For a while now I’ve done a good job of avoiding meals like the skewered ennui on a deathbed of buckwheat kasha that might have inspired this thread. Disappointing for the sustenance of this topic most surely, less so for my belly. I’ve had some good stuff. Some fear too, like the time in Hanoi where my host brightly emitted the following words as I chewed a mouth of food: ‘you like cat?’ Turns out we both did. As pets, fortunately. But for a moment there those were the precise three words I didn’t want to hear with a mouthful of undeclared Vietnamese food.
Of course, this extraordinary run of culinary fulfilment had to come to an end, which it did before Christmas. The sort of end that you wish was cushioned with an airbag rather than a plate of soggy food. I confess to my snobbery*, but you know the Bismarckesque sinking feeling you get when you see a pub with the ‘two meals for £5.99’ sign outside and you’re walking inside. It can’t just be me. I’m sorry, but I’m unconvinced that you can prepare and cook two decent meals for that price. You can microwave a vague semblance of life into something that fell off the back of a catering supply wagon. Or possibly the bits left over from Frankenstein’s monster. The stuff that aspires to be turkey twizzlers yet somehow still underachieves. Turkey twizzlers look down on it like disappointed parents. Shaking their little breaded heads.
But anyway, I was visiting my parents, and that was dinner and my sister was paying, and let’s say my family took the fine out of dining. Took it outside, to the back alley, and gave it a good going over. A steak cooked in their house is something you cry over. It’s frankly the only way to moisturise it enough to dare to attempt to eat it. My entire adolescence was spent chewing the same mouthful of steak. I have the sort of jaw musculature that would let me eat an airliner. The benefit being an airliner would have been more digestible. There's stuff in my lower intestine that dates back to the 1980s. Even Gwyneth Paltrow and a riot-control cannon couldn’t get it out.
Now, sense and sensibility would suggest going for a menu staple like the fish and chips or a pie. Things that don’t eagerly court kitchen calamity, like dating a recently released serial killer in a suishi restaurant. But alas, giddy on two pints of Punk IPA, I figured a more carefree attitude to the menu was required. Mexican chicken. Yes! Full of the flavours of Mexico. I’ve been to Mexico. I’ve eaten tacos in the back of an LAPD squad car. What can go wrong? I don’t even pause to think that ‘Mexican chicken’ may be some kind of euphemism for cat. Latterly I came to wish it was. Braised cat would have been an improvement of sorts.
Firstly, I should have realised that Mexico isn’t in the East Midlands. Secondly I don’t think anyone involved in the preparation was familiar with any concept of Mexico. Not even the famous Mexican state of Taco Bellesco. Now I wasn’t even reaching for authenticity here, I figured some spicy chicken on rice. Just grill some chicken, dump half a bottle of Frank’s sauce on it, job done. The was one meal to be cooked on gas mark expectations low.
But before we get to that. The starter. Chicken wings. Now I’ve eaten buffalo chicken wings in Buffalo. In all the places that have claimed to invent them (everywhere that has buffalo wings on the menu in Buffalo, trust me, and that’s everywhere in Buffalo). Sufficed to say, in the same way Neo knows kung fu, I know chicken wings. Now, I don’t wish to sound like an expert in both chicken wings and avian anatomy, but bird wings normally contain bones. I’m sure of this. These wings notably didn’t contain bones. I did bravely query this. Boneless wings, apparently. That didn’t look like wings. I mean, they could have at least tried to look like something other than disappointing penises that had been in a road accident. OK, boneless wings were probably worse for the chicken. It explains the entire inability to fly. Secondarily was that they didn’t taste like chicken wings. They tasted like something that had been fried the week before and forgotten. I really didn’t want to have to be one to remember them. I got my Frank’s sauce though. It would have been better if I’d drunk it neat from the bottle, like I do at home. I should have opted for the comforting anatomical inexactitude of chicken fingers.
The main course. Now, I’m already limboing under the bar of low expectation. But what I presented with defied rational explanation. This was the X-Files section of the menu. A burial mound of rice atop which sat precisely three pallid objects. The middle of the three had a curious expectoration splashed across it like the cook had developed a savage nosebleed while arranging the platter of despair. I figure that if you popped over to David Cronenberg’s house for dinner, he’d serve something like this. What were they? Albino kidneys? Distantly vivisected boneless rats? They were things to be tentatively poked, not eaten. But everyone else is eating. I cut a small sample for forensic analysis. It’s chicken Jim, but not was we know it. I know a fair bit about cooking chicken, but I’ve never served it embalmed. I guess they’d just dumped three pre-cooked chicken breasts on my plate. It was like a gangland body drop. I think they’re supposed to at least introduce them to a pan or a grill. The kitchen had swiped left on these. If the rice hillock was about as warm as the last ice age. They’d chopped some onion and pepper and added it raw for colour. Possible none of it had been cooked. I was looking at entropy. Sous vide for the infinitely patient. And the sauce. It was mere dribble of what I assume was chilli con carne salvaged from someone else’s meal. Hard to say as the carne had long gone. I’d have said it wasn’t possible to make a dish of embalmed chicken worse, but they laid out the evidence in front of me.
Now, at this point I would have normally overriden any vestige of British non-scene making and sent the entire meal back but everyone is now looking at me. “Oh is that nice?” they ask. I realise a trap has been sprung. I can’t make a scene. Instead I nod like a man asked to choose his favourite noose to be hanged with and resort to pushing bits of embalmed chicken around the plate, circumnavigating rice mountain, leaving bloody contrails, like a dog with worms. I think I managed two small mouthfuls before I declared that the ‘starter had really filled me up.’ It was a marginally better escape plan than pretending to die at the table. Probably good I didn’t, they’d probably just embalm and serve me up too.
At least the chap in the Wicker Man got cooked.
*OK, some value of snobbery. I eat Monster Munch sandwiches, and not just for breakfast.
