Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [72]
I know that these days a lot of pub food is good, beating the local bistro and trattoria on value for money and speed of service, though not on amenity. But the pub should segregate the eaters and the drinkers at least into separate rooms, preferably separate establishments. Pubs that are also lunch counters, and often coffee bars and soft-drinks stands as well, too easily become places for all the family. And that’s an encroachment, an attack on the pub’s time-honoured function as a male refuge.
I said the last bit nearly a year ago on this page. Nobody wrote to me then to correct me, or even to agree with me. Perhaps someone will this time. On the various points, am I prejudiced, out of date, generalizing from too little data, just wrong, or devastatingly right? Letters c/o Daily Express by 25 March, please. State your age, sex, favourite drink, etc.
I can’t go on evading the wine problem—it won’t go away. Just coming out against the tyranny of wine, as I’ve done, isn’t enough. Mind you, I stand by everything I’ve said on the subject. Let me recap, with additions. Most of us would agree that wine is at its best with food, and can perhaps only be appreciated like that. Not all of us, it seems—it’s odd that when experts choose and grade wine, they do so with nothing to eat but the occasional palate-cleansing dry biscuit, and spit out the wine too instead of swallowing it, which I doubt if they usually do at dinner. But let that go.
Under normal conditions then, wine goes with food, though obviously not any wine with any food. No wine at all goes with eggs however prepared, most salads, strong or ripe cheeses and almost any highly seasoned dish, let alone with kippers, fish and chips, bacon and tomatoes, sausages and mash and a whole range of staple unsmart British dishes. Beer or stout goes with them.
Quite a few people, true, will drink a good red wine with roast beef, lamb or pork, and why not, if they enjoy it? Fine, but they won’t enjoy it so much if they also take on board our traditional condiments, like English mustard, horseradish, mint sauce, red currant jelly or apple sauce, the last of which, as I know from bitter experience, can ruin an expensive claret. Similarly, roast chicken can be agreeably washed down with either red or white wine, only much the more so if bread sauce and sage-and-onion stuffing aren’t let into the act. And I need hardly say, keep the parsley sauce off the cod and the poached egg off the haddock. Wine of any merit is too delicate for that kind of thing.
In fact, it follows that the nearer you can get to reproducing a dish from the Burgundy region, say, with all the right herbs and other trimmings, and if possible a stove from there to cook it on, the better your bottle of Burgundy will taste with it. Outside a few specialist restaurants, imitating someone else’s food to go with someone else’s drink seems an absurd proceeding, especially given the quality of British meat and cooking vegetables. This is not a wine-producing country, and our national cuisine evolved without it.
Unfortunately the matter can’t be left there. It doesn’t touch the wine problem. Haven’t I said what that is? It’s simply that people expect wine, confound them. When they come to dinner or just drop in, they require it. No use telling them how much better off they’d be with Guinness. What to do?
It’s some years since a Cambridge don of my acquaintance served his guests tea to wash down their Chinese-style dinner, on the reasoning that with any given food the correct drink was the local drink, and tea was Chinese and wine clearly not. I should imagine—needless to say I wasn’t there myself—he only just got away with it then. Nowadays he wouldn’t dare. But offering beer wouldn’t be much more popular, I feel, even alongside Chinese food, which it’s not at all bad with, better than wine in