A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature)

by Lonely Planet

  Sunday afternoons were when my father, bearing the slumped shoulders of the condemned, came to see me. His visits took the form of drives. We always went to the closest possible fast food joint—an A&W drive-in about a mile from the house. I’d have a root beer float in a frosted mug while he waited, fingers a-drumming. The Bee Gees were usually playing, but this wouldn’t be why his fingers were drumming. ‘OK? You finished?’ These were half-hour trips, tops.

  One Sunday when I was eight, he took me to his (I thought, scary) walk-up rental and said I would be given dinner. It was five o’clock. Before he went and disappeared into the bathroom, he told me that if I got bored, I could always play a game of Monopoly or whatever. ‘Just don’t …’

  I decided I would. And did. I tiptoed down the short hallway and delicately, accidentally peered through a partly opened door: unmade double bed, and above it, painted on the wall, Wendy the Good Little Witch riding her broom.

  I had barely begun to absorb this when a woman with a big smile bounded out of the kitchen. She wore short shorts, exposing pale thunder thighs without a care, and oversized plastic glasses that made her ageless, at once chickadee and Mother Superior. The hair was sweat-flattened Doug Henning, but still fluffy above the brows. Before she could even say hi, she sneezed into her sleeve. I liked her immediately.

  Her name was Doris. She loved comic books. And she was going to be my stepmother—once they got around to, you know, the paperwork. For now, if I could just hang on for a few minutes, she was cooking us dinner. This fact alone got my attention. I’d never known anyone, other than servants, who so much as boiled water. And the smells coming from the kitchen were at least four triple-axels up from the anodyne aromas of soy sauce braises and garlic stir-fries I associated with dinnertime at home. Chili pepper was at play here, sneeze-inducing amounts of it. What Doris served me that evening would change the way I saw the world, beginning with adults.

  At twenty-one, Doris was already the veteran of a trio of Filipino action movies in which she starred as Interpol agent Cleopatra Wong. That was a lifetime ago, when she was eighteen and slender, and living in Manila with the director-impresario Bobby Suarez, whose cost-saving measures had Doris doing her own stunts, the most memorable of which was dangling from the base of a helicopter the day after her appendectomy. For the film They Call Her Cleopatra Wong, she was made to shoot arrows from a dirt bike and fire a four-barrel shotgun in a nun’s habit. But the single most strenuous thing Suarez ever made her do was stay on a diet.

  My father didn’t care about any of that. The first time he saw her, she was shimmying in feathers and sequins, belly hanging out, lead dancer in a troupe called the Devil’s Angels that performed weeknights at the Golden Million nightclub. He was a salesman, or between jobs, or something, fast approaching his mid-thirties. She was taller and rounder than him, but they liked to smoke, they laughed at the same dumb things, so it happened fast.

  I grasped that it was now down to me, the kid, the last gauntlet their love had to brazen through, not because my approval mattered but because my existence affected how they carved up their Sundays. It was easiest if we could at least agree on food.

  But harmony had to be improvised. Because they didn’t have a dining table, my father prepared the coffee table, stabilizing its uneven feet with old copies of Penthouse and military magazines. A cushion with funny smells would have to make do as my seat. And since he didn’t want to have to move the fish tank or the hi-fi so he and Doris could join me on the floor, they’d sit on the couch across from me, resting their plates on their thighs.

  When Doris emerged, with a showbiz ta-dah! after hours of toil and panic in the kitchen, cleaning, cutting and reassembling from memory a flavor she thought she kind of knew but didn’t quite really, the dish she produced was the notoriously labor-intensive sambal squid. Only later would I learn that this was the first time she’d ever cooked anything in her entire life, making it an even giddier leap of faith.

  Under the buzzing bare-tube fluorescent light, I loved what I saw—food in Technicolor, food unlike that served at home. I’d had squid before, and timid pecks of chili, but not the two conjoined with such joie de vivre. Purple-pink squid tentacles and rings awash in a bright red chili sauce, the dense parts of the paste clinging to every crevice between the curlicue legs. The dish smelled—what, Malaysian? Indian? No, no, this was Indonesian—with garlic, shrimp paste, candlenuts and palm sugar in its DNA, not that I could classify it at the time as anything other than ‘yummy’, or a tad more rigorously as ‘not home’. There were no side dishes; the rice was mushy, clearly budget-grain and cooked with a drunkard’s care. Yet these details and the squid’s actual taste (rubbery, under-salted) were immaterial. What struck me was that this child-woman I barely knew had cooked me something cool and different—and seemed mighty tickled at herself for having done it. Chili-burned, I scarfed down her joy, her unbridled exuberance, and asked for more.

  I didn’t pause to let my father and Doris have their share—they had wheels, they could always go out for Shakey’s pizza later. I wanted to demonstrate to Doris my appreciation, my instant infatuation; I wanted to understand the state of mind that would let someone cook something this imperfect and feel great about it. Furthermore, though only as an afterthought, I really dug those new flavors, whatever they were!

  After dinner, Doris and I sat on their bed—that unmade bed—and played Boggle while my father collapsed beside us and closed his eyes and farted. I lost because I spent most of the game marveling at the giant Wendy the Good Little Witch above the (headboard-less) top of the bed. I saw the faint pencil marks peeking out from under Wendy’s red robe: somebody had drawn her outline and then painted her in—a vandal, twice over! At home, I wasn’t even allowed to stick a Post-It on any surface in case the paint chipped. And then there was the bed—the unmarried bed—crumpled sheets, pillowcases that didn’t match, and oh, the clammy smells.

  ‘Do you like my Wendy?’ Doris asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you like comics?’

  ‘Of course.’ In truth I’d had no experience with them apart from those glimpsed at newsstands. I had no idea who Wendy the Witch was aside from being Casper the Friendly Ghost’s part-time chum. I read what I was supposed to—books about English boarding schools and goblins.

  ‘Well, Doris here really, really loves comics.’ My father, eyes still shut, gestured to the side of the bed where five stacks of well-thumbed comic books hugged the wall, rising from the floor like tombstones. ‘She’s got a thousand of them.’ He wasn’t exaggerating. He didn’t sound thrilled.

  I skimmed the ones near the top—all Archies. Grownups in ’50s outfits playing at high school and bonking one another over the head. Fascinating.

  ‘OK? You finished?’ My father hadn’t anticipated dinner to be such a smash. He’d been ready to take me home the minute I stepped in. Whatever had made their bed so messy—he wanted to get right back to it.

  That night, when I told my grandmother and aunt what I’d been fed, they were flabbergasted, traditionalists that they were. What kind of a woman would choose to cook something like that? What kind of a dish is that to serve a guest, least of all a child? This reaction I found delightful, though glee behaved as it often did in that household and quickly disintegrated into self-doubt. Was I wrong to like it? Was I disloyal to like her?

  Sambal squid became a guilty pleasure. It meant dinner away from home, away from the staid and the disapproving. It made me happy to eat it, and it seemed to make Doris happy to cook it. I didn’t want anything to change. So why not keep it simple? I requested it Sunday after Sunday, so much so that my father thought I was secretly mocking him (and he knew I had the propensity for this, having been raised by snobs and nags and hypocrites). Sometimes the dish was good and sometimes it was mediocre, but I always ate it with gusto, savoring the ritual of dining with two grownups who shared the same stinky, witch-anointed bed. So this was what it felt like to be in a nucle
ar family. So this was what my classmates, my cousins, even the stupidest people in the world had. Sunday dinner with my own family … Come on, let’s do this thing forever.

  Then, because romances do this, things hit a bump. My father brought a black crow to Chinese New Year lunch at my grandmother’s, the annual gathering of relatives thankful there was only one such annual gathering. All the cousins and uncles and aunts—lukewarm Dr. Scholl’s types—smiled politely then whispered about the strange lady in the black dress, black fishnet stockings, high heels, eyeliner, mascara, nails, black nearly everything. I watched the woman from across the room, and she watched me back. It was Doris, of course, but Doris dolled up in a form I’d never known. Such sad, cruel eyes the makeup gave her. She didn’t smile, barely shook hands, hardly said a word. Where were her goofy glasses? Her underarm sweat-rings? I’d never even seen her wear lip gloss and here she was with deep-red mistress mouth, sitting with a cup of tea she wouldn’t touch. The aunts who’d seen her before now revised their old verdict of ‘bubbly’. My grandmother didn’t need to say a word for me to know what she was thinking. She had only to smile: instead of having shark’s fin and roast goose with us, you chose to eat food prepared by this witch?

  I ran and hid until everybody left.

  In the months that followed, I still saw my father and Doris on Sundays, though less often for dinner—mainly just nowhere drives. It was a tight fit for the three of us in the MG, with me having to jackknife myself behind the two bucket seats. It made my father laugh to see me squashed against the burning vinyl of the soft top, and he’d speed up to 90 mph so he could cackle some more. ‘Poor Boo-Boo!’ he’d say, for some reason having decided I was the spoilsport tagalong bear in the Yogi cartoons.

  Sometime in that period, they actually got married. She’d been right. There was no ceremony; it was just paperwork, after all. Then Chinese New Year arrived again. Neither my father nor Doris attended the annual lunch, but hours later, while I was watching a Tom Jones special on TV, Doris showed up shaking and in tears. Blue jeans this time, and no makeup. Like the New Year prior, the two of us looked at each other but made no actual contact. She ran straight to my grandmother and blurted: my father chased her around with a meat cleaver, gangs were involved, she’d slept the previous nights with scissors under her pillow, and the police—she had called the police. My grandmother hushed her and took her to another room. Half an hour later, Doris left. The cops didn’t drop by, or perhaps they did and my grandmother sent them away so smoothly in her genteel way that it registered as a non-event even to me.

  Doris never returned, yet the rupture was so swiftly disowned in our house that whenever her name was brought up, she was always referred to as ‘that nice girl’. My father eventually resurfaced many Sundays later, his car laden with Archie comics. He asked if I’d take them off his hands. If so, it’d be two more trips for him to complete the transfer. I said yes, then asked the crucial questions: But what if she wanted them back? And what about Wendy the Witch—did he paint over her? My father sighed. ‘OK? You finished?’

  He turned his car around and stepped on the gas.

  JAY RAYNER is a writer, journalist, and broadcaster. He is the restaurant critic for the London Observer, has a fine collection of flowery shirts, and likes pig. His latest book is A Greedy Man in a Hungry World: How (Almost) Everything You Thought You Knew About Food Is Wrong.

  THE OYSTER MEN

  Jay Rayner

  The first time I got it wrong. The first time, I was forced to lose most of an afternoon to the very waters that had gifted me my lunch. Then again, the ways of the sea have never exactly been my strong point. It’s a cultural marker, this lack of ocean smarts. It’s the non-Jews who have the boats. It’s the non-Jews who understand the way that wind and canvas can be made to dance with each other so as to speed the journey out across the surface. My lot prefer to stay on dry land. When Moses needed to get his tribe across the Red Sea he didn’t summon a flotilla. He got a friend to draw back the waters to the harder, firmer stuff beneath. I am a Jew. It makes sense that I should not think about the way the tides would impact upon my eating and travel plans.

  This, of course, is ludicrous special pleading. For while I eagerly push my Jewishness into service as an excuse for getting caught out on Mersea Island, off the coast of Essex, I discard it with just as much enthusiasm, so I can eat the essence of non-kosher seafood which is its speciality: the glistening, pearly oysters that have been nurtured in these parts since Roman times. The Jewish God is far too picky an eater for me to have any time for him. The facts are these. I didn’t do my research. I understood that I could reach the seafood cafe I wanted to visit via a cab ride from Colchester Station, forty-five minutes’ train ride to the northeast of London. It didn’t for a moment occur to me that this access might not be permanent; that the high tides could sweep in across the Strood, the causeway that links the island to the mainland, making it impassable, and leave me stranded for a few hours. As I sat at the table that first time, necking my oysters and picking at my crab, that’s exactly what happened. I had to wait a few hours for the waters to recede before the cab could rescue me. There are worse places to be.

  I am an old hand now. I am experienced. When the hankering for great seafood comes over me, I begin by looking at the tide tables to find out exactly when the high waters will cover the causeway that links this most easterly of inhabited islands in the United Kingdom to the rest of England. It is worth the effort. The fractured landscape of the Essex coast, where earth and sea seem to crumble into each other, is one of Britain’s great larders. It is not just the oysters—both the flat, round natives, and their less aristocratic cousins, the comma-shaped rocks—but also the snowy soft crystals of salt produced by boiling up the sea at Maldon on the Blackwater River.

  I decide I need a companion. I call up my friend David, a musician who once played mandolin and saw in the Irish punk folk band the Pogues, but who admits he was always more interested in the food on tour than the craic. Now he’s respectable. Now he works as a musical director for the likes of Tom Waits, Marianne Faithful and the Tiger Lillies. He still treats touring as an eating opportunity, and he will travel for lunch. In hushed tones I explain to him the premise and the premises: a place called the Company Shed, which really is little more than a shed, but where they serve some of the best seafood you are ever likely to eat in Britain. They provide the shellfish, the cutlery and the crockery. We will have to bring the rest.

  We meet at Liverpool Street Station, in the City of London. Solemnly David shows me the bottle of Muscadet Sèvre et Maine he has bought for the occasion, which he says is the only white wine to drink with oysters. He has a couple of bottles of ink-dark Porter ale plus a bottle of soy sauce and a tube of wasabi paste. David’s wife is Japanese-American and he has learnt from her that you do not approach seafood without these things. I have a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. There is no point making your own mayonnaise when Hellmann’s can make it so much better. We are equipped.

  It is a cliché that journeys in search of great food must have a certain rugged glamour and bravado to them: there are the suicidal hairpin bends of the Italian mountains, which must be navigated to find salamis made the way Italian grandmas have always made them; there are the drives beneath huge Texan skies in search of the best barbecue. The journey to the Company Shed has no glamour. It’s pig ugly. It’s a journey through other people’s narrow horizons and despair. The train ride takes you out past the mournful industrial remains of the Olympic Park, now being dismantled, and then down through the endless grey suburbia of northeast London and Essex. Occasionally you sight fields, but they quickly give way to the back view of dull domestic English life: scabbed gardens with sagging washing lines, netted trampolines for the kids and bored dogs left to bark at the passing carriages while their owners are out at work. It would all smell of damp and soot, had not the careless thrill of domestic fires been banned so long ago.

  Colchester, onc
e the Roman capital of Britain, has a great heritage. Not that you’d know it from the bleak, modern train station, or from the cab that drives us away from it. The car smells lightly of damp dog. The rear seat is covered by a tartan rug; air fresheners hang from the mirror. Blunt, low-slung modern houses edge the highways out of town apologetically, separated only by the occasional scrubby fields. Eventually we break out of half-hearted woodland to dash across the Strood, like kids making for homey in a game of tag. On a dull, late winter’s day at low tide the waters that lap at either side of the causeway are the colour of used engine oil. The journey across the causeway is over as soon as it has begun and we are finally on the island of Mersea, though still it stubbornly refuses to be pretty. There are a few switchbacks, past unassuming, dead-eyed pubs, and newsagents and semi-detached houses chosen by their owners as retirement boltholes.

  Until finally we are on the coast road and the first moment of a bleak kind of beauty: salt marshes and reed banks spread out towards the waters, punctuated by wooden houseboats perched high on blocks. The tides here can rise and fall by as much as six metres so the boats need to be lifted off the ground. We snake past boatsheds, and crammed boat yards, full of yachts with their masts tilted to the bruising gull-infested sky.

  At last we are there. The Company Shed is a simple, single-storey, black-painted slat-board building. It looks like nothing. It looks like the annexe for something else that is also nothing. In the summer, queues an hour or more long build up outside it. The cafe was opened more than a quarter of a century ago by Heather Haward, wife of a legendary oysterman in these parts called Richard Haward. He can trace his family’s involvement in the oyster business back seven generations. There are records from 1792 of his ancestor William Haward taking oysters up the Thames to the fish market at Billingsgate, and this Haward still gets oysters to the capital on a daily basis.