'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

Cutting The Mustard

I cook a meal most days and like to cook for friends, so the kitchen is not a complete mystery to me. What is a mystery is what ‘taste’ is about. I used to drink coffee with sugar. Then I gave sugar up. Now, I sometimes have a lump of sugar in a bitter espresso, but with ordinary instant or filter coffee, I can’t stand the stuff. Sugar hasn’t changed, so somehow my taste has. Smoking is the same; you hate to give it up but when you have, you hate the smell of cigarettes.

Taste in food, like taste in fashion is constantly changing. There is no universal standard that you can rely on. In the Middle-Ages the taste was for much sourer dishes, for instance. There is also this strange thing called ‘acquired taste’, something that you don’t like when you first taste it, but you get to like it, despite yourself as it were. Your taste also changes, as you get older. Stranger and stranger, as Lewis Carroll would say. And, to think that in England, the land of roast beef, the most popular dish is a curry!

The curry thing is probably a reaction to the legion of restaurants across the UK, particularly in holiday resorts and on motorways, which serve up over-fried, over- boiled, over-baked, when not micro waved ingredients of highly suspect quality. The British philosophy is ‘if it’s a captive audience, any slop will do’. That doesn’t mean that there arn’t good gastro-pubs, hostelries and restaurants in well-healed areas, it just means that in time honoured tradition, if they can serve up shit, they will.  

But the customer can also be incredibly blinkered, not to say darn right parochial about the taste of food. In America, the cheese is jack, jack and more jack and it is the most boring, badly textured cheese on the Planet. Also, the common brands of American beer suck. They have so little bite and flavour you wonder if you are really drinking beer at all. And their bread is the most pappy, tasteless excuse for bread that you wouldn’t think could be made, even if you tried.

Possibly, that’s because many Americans don’t care about those foods. What they want is a big, juicy steak, fries and maybe a salad with one of a myriad of dressings. They are oh so big on dressings, but all oh so creamy, nothing as sharp and simple as a vinaigrette.

France on the other hand, does care – or says it does - and they are also big, big sinners in the taste department. Their main sin is arrogance. Zee food Francais is zee best food in zee World. Eet is zee best and zat ees zat. Now, you could be driving down a country road in the middle of France somewhere. You might stop at an auberge and have the most ravishingly delicious lunch that you could ever have dreamt of. Their markets also have the most wonderful fresh produce that you could wish for. But, I am afraid to say that they have not the slightest idea what a good potato is, although the best in the World are grown a few miles off their mainland, and when it comes to apples, their apples have to be cooked. They are just not fit to eat as they come.  Apples and potatoes are both called 'pommes' in French. An apple is a 'pomme' and a potato is a 'pomme de terre' or an 'apple of the earth'. The notion that there is some similarity between an apple and a potato suggests that they havn't a clue about either of them.

Jersey Royal potatoes are grown on the Isle of Jersey and also in Cornwall, which must mean that they could also be grown in Brittany, but to the best of my knowledge they are not or if they are it is a closely guarded, shameful secret. Once you have eaten a Jersey Royal, you will know why they are called ‘Royal’. Their flavour and texture ensure their enthronement. Apples, on the other hand are in a sorry state the World over. They are nothing to what they were a generation ago, but for some reason in France they are not ‘fruit’ at all. They are leathery, pithy, without juice or sharpness. They look like apples, but simply are not.

The French are food snobs. It took a world revolution in wine to wake them up in that department and when it comes to cheeses, they just can’t get their heads around anything that isn’t French. They ignore the Spanish manchego and the English Cheshire, both of which can stand alongside anything they have to offer. The French are bigoted, food philistines when you come down to it.

I personally like those taste touches that define a country. Cranberry sauce, say in America, wasabi, I think it is called (the hot green horseradish paste) in Japan, herbs de Provence in France, tomato sauce in Italy and mustard in England. I see great similarities between Japan and England. Both are small countries off the coast of big ones with incredibly deep-rooted cultures that have successfully somersaulted into the modern world. And they both have these eye-watering condiments that are only matched in strength perhaps by the ubiquitous chilli pepper. I personally serve a lightly grilled tuna steak with English mustard and it is phenomenal!

But those who buy English mustard in a bottle or a tube and don’t mix the powder with water themselves simply have no idea what the taste of English mustard truly is, and why with roast beef (or grilled tuna) it is so essential. I suppose that all mustards come from mustard seed, but only one that I know of is truly worthy of the name ‘mustard’ and that is English mustard, which has to be made just before serving from English mustard powder. All the rest should have a different name, ‘Musty’ perhaps: Full Grain Musty, Dijon Musty, American Musty. ‘You want some musty on your hot Dog?’ ‘No, I’ll have some mustard, thanks.’

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