My Fray Bentos Days when I was beige in judgement

How many countries did your dinner plate visit this week?

Illustration: Lili Wharfe

The city of Uruguay after which the innocuous 1970’s food staple was named belies its exotic origin. Fray Bentos home to a World Heritage Site, a technological university and a thriving port. But for us Brits it will always be the pie in a tin.  

The slab of gelatinous pastry revealed after unlocking the tin (no mean feat with a butterfly tin opener) did not augur well but there was a magical transformation in the oven as it puffed up to wondrous heights with its rich gravy magma oozing though the crust. No chopping, no dousing cubes of beef in flour, no searing of meat. NO WASHING UP – on the table in 30 minutes. What more could the busy housewife wish for?

Last night’s meal involved two frying pans, a roasting dish, a saucepan, three serving dishes, serving spoons, a myriad of pickles and sauces – which someone - me - needs to put away. It looked like I’d cooked for Innsworth Camp, as my mother would say (the local RAF base), not a family of four. After a day of home schooling I feel the pressure more than ever to make the evening meal an affair to remember - something to look forward to after Zoomday. However the ratio of me cooking, to them eating, is about 4000 to one. My grateful sinking into my place at the table is so often greeted by the scrape of a plate. And yes I am catering for meat and vegetarian here and I lost my way a little in a frenzy of sundry side dishes (I hear your rallying cry of traybake) but one tin ladies – come on! Slash open a bag of frozen peas and voilà – could be tootsies up, watching Call My Agent by 7.30.

We loved meat in a tin when I was a kid. Corned beef - if you still had all your fingers after you’d negotiated the cuboid tin with the wibbly key which always snapped off just as it rounded the last corner – you could enjoy the delights of Corned Beef Hash; Spam - when you stabbed a school dinner spam fritter the fat would leap out and smack you in the eye; and of course tongue. The pink Paisley pressings of the tongue not to mention the incongruity of tongue on tongue, and not in a nice way, was too much for me, but my mum loved it as the main event of a salad.  And by salad I don’t mean the maelstrom of today’s tossed offering.  A salad was an arrangement - each constituent isolated and unadorned. The boiled egg – sliced (always wanted an egg slicer); the lone radish - trimmed; the tomato - possibly cut in a natty zig zag; cucumber - sliced (rounds not nouveau cuisine batons), lettuce - a few caterpillar-checked leaves of the Gem or the not non-descript  Round. Not for us the exotica of Romaine, Mizuna or sexy Lollo Rosso. Icberg was what lay at the back of the fridge and needed to be chipped off with the fish slice. Each item sat naked ready to be dipped in salad cream. What no avocadoes? Dinner party starter with prawns yes, but not blithely smashed on toast as a mid morning pick me up or obliterated in a smoothie as merely a vitamin boost.  

The fruit bowl sat in a silver plate basket and was periodically dusted by Mrs Pope. Apples, blackening bananas, grapes puckering in the sun and a lone orange. Lemons yes for the chicken’s bum, G and T’s and pancake day. Lemon juice was Jif – now called Emergency Lemon in our house. A lime was the fruit gum flavour nobody wanted. I now buy them by the bagful.

Fresh herbs began and ended with the pot of parsley which magically appeared every Christmas Eve on our doorstep delivered incognito by a teacher friend of my mums so she could make her special stuffing. But no bay leaves, no basil – neither purple or Greek, torn nor pestoed; no coriander – which if I can’t get, punches a hole in Taco Night. Green herbs were essentially dried and there was little discernible difference between them so no wonder we gave up and went mixed. At Christmas I was always foraging around in the back of the cupboard for the paprika – way past its sell by date to dust the prawn cocktail resplendent in its Marie Rose sauce (mayonnaise, ketchup and dash of sherry because its Christmas)

Of course for my mum rationing still hung in the 70’s mildewed air and for the thrifty housewife no nethers were off limits: haslet, brisket, frisket, faggots… all good stuff, all things I flinch at today.

My daughter has just come down and hijacked my Ocado order - ooh can we get some tahini and we’ve run out of Siracha and ooh cornichons we need ( does a 13year old need cornichons?  Tacos shells of course.. I mean they’re basically sliced bread and rose water because I want to make Turkish delight…oh and could we get some Mochi? What? Oh and sushi rice because I want to make well sushi, and Barista milk cos we’re clean out.  Around the world we whizzed with our global shopping trolley. Food miles anyone?The sophistication! Well done me I say – all that mashing of butternut squash and sweet potato when they were babies certainly educated their global palette. But jeez sometimes I long for the beige days of three things on your plate one of which was ketchup.

My cupboards shelves are straining under the exotic produce that I have. I’m a sucker for the game changer ingredient that will garner oohs and ahs from my eager recipients. After Mum, my favourite word is mmmmh when they take the first bite. My least favourite the silence when you say it’s cauliflower cheese for tea.

Who do we thank for this cooking cornucopia? The wonderful Elizabeth David of course who brought the sunshine of Provence to our grey post war days – I have attempted her bouillabaisse from French Provincial Cooking and despite feeling slightly queasy at the mention of the hair sieve – we had a good go – it took all day and the wallpaper peeled off the kitchen walls there was that much steam but it was delicious. But things have moved on a pace since.  Today the main culprit of this paradise of ingredients is superstar chef Ottolenghi whose ‘simple’ (oxymoron) top 10 ingredients lists: pomegranate molasses, tahini, black garlic, rose harissa, preserved lemons, za’atar, sumac, ground cardamom, urfa chilli flakes and dried barberries. How did you score ladies? Barberries??   

An Otto recipe still scares me – my rule is if you don’t know which aisle it belongs to in Waitrose then you’re not qualified to cook it. You don’t want to be wrestling with galanghal  or sambal olek on a Friday night.

So grab your passport and let me take you on a global tour of my cupboards, collecting the food miles as we go.  I have the very annoying juddery pull out larder type whose shelves are too shallow to house the myriad of kitchen potions (I have just spotted a piece in The Guardian – 30 sauces to spice up your lockdown cooking. Stop no more!) and I swear at every time I pull it out. Not a serene start to the supposed balm of cooking. I had a pantry once. I loved I lost. We will rise again pantry and I. So in addition to my Ottolenghi ‘essentials’ we have: Berbere spices from Ethiopia (unopened); Ras El Hanout (Moroccan tagines); tamarind paste (unopened); dried porcini (risotto) Pul Biber pepper (Nigella Turkish eggs) Saffron (staining your worktop) zhoug (God knows – grouting the bathroom?). You will have your own.

This is not to mention the common as mash carb staples of couscous, quinoa, polenta, puy lentils, and Arborio rice, all now as common as pasta which is now as common as mashed potato which was then slightly  one up from just boiled due to the addition of butter.

Of course none of these ingredients are essential – we read a weekend recipe from the pantheon of Nigel, Thomasina or Nigella or and feel compelled to purchase.  And it is no coincidence that as the world shrinks our larders expand. Holidays to North Wales didn’t have us all rushing back to rustle up seaweed for tea.   

Around the globe we go every evening ramen, fajitas, risottos, pad thai, tacos, tagines, these have become everyday meals – these have become the lamb hotpot, the egg and chips, the sausage and mash of my childhood not exotic anymore but everyday.  For us the heady heights of foreign cooking was Spaghetti Bolognese – not out of a tin and not cooked by my Mum who insisted on pronouncing pasta parsta and pizza pitzah but my more widely travelled Mum’s friend Maggie who had spent her summers on a boat in Marseille  and the sojourn had rubbed off. Her Bolognese was a slow cooked delight with parmesan dust shaken from a jar and long, long spaghetti – how do you eat it we would giggle? We delighted on sucking up the spaghetti till they made a satisfying whip-smack on our lips.

We really have taken ‘rainbow on a plate’ to our hearts. The saturated colour wheel of pink pickled onions, fuchsia roasted beetroot, pomegranate seeds like jewels winking beneath the houmous, acid lime shavings, purple sprouting scarlet jalapenos… compare to our muted porridge days of apple crumble and custard when an omelette was continental. But it wasn’t the colour – spam was pretty dayglo – it was the taste that was beige. We knew not of the spell of umami and were just glad to be full. 

But at times it is fine to call a halt. Even Nigella professes her love for beige food. I recently read about a famous cook who said his mum wasn’t a great cook – her pastry on her apple pie was soggy – he would never serve it in his restaurant -  but he wouldn’t have it any other way, it was exactly what he wanted to eat when he came home. Because his Mum had made it. So take note struggling mums – it doesn’t have to be Ottolenghi every night – it just has to be filling, home-cooked (opening a box at home counts) and not tongue.  Egg and chips is my last supper (after Linguine Vongole that is).