WICKED WORD - Organic food for the Games

By V.S. Jayaschandran


The Labour Party plans to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected senate. The lords can go bake. A lord originally was the man who guarded loaves of bread, and a lady was the maid who kneaded the dough. Both ‘lord’ and ‘lady’ came from the Old English word for loaf (hlaf). The humble prayer, “O Lord, give us our daily bread”, harks back to flour power.

Hippie flower power influenced Paulo Coelho, whose first ‘drink’ was lethal. His authorised biography, A Warrior’s Life by Fernando Morais, says Paulo “swallowed a fatal mixture of meconium—that is, his own faeces—and the amniotic fluid.” The doctor thought the baby was dead, and pulled him out with forceps. It broke his collarbone. In desperation, his mother prayed to the hospital’s patron saint: ”Please bring back my son! Save him St Joseph!” Just as a nun was about to give him the last rites, the baby stirred.

Meconium is a baby’s first stools. The word means opium juice. The stuff is as black as opium. There is a lot dark about the writer, who wears black clothes. The name of his best-known book, The Alchemist, comes from the Arabic word al-kimiya. Kimiya was Khemia, the land of black earth, an old name of Egypt.

The biography does not powder Paulo’s profile. No hiding the demented man who dabbled in the dark arts, or the liar who grabbed authorship of a book he did not write. In sex he had peculiar tastes. One of his flings was with an aspiring actress in the one-room apartment of her great-aunt, “before the astonished eyes of the old woman who was deaf, dumb and senile.”

More palatable is the cookery contest called Great British Menu on BBC2. Prince Charles is going to host its final. But the French would say there is nothing great about the British cuisine. Much of British food is bland. The rest look like Madame Tussaud’s inventions.

One of the British delicacies is the black pudding, a sausage made from pork fat and animal blood. Another is the original humble pie, concocted from entrails—umbles—that only the lowly and the starving had the stomach to eat.

“My love is like a red, red rose,” sang the poet Robert Burns. His love for meat was redder. Burns wrote an ode to haggis, a dish that can make vegetarians faint. The Scots made haggis with the sheep’s liver, lungs and heart, which they boiled and minced and mixed with onions, oatmeal and spices. Then they cleaned the sheep’s stomach and filled it with the mixture, sewed up the stomach, and boiled and devoured it. Doctors doing autopsies should make excellent Scottish cooks.

Dr Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic psychiatrist in The Silence of the Lambs, has a more human taste. The movie ends with him telephoning the heroine, Clarice Starling. “I do wish we could chat longer,” he says, “but I am having an old friend for dinner.”

The British cannot resist beef. They even have Beefeaters to guard the Tower of London. These fat men in crimson and orange uniform got their name from the generous portions of beef they ate. Many people confuse them with the Buckingham Palace guards, who look like Russians in their bearskin caps. Beefeaters must be disappointed that Delhi will not serve beef at the Commonwealth Games.

Certain dishes can win medals. Chinese athletes gorged on bull’s pizzles imported from Scotland during the Beijing Olympics. Their medal tally swelled up like the animal organ after the consumption. The Korean soccer star Ji-sung Park, who plays for Manchester United, says he drank frog’s juice for strength.

Canadians love prairie oysters. These are bull’s bollocks. Camel’s feet are cooked and eaten in many countries. But camel’s toe is a visual feast—it is the outline of female genitals seen through tight pants.
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