Guest Post: The Etiquette of Fine Dining, Part 2

or, How I Learned to Start Eating and Bounce the Bomb

A guest post by my truckbuddy Tim from England via Spain:

A week or so back Russ posted a lovely video clip about the trials and tribulations of teenage angst and the difficulties of dining etiquette. Well, here, in Part 2, is my contribution to the problem.

Now as you will know from previous posts, I was a skinny child, painfully thin, and not given to sport. My mother, naturally, was well aware of this, but despite her best efforts I was always a picky eater, and under no circumstances would eat greens or vegetables, no matter how well cooked or nutritious they were. Meat and fish were similarly disdained, along with any accompanying sauces; I must have been a nightmare! Of course, all the usual tricks were employed. ‘No dessert until you’ve eaten your veg, go to your room until you’re hungry, other little children in the world are starving’ - but all these blandishments had little effect on me. Only one meal ever tempted me, that great British staple of the 1950’s, Bangers and Mash – preferably with lots of little green peas and thick onion gravy. Just like this:

Bangers and Mash? - Linked sausages using ground meat, usually pork or beef, with spices or herbs, like your breakfast or country sausages, and potato, mashed and creamed with milk and butter. Possibly one of Britain's favourite dishes since the end of WWI, up until the 1980's, eclipsed only by fish and chips, and now McDonald’s. So popular was this dish in Britain we even made a song about it. Here sung by two up and coming actors of the day: that sultry Latin, Miss Sophia Loren, and the just plain silly Mr Peter Sellers, duetting on ‘Bangers and Mash’:



And if you’re wondering why the sausages are called bangers, it’s because they ‘pop’ and burst from their skins when being fried – hence the bang!

In order to get me to eat this wonderful concoction, Ma had to resort to letting me play with my food, and good etiquette suddenly became secondary to my gaining weight!

Continued after the jump . . .

The first ‘game’, probably thought up by Ma, was turning the bangers and mash into an ice-cream cone. I would cut a sausage in half and hold it in my hand; this was the ‘cone’. I would then smear mashed potato, the ‘ice-cream’, over the end of the sausage, and decorate with peas and gravy which substituted for the hundreds and thousands (or ‘sprinkles’) and the raspberry sauce. The ice-cream would be licked off in a slow, rather messy, process, and the cone eaten last. This image gives you an idea of what I mean, although we didn’t have real cones at the time of course!

Now this trick worked fine for a while, and the meal was quite healthy, but the problem came when all the sausages had been used up and a pile of mash and peas remained untouched. Sausages were relatively expensive, even then, so I was encouraged to think of new eating games myself. Quite honestly, Ma was happy for anything if it meant I ate and gained some weight. And indeed I did have plans, but they were sinister and warlike ones!

Growing up in fifties Britain for a young boy meant reading an unhealthy diet of war stories and battle magazines. It’s what we did back then, and possibly explains why we are what we are today. My vivid imagination soon worked out a suitable eating game that would incorporate both military action and my love of aeroplanes, etiquette be damned. The beaches near my seaside home had been the testing ground for the famous wartime ‘dam-busting’ bouncing bomb, developed by Barnes Wallis. Just a walk through the cornfields outside our back door, down across the railway line and my brother and I would be there in the exact same spot. I loved playing Ducks and Drakes, skipping stones across the sea in emulation of this fantastical device, and so I determined to recreate the famous bombing raids in bangers and mash the very next dinner time.

This is what I had in mind:



At the end of the clip, whilst everyone stands nonchalantly by as the bomb reaches the shore; you can make out some wooden groynes along the beach. These were designed to prevent coastal erosion by long-shore drift, which, if you can still remember your schoolboy geography, is when your local beach decides to move to the next town along the coast! Here are a couple of photos taken by my brother of me playing on and under the remains of those very groynes with my first German Shepherd – ‘Legolas’. Late 1972 I would guess, and yes, I had been reading Lord of the Rings!

Click to enlarge.

 

The only live test was conducted a few miles of the coast at nearby Broadstairs, where I later lived.



Back to the food! A mash mountain was built, with a shallow depression on top to hold the gravy lake. At one end the mash was raised to form a broad dam, below which the green-clad Nazi hordes sheltered. One quartered sausage would provide four bouncing bombs for my Lancaster bomber. All was set; Ma looked on with equal amounts of horror and trepidation. Would I eat my meal, or just spend my time playing with it? The first bomb missed, fizzling in the mash, but the second and third struck the lake in huge welters of thick brown spray. Oh yes, this was going to be a wonderful meal. But the dam still held. The final bomb had to be released by the Lancaster just inches from its target, and at maximum speed. The dam split and the green hordes were swept away in a rising brown tide of destruction. Here is a post-raid reconnaissance photo of the event taken from my Spitfire.

The meal was a great success, everything was eaten, the plate clean. But in a foretaste of things to come, the collateral damage was unacceptable. The new wallpaper now sported unsightly spots, large brown ones, as did my clean clothes. Ma’s highly polished dinner table, her pride and joy, was also hit in the attack. The same one on which, with a suitable covering, was where the Lancaster and Spitfire were built. But the CinC was not happy! After one week all further operations were cancelled. Gravy was banned! However, those old comics held other ideas and plans for dinner time and my new style of dining etiquette:

It was well known to me that the Nazis still retained secret mountain hideouts, where crazed scientists and the green uniformed storm troopers hid and developed their secret weapons.

Click to enlarge.

Who knew what diabolical raids they would launch from their underground lairs in Bavaria and Sicily? They had to be stopped, and soon! But how?

Click to enlarge.

Fortunately, Dr Wallis had also developed a huge 22,000-lb. sausage bomb called Grand Slam – the earthquake sausage. And here it is:



Even a B-52 would have trouble getting this banger in the bomb bay! The new game proved a great success; hiding in their caves carved out of the mashside, the green Nazis had no defence against a single sausage bomb dropped from the lone Lancaster on high. The mountains crumbled, and creamy avalanches buried the doomed boffins and their sickly green cohorts. There were many variations I could play as well. Sometimes convoys of green tanks would be winding their way up the mashside, or crossing creamy bridges. Nothing could withstand the Grand Slam Banger. Occasionally a discoloured pea would be found, and this brown-shirted leader would then become the prime target. I also remember a variation based on William Tell, the famous Swiss hero, rolling sausage logs down the mashside onto the odious Lanburgher Gessler and his troops. This idea came from the TV series of the time, which puts it around 1958, but it didn’t have the same impact for me, or the mash, as an aerial assault!

Without the gravy, even Ma was happy, although I think she would have preferred me to stick with the ice-cream game, but boys will be boys! And more importantly, my appetite did slowly improve through playing with my food, whatever the lack of etiquette. Funnily enough, after I had my tonsils removed a year or so later, I developed a ravenous appetite that has lasted to this day. That diet of throat-soothing ice-cream after the operation was just what the CinC ordered.
BTW if we are all lucky, next time Russ will let me tell you what I did with pink blancmange and banana splits. Yes, there are more etiquette-busting tales to come.

Oh, and guys, if you want to bounce your sausages at the dinner table next meal time, remember to clean up afterwards!