BARTLEBY

When I was growing up, the idea of grilling sausages in a city park would have seemed, well, weird. If you wanted something fancy like a chicken drumstick for a picnic you made it the evening before, put it in the fridge, then transported it in a sturdy old-fashioned Tupperware. By the time you came to eat the chicken it would have warmed nicely to a tasty room temperature.

The main reason why people didn’t turn their local park into a giant mixed-grill-production-facility every weekend was simple: the portable burn-and-bin barbecue hadn’t been invented yet. If you wanted to cook outdoors you had to do it old school style, with an actual fire that you allowed to burn down to the embers before cooking. To do this in a civic park in the 1970s would have aroused the ire of the park-keeper (remember them?).

Besides cooking over a fire is a skill that takes some honing. We ran out of camping gas on Dartmoor once and decided to survive a few days using only old-fashioned fire. The results were mixed. Early morning tea was reborn as late morning tea, but after a while we became adept at judging the quantity of wood needed to produce enough heat to, say, boil water for pasta. It’s about sustained heat, we discovered, which requires not only the right amount of wood but also the right type. Ash is a lovely slowburning wood, which made the tree popular among people who worked with fire in the days before gas. Ash die-back would have been catastrophic to a 19th century country blacksmith.

Actually there were intrepid souls (we’re in the 1970s again now) who manufactured their own portable barbecues. A biscuit tin with holes poked in the bottom worked pretty well, but then of course you had to contend with 20th century barbecue briquettes, which required great skill to light and keep lit. Or failing that a good glug of petrol from the portable plastic container we always seemed to have in the car. They were elegant things, those briquettes, smooth and rounded, but they were the source of much familial strife back in the days of the Ford Cortina.

Traditionally Dad would be in charge of the grilling, while Mum did everything else. Cue calls from the kitchen: ‘Are we about ready to cook out there?’ ‘Nearly!’ comes the cheerful response from Dad, who has spent the previous hour working his way through a large jug of Pimms. Redfaced from the sun, he now belatedly begins firing up the grill. Into a mound of charcoal he inserts half a dozen firelighters, then douses the pile in paraffin. One match – whouf! – up it goes. After a few minutes, however, the resilient non-flammability of the briquettes asserts itself and the flames die down, forcing Dad to – as he put it – go nuclear.

Out comes the heat gun. Designed for removing wallpaper. Repurposed as a sort of flamethrower. So there’s Dad, red-faced, letting the charcoal have it with both barrels, observed curiously by a pair of toddlers.

‘Is that thing safe?’ enquires Mum, as she emerges from the house laden with chops and sausages. ‘Should the children be so close?’

‘Perfectly fine,’ Dad replies through gritted teeth, as the flames rise higher.

Obviously with this kind of set-up, barbecuing in the park was not an option. Nowadays by contrast you simply buy a burn-and-bin, and a box of matches, and away you go. This free and easy grilling gives the park a curiously old-fashioned air of a summer evening, as fragrant smoke rises here and there among the groups of picnickers. For a dog who likes to scavenge, as ours does, it’s a particularly joyous time of year. Like most dogs he thinks all those sausages and chicken skewers are being cooked just for him. Which, occasionally, turns out to be the case. There are few happier beings on earth than a dog with a stolen sausage. ■

MAGAZINE

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