Apples and onions

Imperial unit of length, four letters.

Damned imperial measurement system. I am a metric child, born late enough to have only ever been taught millimetres and metres but early enough to still have bought fresh produce in pounds and ounces. I don’t object so much to the transition to metric or the lingering half-status of the imperial system, but being raised exclusively with one means I’m usually stumped if an older butcher or grocer asks me how much of something I want. And this kind of crossword clue reminds me of one of minor annoyances of the imperial system - a four letter crossword entry with the clue “unit of length” could be “inch”, “foot”, or “yard”. I’m not bothered about the inconsistency of the imperial system (twelve inches to a foot but three feet in a yard… I had to look that last one up), but I am frustrated that the three primary length measurements of the system all have four letters in them. It simply doesn’t help with crosswords.

Looking up from my paper (crossword doomed to be no more than eighty percent completed, I can feel it) I observe the scene. I’m in Broadford, one of the less defined, less attractive and frankly straggly towns of Skye, and I’m waiting for a bus. Beneath grey skies, light rain is falling, and I’ve retreated to a Beinn Na Cailligh, a café on the outskirts of the village. There are three buses a day from the principal towns and villages of Skye to Glasgow, and I tried to catch the first one. Although the ticket I bought was flexible, the driver refused to let me board the earliest serviceon a technicality. Flexible ticket or not, mobile tickets have to be checked against the driver’s manifest, so they’re actually only valid on the booked bus.

The driver did give me a lift though, picking me up from the cloud of midges beside the road where I hailed the bus and bringing me a few kilometers down the road to Broadford. There was, at least, more chance of me passing two and a half hours here than where I’d tried to board the bus.

My walking tour of Broadford was concluded in about five minutes. The main road from the Skye Bridge up to the island’s de facto “capital” of Portree passes through it, and there are a handful of minor streets on either side. For a brief stretch the road passes alongside what could have once been an attractive harbour, but just to cement the town’s aesthetic mediocrity, a petrol station and aircraft-hangar of a supermarket were built between the road and the water. A handful of attempts at town beautification have produced some delicately designed parks, but the town’s entire density is too low and the buildings are notable only for the functionality and weather resistance. Of all the towns to be stranded in the Hebredes, Broadford is not my choice destination.

But there are at least some retail opportunities, so I buy a paper and send a postcard, and once Beinn Na Cailligh has opened at nine o’clock, I saunter in for a cooked breakfast. I’m already damp and shivering, and the prospect of a meaty breakfast (black and white pudding included) cheers me. The coffee isn’t bad either. There’s an actual espresso machine, which probably tells you all about the expectations of modern holiday makers who visit Skye. I’d previously be told by a resident that amongst English tourists, Skye is a firm favourite with lower income groups (my interpretation of his words), a fact that seemed to be born out by the conversations I overheard in the café and the types of cars parked outside. There were others, however, with bemused Spaniards peering at the desert cabinet and an American woman flying in to get three cappucinos “to go”.

Outside I spy some middle aged men who’ve pulled up in a silver car and who have stepped out to photograph a pair of buses that have pulled up at the stop outside. They snap a few pictures and then drive off, perhaps to catch the same bus further down the line. During the hour and a half that I spend in the café, I count almost twenty buses coming and going. Skye is phenomenally well served by public transport. Locals rub shoulders with tourists on most of the routes that connect the towns and villages of the island with the railway station at the other end of the Skye Bridge in Kyle of Localsh, and the ferry terminal at Armadale.

I clear my plate, finding black pudding much more digestable with brown sauce. The sauces come in small plastic sachets that are kept in little bowls on the table. I remember that it was around this time last year, on a Caledonian Macbrayne ferry not far from Skye, that I noticed something on the very same design of sauce sachets.

Each sauce packet was a little double sided envelope. One side, in white against the appropriate colour, was the written name of the contents. On the back was a photograph of the principal ingredient. So on the back of the tomato ketchup sachet were tomatoes. On the back of the mayoinnaise sachet were hard boiled eggs, de-shelled and cut in halves. What surprised me a year before, and what I remembered again that day, was the illustration on the back of the brown sauce sachet.

What would you expect to see on the brown sauce sachet? What are the primary ingredients of brown sauce?

When I first picked up one of these little brown packets, I was quite surprised by the illustration. I may be devoted consumer of brown sauce, but only because I find tomato sauce a little too tart and dull. I’d never really thought about what might actually give brown sauce its flavour.

According to these packets, the primary ingredients of brown sauce are apples and onions.

Whether or not this commercially prepared and packed brown sauce had ever come into contact with an apple or onion is open to debate. For all I know, it is quite possible it was just “red” sauce with extra vinegar and colourings. But the idea that once upon a time, brown sauce was freshly prepared with green apples and brown onions amused me, because it’s only when I’m in the Scottish islands that I consider the origins of brown sauce.

Poaching

Last week, while travelling at speeds of almost 200km/h, I ate freshly prepared Eggs Benedict and drank a quite reasonable Merlot. Some unexpected news had reached me during a five hour train journey (via the complimentary wireless internet provided on said train), so I decided to celebrate with a modest lunch in the restaurant car. The restaurant on National Express East Coast services is in fact half of a first class carriage beyond the standard class buffet counter, so for penny pinching apex travellers like myself, a meal on the train is actually a pretty cheap upgrade to first class for as long as you are eating. The Eggs Benedict didn’t last that long, although the Merlot and a coffee meant I spent the time it takes to get from York to Peteborough in a much more comfortable seat than that which I had occupied from Glasgow at the other end of the train.

I don’t think I’d eaten Eggs Benedict until a few years ago when I tried the dish during a torrential summer downpour in a Montréal bistro. Something I miss a great deal from living in Canada (and travelling in America) is the ease and affordability of eating out for breakfast. The consumate skill required in preparing Eggs Benedict makes it a justifiable purchase in a breakfast joint, especially since I rarely have the motor skills first thing in the morning to poach eggs.

These eggs were amazing, served beneath a creamy hollandaise sauce on lightly toasted muffins, with a few slices of cured ham and salad. Light yet filling, supremely healthy, and surprisingly well matched to a glass of red wine. Before I left the train at Peterborough I asked the chef, who was lingering at the end of his immensely impressive narrow kitchen in the next carriage, how he managed to make such perfect poached eggs on a train. He said it was simple.

“I’m just good, that’s all.”

Not the kitchen tip I was hoping for, but he did disclose that poaching eggs can’t be done without a drop of vinegar in the boiling water to help the eggs thicken and coagulate. Having never poached my own eggs before, I was reminded of this tip during an early morning B&Q trip today. I was accompanying a new homeowner who wanted to buy a new contraption that makes painting easy for those who forget to wash their paintbrushes. After finding the device and purchasing it at half price we stopped at a supermarket on the way home, planning breakfast. Eggs, salmon, hollondaise sauce and bagels were procured, along with a copy of the Saturday Guardian. With some fresh spinach leaves at home, I launched into my first ever attempt to poach some eggs. I must confess that I’m slightly surprised at just how easy it was - the vinegar in the water does indeed help, and by using a spoon to stir a whirlool in the pan of boiling water the egg forms a vaguely contiguous shape that is simultaneously aesthetically pleasing to mount on a toasted bagel. I plan to poach some more in the coming weeks. What with my kitchen being slightly more spacious than that on board a high speed train, and noticeably more stable, I suspect all that is needed is practice.

Bulgarian chardonnay disclosure

I think it’s important to note that my last post was written after a glass of a particular reasonable Bulgarian chardonnay. It reminded me of a Hungarian white wine that I used to buy at the German discount supermarket Aldi that knocked the socks off most other supermarket white wines. That Aldi wine was also spectacularly cheap, at about £2.49 for a bottle with a proletarian screw top.

So, just bear in mind that I was writing under the influence of good wine in a very nice apartment (in the company of two beautiful cats). The kind of apartment I definitely can’t afford at the moment with the kind of cats who actually prefer to keep me awake all night than let me rest. So this morning, I’m back on the very rainy and very grey streets of Glasgow, nursing the aftermath of a night of fitful sleep.

I await the next glass of wine with some anticipation.

Castle Acre bookshop discoveries #2

It’s been a bit of a dairy-centric day at the bookshop. After my earlier discovery of literature promoting southern Scandinavian cheese products, these three beautiful pamphlets emerged from another box of donations. I must have had milk on the brain. But then again, I was friesian in there, and unpacking books meant I was moo-ving about a bit. I only semi-skimmed these ones, but I made sure to cream them off from the rest of the stock. Surely someone must want to pur-cheese this little set? I think that the illustrations are udder-ly beautiful.

Each one carries the following on the back cover:

Published by the National Dairy Council.
Melbourne House, Aldwych, London WC2.
llustrated by W. G. Morden
© Copyright 1960 the National Dairy Council.

I’m going to separate these three and wrap them together. They’re in near mint condition. Drop me a line via the comments box if you’d be interested in them. We’ve talked about uploading the shop’s small but growing inventory of first editions to Abe Books or similar, but at the moment I suspect the subscription costs would be too high.

I leave you with my favourite cover design of the day, and a scan of a loose inside sheet. If the inside sheet was originally published with the book (and I suspect it was) we have an extremely rare complete document here.

Regardless of historical or monetary value, that’s one cool cover design, and one surreal title for an educational booklet.

Three dollars

“What’ll it be folks?”

The question comes so hard and so fast we are both lost, gazing blankly around the bar like a pair of rabbits in the headlights. We’re in a small town bar - a small town red neck bar, to be precise, somewhere in the mid-West. We have just arrived, unpacked our bags in a motel room, and are in search of refreshment.

“Two Bud Lights,” says my guide.

“Two Bud Lights it is…” replies the barman. He’s dressed in noticeably hip clothes - a big statement t-shirt and a light coloured linen jacket. He looks almost as out of place as we do.

“Bud Light?” I ask my guide.

“It’s the only thing I can be sure they would have,” she replies.

A glass and a half of pale beer arrive before us.

“This one is for you, and the barrel popped as I poured it, so this one is on the house.”

We thank our hipster barman, and drink to a day on the smaller roads of the remoter counties of this state. We drove through this town earlier in the day, and then doubled back in a loop knowing that this would be a good place to stay overnight. There was a pair of motels to price off against each other, a couple of places to eat and this - the small town’s self evident and ram shackle low end saloon. It faced the main street of town with a covered deck and countless neon signs in the window. The door was propped open, and the cool evening air was slowly making its way inside.

I am lost in the middle America I love. I don’t want to find my way again any time soon. Anonymous and modestly making my way, there is no more comfortable place to be right now than sitting at this bar.

The advantage of being a Brit in America is not only that everything seems cheaper, the beer also seems weaker. Your pound and your liver go much further over here. Another pair of drinks follow, this time in bottles from a more respectable local brewery. It’s a myth of European origin that Americans don’t make good beer - they just don’t export good beer. Hence slanderous judgements of American culture are made based solely on Budweiser and Coors.

I am strangely content, yet an undercurrent of imminent sadness undermines these cold beers. This time tomorrow I will be at an airport, and on my home. Another journey is over. It’s time to return to the little windswept island in the north-east Atlantic that I call home.

Looking around the bar we clock the clientèle. A pair of (underage) kids keeping a low profile playing pool at the back of the bar. A pair of elderly weekenders who seem to have chosen the wrong bar for a quiet evening’s drink. And finally a rowdy gang of construction workers; still wearing reflective jackets and sporting tightly shaved heads. They occupy the indeterminate zone around the end of the bar where the counter top lifts up. One (young) man in particular is in charge of this drunken conversation; he floats between his buddies and the open counter, straying behind the bar to establish a comfortable position within the barman’s territory.

Hipster barman seems not to mind. He’s dutifully pouring drink after drink. Guessing that construction workers start early and finish early, I reckon they’ve been here for almost two hours. The subtle intra-personal politics of American alpha males is observed discretely by my guide and I. Tensions occasionally flare, and we both prepare ourselves without communicating it for some kind of tussle. They subside, naturally. More drinks are poured. We order food. A frozen pizza emerges from the domestic freezer behind the bar and disappears into a pizza oven.

As we begin to eat, alpha male number one comes over to join us. Perhaps he’s distracted by my admittedly beautiful female guide. Or maybe he’s seen my poser spectacles and wants to know who’s the cheese eating surrender monkey who’s just arrived in town.

He introduces himself, and we shake hands. He inquires as to our origins - which interest him. One of us from west of here, one of us is from east of here. We are all roughly the same age - he’s almost a year younger than me. He’s been to Europe once - a brief layover at Frankfurt airport between military transport flights.

This young American road worker is delighted to welcome us. He’s interested to speak to me, the visiting Brit. He’s met many British people before; he’s served alongside them in Iraq and Afghanistan. Almost a year younger than me, and he’s seen four tours of duty in the U.S. Army. He shakes my hand again, and tells me that my soldiers are some of the best in the world, the most professional out there.

On the last night of my latest American odyssey, I found myself somewhere I wanted to be for some time. In the middle of almost nowhere; small town America. One horse town, one red neck bar. I’ve found myself in my “dream” middle American venue. But what now seems to have been so arrogant - to have imagined that I, the rich British tourist, could have just swanned in here for a quiet drink while I soak up the atmosphere - seems to have been based on the assumption that I wouldn’t have to have a conversation like this.

The young American man is drunk. He’s slurring, the actions of his hands and arms are wildly exaggerated. And he apologises. He doesn’t stop apologising. My guide and fellow traveller knows the military terms; she’s the daughter of a man who fought for this country in a certain sixteen-year conflict. She also knows other references he’s making, other frustrations with post-demob liasons that he’s occasionally expressing, but then hurredly concealing and apologising for. He’s a long way from home, working with an itinerant road crew earning top blue collar wages. But he’s left his beautiful wife and daughters at home. He carries pictures of them in a laminated wallet, and drinks away the evenings (”most nights after work”). He talks to us about them, but more about his life to date. Especially that brief visit to Europe when he transited in Frankfurt. Delighted to be in Germany, he and his buddies celebrated the stop off on their journey home by buying a crate of German beer to take on the plane. It being a civilian flight, however, they’re told the glass bottles can’t go on board, so they collectively neck about five bottles each.

“Man, I didn’t know German beer was that strong.”

This is a clichéd situation. A well spoken privately educated Brit with a BBC voice and a BBC take on the world arrives in a small town and starts talking to the demobbed and apprarently deeply traumatised young working class American. I’m drinking beer and making jokes about American brewing, and he’s drinking glass after glass of strong liquor telling anyone who’ll listen what he hasn’t been able to tell anyone from military liason.

The conversation last longer than the sum of its parts. I order two more beers while my guide talks with him, reminding him to keep pressing certain people for certain things. She has a greater degree of empathy than I do. I’m lost, floating out of my depth not quite sure this conversation is real. Everything I believe about certain events and actions is being confirmed, but I’m not capable of looking at this man in the eye. And I know in the pit of my stomach that in hundreds, maybe thousands, of bars across this country tonight, men and women like him are telling strangers their story. Maybe no-one else will listen, because it certainly sounds as though the authorities who sent him to a war zone four times in a row won’t listen any more. He’s left the military, set down his uniform and now, he has discovered, lost the vital framework in which his comrades supported him. Hundreds of miles from home, his new buddies are short-contract colleagues and tourists who happen to wander in to the bars he frequents every night after work.

When he leaves us to re-join his buddies and set off for the night, we shake hands again repeatedly. He tells me it’s been an honour to talk to me tonight. I return the compliment, and make some sincere but rushed and half-considered gesture of a compliment that could only be accepted without complaint by a very drunk man.

He finishes his drink, and the group of road workers heads out for the night.

My American friend and I are silent. Of all the places in the world, another dimly lit bar in a small town is not where that man should be every night. We both know it, but can’t express let alone consider where to begin. The support this young man needs is not here. It could be at home, but he needs to feed his family before he can show his face in their company.

Hipster barman clears the end of the bar of the empty glasses, and sweeps up the small change and dollar bills left as a tip. He mutters and rejoins us, dropping less than $3 in change on the bar in front of us.

“Jesus. Three hours of them in here and what do they leave? Three fucking dollars.”