Signature Dishes – a Lyric Essay

A signature dish usually has a story
Rooting its cook in the time and place
Where it was acquired and from whom…

Palaver Sauce was my first glorious excursion into cooking in a different way, and I brought it out at dinner parties for many years and told its story. The American professor of West African studies who taught my fellow student and I to stew the things which convention would say ought not to go together, red meat and white, and salt fish…

Goat—funkier than lamb, nearer to mutton
Chicken – chopped in chunks still on the bone
Salt Dried Cod – ancient African currency that once bought slaves
Spinach sauce rich with garlic and chilli
Turmeric, my own addition.

Palaver is the Portuguese word for quarrel but there is no argument once cooking’s worked its magic.

My old boss Tony, took me for a meal in Manchester, in a church converted to a hotel and restaurant with a swimming pool in the Lady Chapel and Venison Marinated in Strawberry and Stilton on the menu.
Tony gave me my first job as a cook—I will not honour it with the title chef.
Ratatouille
Chilli con Carne
Six Quiches, various
and six buckets of salad each morning
developed my skills and gave me staples so that years later when I opened my own restaurant, Frewin’s, The Carroll Hotel long gone, I sentimentally made that Venison dish my own signature, menu centrepiece…

Small things can make a signature dish
I nestle walnuts into Apple Crumble topping
For who thinks of roasting walnuts
Yet how delicious is this tiny touch
Browned at the crown but protected from burning
A rival to its cousin Pecan Pie.

But crumble never overtook Bread and Butter Pudding at Frewin’s – I made a rod for my own back with that one, so often was it ordered, but at least it could be made at a moment’s notice – the ingredients always to hand…

Buttered Brioche bread
Cream
Milk
Eggs
Veins of sugar and raisins interleaved

Ramekins into the microwave until the mix began to rise and then into the oven to swell and brown – the look on diners faces when the souffle impersonating dessert arrived hot foot…

Christmas Dinner for the whole family, though a favourite feast, is my least favourite meal to cook – all logistics and creativity giving way to tradition. Yet special meals are not always for the many, once, I spent a quiet Christmas with just my sister, Carol, in a town in Roscommon where a halal meat packing plant had populated the place with Pakistanis and the supermarket shelves with foodstuffs I could have found back home in “Bradistan*”.
I decided to treat Carol to a “desi**” breakfast such as we had both enjoyed in Bradford. Such fun making wholemeal, spinach pooris, flicking the wrist to spin the disks discs like frisbees, into the deep fat fryer – watching them inflate like little green footballs then eating the curry and lime pickle with pooris and fingers, not forks and spoons.

Also at Carol’s command
I recreated a Victorian favourite
Sussex Pond…
Suet Raisin pastry
Crudely thrown together
Roughly rolled out
To line a plastic bowl
A chopped-up lemon
And equal weights of
Butter and muscovado
The filling in and
Pastry top crimped down –
Four minutes in the microwave
Is all it took and
When the pudding –
Turned out on a plate
Was cut into – out poured the
Pond water, rich and brown
Its sweetness offset by
The chunks of lemon.
This too graced my restaurant
Tables for special guests
With suitable appetites for
Suet pudding – I promised
To deliver in just twelve minutes
Start to finish and
I never lost my race…

Food is life, and love, and comfort
and is it any wonder that
it generates stories
rooted in people, places
traditions and relationships
flavours and feasts remembered…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

* So many Pakistanis came to work in the mills of Bradford, that it was sometimes referred to as Bradistan.

** from the Sanskrit word “Desh” meaning “country”. The word “Desi” refers to something “from the country” and so for Pakistanis in Bradford, it means things from the old country – desi food, desi calendars, and desi dress.

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, in Poetics: Satiating the Soul, Punam invites us to celebrate any or all of the things that go to make up the Hindu festival of Diwali – cleaning the house, preparing food, and celebrating the festival of Light with friends, family and everyone else…

I have been intrigued for some time, by the idea of the lyric essay and have bought books by Claudia Rankine and Kathleen Graber as examples, but the form is as slippery as a fish and impossible to pin down. Writers.com begin a very good attempt at definition by saying “Lyrical essays explore the elements of poetry and creative nonfiction in complex and experimental ways, combining the subject matter of autobiography with poetry’s figurative devices and musicality of language.” This is my first serious attempt at the form…