In 1968, people thought this was delicious. The caption reads, “Pineapple jelly starter, garnished with watercress; the dressing is served separately”. These days it looks like a bunch of leafy cartoon creatures trying to escape the Blob from Planet Symmetry.

Yesterday, I cooked a meal for my friend Alex. We eat a lot of Asian food in our house, mostly because I am trying to force vegetables and fibrous stuff into my Anglo gob, in response to ferocious threats from the doctor about my bowels.

My partner Susie rose up and demanded proper old fashioned grub. Her collection of 1970’s Cordon Bleu cookery course magazines arrived on the kitchen table with a thud, as she suggested it could surely inspire me to something decent.

Alerted by a cursory flick through its alarmingly pink photos, I went to the market with new eyes. I noticed a remarkble change. Less fat, of course, and lots of cryo-vacced skinned flesh with pre-prepared dobs of herbs and (gasp) Asian sauces. But, amazingly, the organ food has disappeared completely. What happened to liver? Whence the kidney? The chicken livers? Sweetbreads? That guilty, creamy pleasure of a good crumbed brain? You can’t even get an ox-tail.

The change has been gradual, but I really failed to notice for one very Tiley reason. My mother was a deliberately foul cook, who turned liver into small petrified black aircraft carriers, and kidneys into soft, gristly knuckles of urine. Even today, the very idea can make my stomach lurch. Tripe was for northerners, so we had none of that, thank you very much. Oddly, she did manage a decent brains on toast, but at the time I thought spaghetti came in tins and was round like a pile of tiny hula hoops.

I came away with a rib roast, which turned out only to have a decorative end of bone rather than the whole rib, which explained immediately why my modern recipe with its recent culinary fashion was not going to work. Put the chopped bones under the meat? – sadly, no. I can safely say the joint was perfect crap, even though I seared it and timed it properly and all that reflexive stuff which is clearly not genetic.

Meanwhile, Alex rang to on our new-fangled mobiles to say that he was stuck in a traffic jam. Then he rang to say that his car had died completely with an ugly rattle in the engine, symbolically on the downside of the highway next to the casino, so he coasted to a petrol station, scarfed a hamburger, and rang for help. At least in a culinary sense, he had the better part of the arrangement.

Alex being a cheese lover, I had lovingly assembled a platter. A triple brie with special straw things to resemble farmyard sticks, a decent blue, and a hunk of vintage cheddar. “Vintage” in the sense that the deception is a very old one. It has a peculiar soapy sharpness that I have found in several recent pieces of cheese. all packed in that black pseudo-ethnic rubbery stuff which was probably invented for BDSM rites deep in the secret laboratories of Du Pont.

We had a pear to go with this. I found the only soft pear in the whole damn market and it was delicious.

This morning I did open the gordy bloo cullection, actually published after 1975 but based on a course which originated in 1968, a year in which so much that was new tried to break forth. While the inspired idiocies of Paris in May 68 and the pitiful hope of the Prague Spring were put down by force, I suspect the Ginger and Grapefruit Cocktail just withered away from neglect. Randomly on page 32 of Number Seventeen, I found the following letter, which is the point of this post.

Cooking Tongues
I bought a fresh tongue recently, and, bearing in mind what you said about it being almost impossible to overcook a tongue, I cooked it in accordance with the instructions given in Issue 9. I used a good handful of iodised table salt – the water in my area being deficient in iodine – and I’m sorry to say the result was a very tender and completely tasteless tongue. What did I do wrong? Should I have used all cooking salt, or should I have bought a pickled tongue?

These days, we would immediately assume that some horrible factory grows tongues artificially in quivering rows under purple lights. Free of the natural environment of the animal mouth, never stimulated by genuine organically-originated food (usually in fact the animal’s grandparents rendered into pellets sprayed with attractive odours from the bottom of some Arabian fractionating column), they are never stimulated to produce a flavour of their own.

In the innocent Seventies, we assumed the problem was the salt. The disappointed tongue lover here was probably wrong to worry about the amount of iodine in her (surely a her) water supply, since the amount is usually very low anyway. But she was right to use iodised salt, because public health professionals are now telling us we can end up with hypo-thyroidism because we use fancy organic and sea-salt with no added iodine. Anyway, the experts at Cordon Bleu reach out to us over a generation to provide an answer..

“You will find that a fresh tongue is much milder in flavour than a salted one, but it should not hagve been completely tasteless when it was cooked. Next time, we suggest you use a little cooking salt as well as the iodised table salt [odd advice, that] and cook the tongue with root vegetables and a large bunch of herbs, as well as peppercorns, to give more flavour.

This stops short of the truth, of course. Tongues have never tasted of anything much. They are mostly good for putting under the pillows of smaller brothers and sisters. Or for a particularly startling moment deep in the secret laboratories under Du Pont, shortly after the sound of a zipper.

———-

There is not a single reference on the whole interwebnets for “pineapple jelly starter”. And I am really partial to a good steak-and-kidney pie. And I don’t believe they taste of piss at all. Just cook them enough.

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