Wigwams, laundries and stories

Jon Gower

The memories made from food

I’m nding that old age, or very late middle age has its compensations beyond the free bus pass. I go visiting the past increasingly and remembered happy meals (and no I don’t mean McDonald’s Happy Meals, even with a plastic gurine of my favourite Disney character) are a recurring component of such warming nostalgia. Top of the list is a bowl of my granddad’s cini bêns, runner beans picked o of a tall wigwam of bamboo canes. Boiled on the range, they were simply served complete with a hearty blob of home-made butter and maybe a glass of the ginger beer old omas John brewed himself. If over-sugared it was a deadly thing to uncork, requiring one of those robotic arms used by bomb disposal squads but there was never one in the shed when you needed it. at smell of fresh-from-the garden-vegetables conjures up the very essence of childhood, for aroma is always the most evocative of the senses when drumming up the past.

If you’re lucky life will be punctuated by many memorable meals, made so because of the food or the company or the dazzle of the occasion. When it comes to the rst category one place stands proud in my mind – pretty much as a cathedral amongst booths – being the tasting menu at omas Keller’s French Laundry. It was considered the best restaurant in the world at the time and the menu included his signature starter which has been on the menu since he rst opened his upscale restaurant in California’s trendy Napa Valley. It’s called “Oysters and Pearls” being a sabayon of pearl tapioca, beau soleil oysters and white sturgeon caviar and yes, I had to look it up – a sabayon is “a light sauce traditionally made with egg yolks, sugar and wine, normally Marsala.” It was all made all the more extraordinary by the quiet theatre of the place – the waiters gliding around as if on castors who pronounced Tŷ Nant as if grandmother came from Ceredigion. With add-on prices for special ingredients such as kobe beef that would make your eyes water like using vindaloo sauce as mascara, one of the highlights for me came when our genial hosts said they would pick up the tab. Oh there was much rejoicing deep inside, as I truly didn’t want a second mortgage.

Company can be key, of course. I recall my rst date with my wife Sarah, over twenty years ago, in Richard’s Bistro in Llandudno. e food was fab but the main delight was nding out more about her. Discussing books I mentioned my experience of reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude twice within a period of twenty four hours, as I was so bowled over by the novel. She then proceeded to recite from memory my favourite passage from it, in its entirety. It’s little wonder we’re still together and very happily so. It was very di erent from the meals I had with the great poet R.S. omas, when the basic fare was as basic as it gets, being bread and cheese. But the presence of the man, the candle in a sheep’s skull providing the ickering light, make of such suppers an oil painting, with thick applications of dark paint.

Someone asked me recently what I’d choose as my last meal on Death Row and initially I suggested a bacon and egg sandwich, using Alex Gooch sourdough or a loaf from Andy’s Bread in Llanidloes and, he whispers, some smoked bacon from Cheshire. But I’ve had second thoughts (as one is presumably allowed to do for such a last supper). is was prompted by reading Carwyn Graves’ ace new book of Welsh Food Stories, especially the chapter about laver bread and cockles, which catapulted me straight back to my childhood.

Fortunately I was reading it on a bus in Swansea and so got o to source my ingredients in the market. Once I nish writing this I’ll be having a great, green, glutinous blob of seaweed cooked in bacon fat, complete with cockles. ese will taste of estuarine boyhood a ernoons, raking up the little bivalves from the sands, with the tang of iodine carried briskly on the wind.