Why Edible Ming?

It occurred to me not long after posting my opening gambit that the title of this blog really needs an early explanation, but it’s been hard to write my way around one of those squirmy “you had to be there” moments. It is a bit excruciating to have to explain what is essentially one of those rubbish private jokes which become so normalised inside the family unit that you no longer even laugh at it yourselves. It’s just a ritual which makes you feel loved and comfy, and leaves outsiders thinking you’re all thoroughly weird. So do bear with. Sick and tired of answering the wail of “what's for dinner?” every night when I was a kid, my ever-witty and sophisticated parents took to answering “ming”. This quip descended into the mature exchange of:

“What kind of ming?”

“Edible ming”. 

“What kind of edible ming?”

“Spinach.”

Hilarious, no? My dad’s alternative response was “pizza and beans” (a dinner which in his eyes was the lowest of the low, but which we secretly longed for) when in fact he was busy deep-frying courgette flowers and wondering why his teenage daughters’ eyes were permanently rolled heavenwards.

 
So basically - skipping to the end - ‘edible ming’ means tea, dinner, supper, scran, etc. (insert your colloquial phrase of choice), as well as being a reminder of how silly and lovely family life can be. And now it has a new incarnation as my attempt to write a diary of sort-of essays about food.  

If it is true that reading makes you a better writer then I should be snapping at Elizabeth David’s heels within the month, since my cookbook consumption is out of control. In the bookshop where I work, the cookery section is both my fiercely-defended and fussed-over domain, and a curse on my wallet. I regularly go into work to find cookbooks set aside for me that my dear colleagues can’t be faffed to shelve, knowing too well that I won’t be able to resist them for the length of a whole shift. I’ve snapped a chunk of my current collection, but this doesn’t cover the mountain of books of grub-based history, travel and politics currently warming the skirting boards in the living room. Titles like ‘The Rituals of Dinner’, ‘With Bold Knife and Fork’, ‘Hungry City’, ‘Salt’, ‘Spice Routes’ and ‘The Man Who Ate Everything’ seem to accrue around me like pondweed, and leave me at the receiving end of a lot of despairing looks. Not least from removal men, a few of whom I think I may have pushed into early retirement.  

I read cookbooks like normal people do the newspaper, while I’m eating breakfast, while I’m cooking dinner, when I should be studying. I particularly love the introductions, the histories of certain dishes, the little reveries and the barbed, jokey teases that Nigella, Nigel Slater and Simon Hopkinson write so brilliantly. Those bits are why my shelves are groaning with books, and what I’m trying in some small way to emulate here.

So there is, for want of a less obnoxiously twattish phrase, my ‘mission statement’. More food, less cook, to follow - I promise…

Dad's Legacy

Don't worry, this isn’t the start of an X Factor journey. I would rather take out my own eyes with a wooden spoon than earn a sympathetic look from the Geordie tear-dispenser, but as I only entered the kitchen with serious intent after my dad died when I was 20, it makes sense to start with him. 

My sisters and I spent a substantial proportion of our littleness eating, swapping stories and arguing around the dining table. We were, and remain, a greedy family, for which I blame my dad’s good cooking. We grew up in a River Cottage-esque idyll with a large vegetable garden, chickens, vicious hated geese, and a pervasive fear of the wrath conjured by Dad finding banana skins in the big bin (rather than the compost). We podded all the peas before they had the chance to make it from garden to kitchen, we looked forward to the first spaghetti squashes of the season, and were forbidden from considering Pot Noodles as a foodstuff. The only way Coco Pops were permitted in the house was at Easter to feed the chickens so they would “lay” chocolate eggs. (It was the foil that finally broke the magic - my poor otherwise-brilliantly-imaginative mother couldn’t come up with an explanation fast enough when challenged by three precocious and troublesome brats).

I do read the Guardian (I may as well have it tattooed across my forehead), but I am conscious of how hideously smug this all sounds. But it was lovely. Dad was a doctor, not a farmer, but he was an avowed food nut (or snob, depending on whether he was being a pain in the arse in the ready meal aisle of the supermarket). He made beef olives when we were boating on Scottish canals. He stuffed squid after work. He did buy crumble mix once - a slip which he has not lived down even in death - and once served us cold fillets of herring which were hairy. My sisters have never forgiven him for the "rustic peasant sausages" which he choked down stubbornly in the name of authenticity, while my mum ransacked the pantry for pasta and cheese for his retching family. He puffed up with delight when allowed to pronounce to others about our lack of a microwave. 

And thanks to twenty years of such conditioning and the inevitability of genetics - despite bemoaning his eccentricities in a stroppy teenage fashion - I am exactly the bloody same. When I left for a tiny kitchen of my own in London, we discussed dinner plans every night over the phone, always with the air of competition. I still have a picture he emailed of homemade Indian pickles, served in little tin dishes bought for that very purpose from the Kashmir supermarket in Middlesbrough. We discovered St. John’s Restaurant together and I ate brains for the first time with him in Knightsbridge. This is the first and last time I will be a bit melancholy in this blog, or over-share in any other slightly embarrassing way, but the reason I am writing it is that it does still make me sad that I don’t have anyone to ring to show off to when my sourdough works out. That is why I am writing this now, in a meekly showy-offy way, to tell the entire Internet instead. And my sister seems to think it would be a good idea, so we can blame her if it all goes horribly pear-shaped. 

There isn't a room in the grand total of five that make up my small semi-detached house that I love more than the kitchen. I would be happy living in it, with a hammock in the corner. I am a horrible cooking companion though, this I admit. I am borderline obsessive-compulsive, to the point of being a bully to those poor sods who try and ‘help’, and am an inconsistent perfectionist without the necessary talent to satisfy my own standards - but I’m working on it. My lasagne is (admitted in hushed whispers by my mum and sisters as if the big man's listening) better than Dad's, and it gives me enormous pleasure to imagine how competitively cross this would have made him. And my bread is better than his, although still not as good as my mum's. So I’ll be writing about my stove-side experiments, successes and failures, sharing useless but (I think!) interesting bits of food-related history and anthropology. My dissertations in both subjects were food-based (I am nothing if not one-track minded) - and it's about time they came to some use. I will try not to be gloaty, or samey, or dull. Here’s hoping that the scribblings in my recipe books are not to be the pinnacle of my food-writing achievements: “YUM. But needs more chilli” does not a budding Simon Hopkinson make…