset spread fingers of glowing light over the Vale of York, breathlessly stood among the bouldered grandeur of the peaty moors in a cloudburst where the Rochdale Road bends downhill towards Lancashire, loped the fells and climbed the grey crags of the Lake District in the last days of snow, seen the fruited fields of Shropshire ready for the harvester’s blade, or experienced flight up the Aire and Calder Canal’s seven locks at Bingley.

Nor has he sat bewitched in the autumn cooling across the river from Bolton Abbey and watched lengthening shadows transmogrify its ancient churchyard, dallied in the dark of a foggy November dawn for the massive red pile of Durham Cathedral to disengage itself from the clingy cloak of shapeless fog to emerge victorious yet again after more than a thousand years, toured the Trossachs, visited the Vale of Gloucester, meandered the Mendips, tramped the Chalk Downs, nosed through the New Forest, moseyed the Welsh Marches, been to Bangor’s velvet hills, plodded the Pennine Way, angled off Anglesey, breathed by the Brecon Beacons, limned the Llyn Peninsula, ogled the Orkneys, careened through Cornwall, dined in Devon, whelked in Whitby, covered the Cotswolds, shopped in Skipton, foraged the Forest of Dean, raved over Roseberry Topping, been cheered by the Cheviots, kicked his rising admiration through Kielder Forest Park, or watched mute and breathless at wheeling seabirds on Marsden Rock at South Shields.  

I make no odious comparison with these places of outstanding beauty and the scenery of America, because they are distinct and dissimilar.  Nor do I diminish aught from America’s places of unique and compelling beauty, whether grand or cosy.  But to impose the ‘apples and oranges’ view that they should not be sought out or looked at by curious visitors because they have scenery back home is like advising diners at a restaurant not to eat the food because there are victuals back at the house, and is an extraordinary example of cultural vandalism for which I can find no mitigation.  

But, I digress.  My major complaint about Professor Hank’s unguidebook is reserved for what he has to say about British food.  I understand that a first-time visitor to the United Kingdom will find the food different, unless they go to the many fast food outlet franchises where they can eat exactly the same fare as they did at home, but at twice the cost.  

So, in order to get to my chief complaint I overlook minor niggles, such as his remark that the westernmost part of Yorkshire is grim and industrial, but other sections, which are called “ridings,” have some ruggedly beautiful stretches of green hillsides and foggy moors.  How can a “Professor of History” who has been studying his subject for “twenty-seven years” not know that the west of Yorkshire is a Riding – the West Riding?  

When he grudgingly tips his hat to Bonnie Scotland, he is quick to snatch it back.  “Highland Scotland has Britain’s ruggedest mountains, and best hunting, fishing, and skiing regions.  Such well-developed recreational opportunities make the Highlands a popular place for vacationers.  While visiting Americans might enjoy the scenery and the small towns of this region, they should always recognise that the United States has vast recreational resources along these lines.”  

It sounds as if he is saying they were better staying at home!  But I am only interested in what he has to say about the food, and so I will press on, ignoring his calling traditional Scottish regalia “clannish paraphernalia.”    

Yes, the food.  This cultural assassin has the temerity to launch an assault on the staple diets of millions of Britons, and he does so in a way that reeks of disdain, distaste, and hybris.  In the matter of fish and chips, that, from his report, he appears not to have eaten, it would be perfectly acceptable for him to say that he ate them in the traditional manner, but that they did not suit his taste.  However, his attack on the ancestral repast is, not to put too fine a point on it, intemperate, derogatory, despicable, offensive, and pejorative.  

“Fish and chips, consisted of a hunk of unspecified fish in a puff of batter accompanied by a mass of greasy fried potatoes.  All of this used to be served up in a cone of ordinary newspaper that rapidly became translucent with grease.”  

Fish and chips is still served up in a cone of newspaper, but I have been acquainted with the dish for more than seventy years and have never had them in newspaper but what they were wrapped inwardly by a lining of stiff white absorbent paper.  

What it more, no one ever ate ‘unspecified fish’ unless they were ignorant.  In the overwhelming majority of chip ‘oles found in Britain the fish is either cod or haddock, and if it is not marked up in the fish and chip shop, then asking a member of the Frying Fraternity will reveal the nature of the denizen of the deep that has been cooked, not in a ‘puff of batter’ but in a coating of crispy golden batter.  No mystery there for someone with a tongue in his head.  But, ‘Attila the cultural Gorilla’ is not done.  Not content with damning fish and chips to Hell, he next proceeds to denigrate those who enjoy them.

“Rough looking characters used to be seen propped up in doorways clawing into their greasy cones for this old staple of the British diet.”

British soldiers ‘used to be seen’ wearing red coats.  Most Britishers ‘used to be seen’ not owning cars, and so after a night out they either walked home or caught the bus.  The fish and chips would warm the walk home, and many frying establishments were placed near bus stops to catch the returnees on the last leg of their journeys.  

And, yes, I have seen the odd drunk propping himself up inside Jubb’s shop doorway to shelter from the rain – a wise thing to do – and sometimes they have been in the company of a fried supper.  But, “Rough looking”?  It is true that few of them were dressed in evening suits with black ties, patent leather shoes, and ruffed dickies, but if their honest faces were anything, they were not usually rough.  Lugubrious?  Perhaps.   Intoxicated?  Naturally, that’s why I referred to them as drunks.  But very few of them can accurately be called rough in the outrageous way Hank describes them, as if the whole nation of fish and chip devourers were inebriated barbarians that the foreigner had better beware, or else suffer dire consequences.  

He says, in effect, that the traditional fish and chip shops have had their day, having yielded to more exotic Oriental take away dishes.  While there is some truth in his statement, it would be foolish to write off fish and chips altogether, for they still have an impressive presence in British communities, an envied and not easily relinquished place in British hearts, and a home in the hearts of foreign visitors who are not put off by Hank’s insensitive and inaccurate culinary critique.  

“Ordinary British food,” he likens to British weather.  “Mostly unexciting” but with “a few bright spots amid the general dreariness.  At best,” intones the professor, “British food is similar to good American food.  At worst, it is greasy and overcooked…. Better on average than Irish or Russian food, which really does not say all that much for it.”  By this stage in his book, page forty-seven, I had begun to wonder if, history – of which he is the master – apart, he could find anything nice to say about Britain.

He hands out another left-handed compliment: “The British cook a few things quite well: simple, plain, unspiced roasts, particularly roast beef, for instance, or various kinds of fresh fish, also prepared simply.”  Shepherd’s Pie he dismisses with all the panache of the Philistine that described Bruch’s Violin Concerto in D, “Horsehair scraping on catgut!”  The Pie he says, damning it with no praise at all, “is a simple concoction of ground meat and onions covered with mashed potatoes.”  He could have added that landing men on the moon was a simple matter of some men in a tube being pushed through space.  Quite!

The pontiff, getting into his stride and warming to his crusade of destruction avers, “In Britain, vegetables can suffer a fate as horrible as that of the coagulated meat pie.  ‘Veg’ usually means peas, but on poorer menus brussels sprouts can be substituted.  Peas can plop onto plates cooked to death, all concave and grayish green.”  In all my years I have never seen a plate cooked to death, all grayish green, although they do function best at holding food when they are slightly concave!  Without taking a breath, he charges on, “Brussels sprouts can be so overcooked that a simple thrust through with a fork can cause them to explode like a green caterpillar underfoot.”  He has no regard for caterpillars either!  

The poor man!  Has he never been to a greengrocer’ shop and seen rows on rows of cabbages, cauliflower, chervil, Spanish onions, spring onions, parsnips, Swedes, carrots, turnips, fennel, peas, Brussel sprouts, runner beans, broad beans, asparagus, spinach, kidney beans, celery, celeriac, Savoy, kale, endless varieties of potatoes, mushrooms, lettuce, radish, tomatoes, capsicums, red cabbage, artichokes – globe and Jerusalem, beetroot, lima beans, haricot beans, lentils, split peas, chick peas, mange tout peas, garlic, black beans, broccoli, chestnuts, maize cobs, aubergine, shallots, endive, leeks, okra, plantains, and a whole host of exotic vegetables that have been imported into Britain since the sixties?  Peas or sprouts my eye!

There is worse to come.  The crainiac is just winding up his arm to assault more hallowed institutions, referring to the “chamber of horrors” of “British food,” even as he invites his gentle readers to “encounter bad British food [by going] to a cheap short order restaurant … called cafés [that] bask in the glare of fluorescent light and have a deafening level of noise from the roar of the cooking grease [curiously, he omits ‘the smell of the crowd!’], the semi-intelligible shouts of the staff and the endless clatter of heavy dishes.”  Now, I believe that the man is gone completely mad, and invites his unsuspecting readers to join him in his nightmare.  

Yet there is worse to come.  “Impossible!” I hear you exclaim.  But “worse” is what I said, and “worse” it is!  He next turns his venomous fangs towards the British Meat Pie.  Speaking for the British, he sticks his grubby fingers into our mouths along with his words, as if he were both spokesman and marionette-meister.  

“British people forever complain that their particular steak and kidney pie is overdone or, something worse, underdone, when the kidneys do, alas, remind one of their essential function when they were embedded in a living animal.”

Overlooking what he describes as “the worldwide British maritime navy,” another example of professorial superfluous, redundant, tautology that I have, as promised, completely overlooked, well, almost, I now report his findings in that grave matter of the British Pork Pie.  Not wishing to do to his work the violence he has done to my food, I will let him condemn himself from his own mouth, but first I will share a non-pejorative definition of the noble Pork Pie.

Pork pie is a traditional British food. It consists of cured pork meat and pork jelly in a hot water crust pastry and is normally eaten cold.  It is a savoury deliciousness to be treasured.  The earliest recorded recipe for pork pie dates to the thirteen hundreds. Then, it was flavoured with nutmeg, mace, and raisins, and the ‘coffyn’ or crust was filled with melted butter rather than pork jelly.  Yorkshire folk and their poorer neighbours to the west, still prefer their Pork Pies eaten warm, on a plate, sliced into six, and drizzled with brown sauce.  

But for all their present simplicity of seasoning, their place on British tables is assured.  They are eaten cold, the perfect picnic snack, easy to transport, and can be sampled without soiling the hands by holding the pastry coffin and devouring the innards with gentle finesse, noisily sucking up the jelly when it threatens to run away.  

That is, unless you are fortunate enough to buy one from the tiny butcher’s shop just over the bridge on the road below the mediaeval church in Skipton, in which case these culinary delectations are straight out of the oven and very warm, some might say ‘hot,’ when they are purchased.  Crowds of people, including American tourists who have not been dissuaded by reading a certain book, throng the narrow pavement taking care not to let the not-yet-set jelly drip down their sleeves to their elbows.  But here’s Hank’s perspective:

“Pork pies,” he effluviates, “deserve their notoriety.  They have the specific gravity of lead, and they can be thrown just like hand grenades or baseballs.  One can remove the pie crust and expect to find a layer of shiny green gelatinous scum.  Inside this layer is a core of pinkish, grayish pork that looks as if it is composed of snouts or tails.”  

One wonders why he doesn’t just come right out and say what he is thinking instead of beating around the bush!  Perhaps this gentleman is a thwarted Yankee humorist who imagines himself of the stamp of Mark Twain, Will Rogers, or Artemus Ward.  He is none of those, nor anything like unto them.  The specific gravity of lead is 11340 - that of cooked pork less than 2000.  Draw your own conclusion.  

There is much more in his book for which he deserves flogging, but I have imposed on your good nature and attention spans too long already, so I will close with his diatribe of error regarding that honourable and regal institution, the Yorkshire Pudding.  

Like many traditional British foods – Scottish haggis, for example – the Yorkshire Pudding as fare for common folk was brought on by extreme poverty during times when hungry working folks needed to eat but could not afford, or had no other access to, the flesh of animals.  Flour, eggs, milk, salt, and a little beef lard or dripping – never ‘grease,’ which is something used to lubricate wheel bearings – were usually available to an agrarian population even in times of want, and these are the basic ingredients of the ‘Yorkshire.’  

In the big houses, it was cooked in a tin under the rotating spit on which beef was roasting.  The rich juices from the meat dripping on to it provided its delicious flavour. In better times in modern Yorkshire, it is still sometimes cooked around the meat in a roasting tin, and still occasionally served as a first course before the meat and vegetable, smothered with unspeakably beefy gravy.  It can be as light as a feather by letting it rise to nothing more than a shell, or it can be cooked to a consistency of some substance, reflecting the oft-felt need to fill up with something that would ‘stick to your ribs’ in times of cold and hardship.

Well-risen crispy Yorkshires are the sign of a good cook, and British chefs unable to turn out perfect ones, cannot hold up their head in public, especially in Yorkshire, where the entire population are connoisseurs of the beloved comestible.  Hank blasts the King of Puddings with his haphazard shotgun, his snotty disdain for what others value, and his pitifully inadequate grasp of traditional British fare.

“Yorkshire pudding, although widely celebrated,” he concedes, “seem to be only pastry made in the grease that comes from roasting.”  

Had he put some into his mouth, he would have had more to say about it that was less disparaging.  What something ‘seems’ to be can be readily verified or controverted by the age-old principle of practical research dwelling in the celebrated saying, "The proof of the Pudding is in the ____.   Fill in the missing word, Professor!

Who knows how many visitors breathless with anticipation at visiting the Ancient Motherland has Hank sent tumbling in with a foul taste in their mouths even before they have had opportunity to discover for themselves the delightful taste of these foods, because he has poisoned their minds with his malicious monograph?  

Who knows what horrors invest his mind to make him so negative and bloody-minded towards a country that has, however indirectly, given him a good living for many years?  What is in his heart that compels his acrimony?  Is it written to amuse adolescents who don’t know better, and who have a tendency to believe whatever comes out of the mouths of their mentors, especially when they hold a chair, and must, de rigeur, laugh at their jokes however inappropriate or misleading they are? 

I have no doubt that Hank’s book filled a gap in the market, but the publisher really ought to have gone for the gap.  I have placed the professor’s tome “Understanding the UK” on the bookshelf between “The Minutes of the Meetings of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and “The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk,” where it now keeps company with the like-minded.  

Hank can neither blame the ignorance of youth, nor the forgetfulness of old age, because he and I share the same birth year, and such nastiness has not struck me down.  We are each responsible for doing our very best at all times, and obligated not to yield to the demons that plague writers who imagine they need to be wildly different and dishonestly confrontational to be read.  

In a paragraph that I suspect someone who had not read his book wrote for him, he avers:

“Journalists’ pursuit of royal sexual peccadilloes borders upon insensitivity and, of course, goes far over the line of common decency and good taste.”

How right he is to point out that ‘insensitivity,’ ‘common decency,’ and ‘good taste,’ have a place in human life.  These virtues would have been welcome in his work.  

Copyright © 2006 Ronnie Bray

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED