A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [97]
I love England. I’m there a lot. So I have a vested interest in the outcome. Few cultures are as resolutely grounded in the appreciation of a nice thick slab of fatty meat, a well-brewed beer or ale than the English.
No country was experiencing the kind of foodie gold rush, that boomtown mass psychosis that suddenly causes everyone to become obsessed with all things to do with food, restaurants, chefs, and cuisine, that England was (except maybe Australia). Things were going so well. Now? Everything hangs in the balance. It’s war. A fight for the hearts, minds, and souls of future generations. If the dark forces win? They’ll be looking across the Atlantic; don’t doubt that for a second. They already have their operatives in place. They’ll be looking at your plate, inspecting your refrigerator. They already are. They want to take your meat away.
They even want your cheese.
Japanese porn is ugly, violent, and disturbing. German porn is ugly, fetishistic, and disturbing. American porn is stupid, slick, and produced in multiple versions (how explicit depends on what major hotel chain you’re staying at) – sex as a mass-produced corporate endeavor. Brit porn, however, is the absolute bottom of the barrel – stuff so witless, brainless, joyless, and strange as to remove from the imagination immediately any possibility that sex might ever actually be fun.
The actors are crude, fat, and saggy and have bad teeth and dirty feet. Even their tattoos are artless. The cast members, apparently, are compelled to have sex through their underwear, tonguing saliva-soaked Jockey shorts until the questions about why Brits have historically been so fucked up about sex are answered: Judging from the videos I saw, it’s all about bum whacking and undies. There is no hope. Bear with me here; I’m leading up to an allegory.
Eventually.
One can be forgiven, I hope – on first look – for thinking that the only people getting laid in England are rock stars and chefs. (Which is entirely appropriate. The two professions have traditionally been at the vanguard of sexual adventurism.) In England, as in America and Australia, the population has gone chef-crazy, reading about them in the tabloids, watching them on TV, buying their recipe books, losing themselves in lurid fantasies of cutting-board penetration and sweaty tangles in the larder. If food is the new porn – a less dangerous alternative to the anonymous and unprotected shag of decades past – then the mission is even more urgent.
A sampler of England’s hottest ‘chefs’ would include a mostly hairless young blond lad named Jamie Oliver, who is referred to as the Naked Chef. As best as I can comprehend, he’s a really rich guy who pretends he scoots around on a Vespa, hangs out in some East End cold-water flat, and cooks green curry for his ‘mates.’ He’s a TV chef, so few actually eat his food. I’ve never seen him naked. I believe the ‘Naked’ refers to his ‘simple, straightforward, unadorned’ food; though I gather that a great number of matronly housewives would like to believe otherwise. Every time I watch his show, I want to go back in time and bully him at school.
Another TV demigod is Nigella Lawson – the object of desire of nearly every male I met in England – and the apparent dream of perfection for most women I encountered. She’s a wealthy and beautiful widow who cooks in a denim jacket. When she leans over the workbench, her breasts are the focus of intent contemplation and rhapsodic praise by the male television audience.
Last time I was in England, it was all anyone seemed to want to talk about: ‘Nigella’s breasts . . . have you seen them?’ While she may not look like too many cooks I know, she does seem to cook a lot of exuberantly cheesy, fatty, greasy stuff – not shying away from the butter and cream – which puts her on the side of the angels in my book. How many upper-crust widows do you know who say, ‘Fuck it! Let’s eat what’s good!’ Not many. I like her.
There’s the