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…