Eat My Globe Part 1
Eat My Globe.
One Year to Go Everywhere and Eat Everything.
SIMON MAJUMDAR.
Acknowledgements.
If I were to thank everyone who was of help before, during and after my journey, this section would be longer than the book itself, so I hope that those mentioned in these pages will accept that as my sincere appreciation of all they did to make Eat My Globe such a special experience. It would not have happened without them.
In the UK I would like to thank my agent, Euan Thorneycroft, and all at A.M. Heath for helping to turn an idea from a proposal into a book, the whole team at John Murray, including Eleanor Birne, James s.p.a.ckman, Helen Hawksfield, Bernard Dive, Polly Ho-Yen and Nikki Barrow, for their enthusiasm and, most of all, their correct insistence that I overcome my obsession with the world's toilets. Any factual errors in these pages are mine, not theirs.
In the USA I would like to offer much appreciation to my publishers, the Free Press, and particularly to Leslie Meredith and Donna Loffredo, whose pictures should both appear in the dictionary under the word 'professional'.
Many people have provided support along the way, and I would like to offer particular thanks to Anthony Bourdain for a supportive quote and Jay Rayner for offering the sage advice that only someone with his level of success can give. Sybil Villanueva was the first person I trusted to read the ma.n.u.script, and all her suggestions were spot on. Sarah Giles and Kirsty Jones all kept my spirits high with regular e-mails, and Paul Smith brought me back down to earth and reminded me again of the fine phrase 'mardy old git'. I plan to use it regularly from now on.
Finally and, if the others will forgive me, most important of all, my thanks go to the Clan Majumdar: to Baba, Robin and Jeremy, to Auriel and Matt, and to Evan Arthur and Biba Florence, who are already proving that the apples have not fallen very far from the tree.
Introduction.
Imagine you are sitting in a small bar in Andalucia. In front of you, an unsmiling man in a an ill-fitting white jacket is wielding a long, sharp knife and taking small, thin slices from an Iberico ham which he has locked into a weathered-looking stand upon which the legs of many pigs have given their all.
As he slices, he places each piece of the deeply flavoured meat on a large plate in concentric circles, like the petals of a flower. Like yours, his attention is on the ham, only on the ham. It is as though nothing else on this earth matters, and it doesn't. This is, after all, one of the greatest foods on the face of the planet. Forget truffles and caviar. If you want proof of the existence of G.o.d that does not involve Natalie Portman doing something unsavoury for your pleasure, this is it. After what seems like an eternity, he has finished his cutting, and he places a few oily almonds in the centre of the plate and slides it towards you.
Next to the plate he places a small gla.s.s, a copita, which he then fills, close to the brim, with a b.u.t.tery-coloured Manzanilla sherry whose saltiness will be the perfect foil for the richness of the ham and its creamy fat, flavoured with the acorns on which the pigs have fed before giving up their lives for our pleasure. Your mouth salivates at the prospect. You reach towards the plate, your fingers aiming for the choicest morsel.
Suddenly your hand is brushed aside, and you are brought back to reality by the words 'Oi, lardy, me first', as another hand, that of an older sibling, claims 'dibs' on the prime piece.
Welcome to my world. A world where food is everything, but the right order of the family hierarchy comes first.
I was probably five years old, or maybe even a little younger, when I first learned the natural order of things. There was nothing unusual in the fact that when my parents went out for the evening, they put the oldest of their children, my brother Robin, in charge. There was not even anything particularly out of the ordinary in the fact that he took the opportunity to spend the evening torturing us. That's what older brothers do.
What made this particular evening different was that this time Robin decided to declare himself a G.o.d, the Lord High Ruler of our home in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, and he bestowed on himself, the t.i.tle of 'The Great Salami'. My older sister, Auriel, myself and my younger brother, Jeremy, were forced to crawl along the floor on our bellies paying obeisance to him with the words 'Oh, Salami'. You see, even then it was all about food.
To say that our family was obsessed with what we ate would be like saying that J.K. Rowling is comfortably off. Food was not just fuel to feed the plump bodies of the Majumdar clan. It was the very essence of who we were and indeed are, and that pa.s.sion has remained the focus of our every waking moment and every conversation. At breakfast we would sit and discuss what was for lunch, at lunch what was for supper, and at supper what we had eaten for lunch and breakfast. There would be comparisons with previous breakfasts, lunches and suppers, and fond and wistful remembrances of breakfasts, lunches and suppers past. It was not uncommon for any one of us to be slumped on a sofa and suddenly cry out unprompted, 'those sausages were nice', and the rest would nod in enthusiastic agreement, even if said sausage had formed part of a meal over a week ago. We would all understand.
In my student days it was just the same. For reasons I have never quite understood, I chose to study theology and headed down to London - the alternative being Lampeter St David's, in the middle of Wales, where research told me that the sun only came out for thirty minutes every other June and pubs were open only on Mondays. These were heady days, when governments paid students to go to college and, unlike the poor mites of today, who will go to their graves still paying for their education, I got a grant - a nice, fat cheque for ^6oo - at the beginning of each term. It was supposed to last ten weeks and cover all sorts of important things such as rent and textbooks but instead it lasted about ten days as I spent it with wild abandon in the Indian restaurants and steakhouses of south London and the Turkish okaba.s.si and Cypriot pastry shops of Green Lanes.
The Great Salami (hereafter to be called TGS, as I am lazy) had also moved south and was making pots of cash. He was happy to share the love and would take me out for meals. Not just any meals, but meals at places I had read about in food guides, meals at the restaurants dragging London kicking and screaming from the moribund food scene that had engulfed it since post-war rationing to being among the best places to eat on earth. TGS is a man of extraordinary generosity, even though that generosity obviously comes at the cost of our never trying to usurp his primary position in the Majumdar hierarchy.
On my twenty-first birthday my parents gave me ^loo to spend on a meal, which I duly did. A very fine meal it was too, at an old-school trattoria called Gino's at the bottom of the Charing Cross Road. In the early 1980s ^100 brought you a great deal, and I had no trouble finding companions to help me spend five hours blowing the lot. I can still recall what I ate: tortellini in a mushroom cream sauce, poussin flamed in cognac and served with rosemary and soft, melting chestnuts, followed by a frothy zabaglione made at the table by a waiter with a loud waistcoat and a liberal hand with the marsala wine. It was all washed down with any number of bottles of Valpolicella and my first tastes of a complimentary rough grappa, the burn of which I can, if I close my eyes, still remember.
You may think it odd that I can recall what I ate at a meal twenty-three years ago. In fact, I can recall just about every meal I have ever eaten. It is a Majumdar family trait: we signpost our lives by what we have eaten and when. If I were to ask any one of my family about a significant event in our lives, they would look at me blankly until reminded of what we had to eat on that occasion and then it would all become clear. There would then follow a lengthy discussion about the dish in question and possibly even a heated debate about whether it was any good or not.
Heated debates about food are common in my life. There is nothing I hate more than bad food and, hard though it is to believe, I have been known to be ever so slightly opinionated about it. I try not to be judgemental but fail miserably, and a wife and any number of girlfriends have fallen by the wayside as they tried and failed to keep up with my fixation, trailing round after me as I take the long route home so I can go from restaurant to restaurant to see if there is something new on the menu or sitting opposite me as I dissect a meal that they have lovingly prepared. 'That was great, sweetheart. Couldn't you find the good lentils?'
I can recall a nascent relationship that came to a screeching halt when I was being treated to a meal at a very grand place on my birthday. I tried to be generous, knowing that my girlfriend had put a great deal of effort into choosing the location and securing the booking, but there is nothing I hate more than a lousy meal. I grimaced my way through the first course, sent the fish course back with a complaint about it being overcooked and sent the next course back with a complaint about it being undercooked. By now she was close to tears, although I was too engrossed in what was going wrong with the food to notice. I think it was my description of the sauce as 'jejune', a word that I had recently gleaned from a Woody Allen film and was using at every opportunity, that finally sent her hurtling to the bathroom in floods, only to emerge about thirty minutes later, ask for the bill and leave - never to be seen again. Such occasions are not uncommon in my life.
If anything, I am even more pa.s.sionate and obsessive about food now than I was when I was younger. Certainly I can afford to eat out more than I could when I was a student, but that is only part of it. My obsession has been fuelled by any number of cookery books, membership of websites and internet forums where people discuss the best food and restaurants and the advent of television channels in the UK and USA dedicated entirely to food, even if they just make me throw something at the screen as the chef smothers a great ingredient in an unnecessary sauce.
Quite simply, I adore food, and I also love people who are as pa.s.sionate about growing, preparing and talking about food as I am about eating it. I love the glamour and glitz of the Michelin-starred restaurants and, if I were to b.u.mp into Gary Rhodes, I would probably faint like a bobbysoxer at a Fabian concert. I love the skill, craft and technique the great chefs show in transforming the mundane into the utterly fabulous and delicious. I love being presented with the wine list and the pop of the cork when that first bottle of many arrives. I love the little cups of foaming soup that the chef sends out as a little welcome and the pet.i.ts fours that arrive to accompany the tinkle of tea being poured in fine china at the end of the meal and all points in between.
It's not just the smart places, however. If I had to choose my last meal, it would be a plate of fish and chips - from up north, of course - the crunch of bubbly, crisp batter breaking under the slightest tooth pressure to reveal glistening white fish, which has been allowed to steam inside its protective coating to a perfect flake. Alongside it, a mound of 'proper' chips, crunchy on the outside and soft and yielding in the middle. All washed down with a mug of builder's tea. Perfection.
A close second would come meat. I like meat a great deal. A journalist once described me as 'The Great Majumdar, a man for whom many animals have died'. It's true. If it once had eyes and a face and a mom and a pop, I want to eat it. A perfectly prepared steak, with a charred crust and rare and b.l.o.o.d.y in the middle, is one of the true tests of any chef's art. Many try, and most fail. Those who succeed are as worthy of note as any great artist.
If you eat meat, it is disingenuous not to eat all the animal from where your choice cuts may have come. So I like my offal, my entrails, my hoofs, noses and lips, my nether regions and innards, so often thrown away in these days of pre-packaged foods but often the source of the best flavours. Gnawing on the roasted head of a suckling pig at London's legendary St John restaurant and slurping up a bowl of tripe soup in Chinatown are regular treats, and yes, before you ask, I have eaten t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. Jolly good they were too.
Food is the first thing I think of in the morning while I ponder a bowl of slow-cooked porridge with a spoonful of peanut b.u.t.ter and a chopped-up black banana, sipping on that glorious first cuppa, and it is the last thing I think of at night, as I sit down with a bowl of macadamia nuts and a tumbler of peaty whisky.
Food, I have realized, is not just what I eat: it is what I am and what I do. That realization and the realization that I am not alone in my obsession are what led to the book you have in your hands. It is what led to the whole notion of Eat My Globe, my desire to 'Go everywhere, eat everything'. It is what made me walk away from my old life of self-indulgent hedonism to head off around the world in search of the weird, the wonderful and the downright tasty. It is what took me from a comfort zone where my idea of hardship was finding only Chardonnay in a hotel mini-bar, on a trip that saw me endure nearly one hundred flights, the same number of different beds and the unspeakable horror of Chinese toilets.
Best of all, it was a realization that brought me into contact with hundreds of people all over the world who shared my pa.s.sion for incredible things to eat and who opened up their lives and their hearts to let me share a meal with them or be part of the process that brings these treasures to our tables.
I hope that reading this book will not only give you some vicarious pleasure from reading about the people, the places and, of course, the food but will also rekindle your desire to go to places far and wide because 'they do great noodles' or to spend time preparing a meal for someone special, even if they can be.
like me, an over-critical dolt. Most of all, however, I hope it just makes you really, really hungry and want to put the book down (after buying it and taking it home first, of course) and go and eat something incredible.
That is, of course, if an older brother does not steal it off you first.
Simon Majumdar London,2009.
I Hate My Job.
That's not quite true. In fact, until late 2006 I loved my job. I worked in book publishing and got to travel to far-flung places where I could usually score a decent meal on my expense account. I led a hfe that some other people would consider charmed or at least enviable.
A few years earlier The Great Salami and I had bought a flat together on the edge of London's fashionable Hoxton. The burgeoning bar and food scene fed our craving for decent c.o.c.ktails and offered a pleasing variety of restaurants. Between us, we ate out about seven times a week. Neither of us was every going to be mistaken for cool at any point, so our perambulations around the achingly trendy neighbourhood often drew contemptuous stares from the young folk as we headed off for dinner or a drink. TGS suggested we have T-shirts made that said, on the front 'We May Not Be Hip Enough To Drink Here, But We Are Rich Enough To Live Here' and on the back, in larger letters, 'f.u.c.k Off Back To Clapham'.
But that was a small price to pay for being able to walk to work to my office in Islington every morning. I could not wait to get there, switch on my computer and see what e-mails had flooded in from customers around the globe.
Of course, I had to have my breakfast first. Porridge. Porridge gets a bad press from so many people, who think back to the misshapen lumps of oaty mush they were forced to eat as a child. But for me there is no other way to start the day. If I don't have a great deal of time, then a microwave will suffice, but if I am on a more leisurely schedule, I will take the opportunity to slow-cook my coa.r.s.e-ground oatmeal on the hob in a combination of milk and water until it is rich and creamy. I'll stir in a spoonful of crunchy, organic peanut b.u.t.ter before topping it off with a banana or a pile of berries, which will burst in the residual heat to release their juices. If I am feeling particularly indulgent, I will treat myself to a large dollop of Greek yoghurt, which will be slowly amalgamated into the dish as I eat it.
I was living a life that could hardly be described as uncomfortable, with a smart flat, a highly paid job and well within my tolerance levels of never living more than fifteen minutes from the nearest source of Madagascan vanilla extract. So what made me come in one day, sit at my desk and write forty-two e-mails to friends all of which read, simply 'I hate my job'?
With hindsight, it was a combination of things. Certainly the job had changed. It had gone from being an exciting and challenging opportunity to grow a business into a dreary procession of spreadsheets and arguments over budgets with colleagues. But it ran much deeper than that.
Two years earlier I had turned forty, and that milestone hit me in the face like a slap with a wet haddock - an un-dyed, lightly smoked one, of course, not one of those yellow monstrosities they sell on supermarket fish counters but a haddock never the less. At a quiet supper a few days after the event a friend said to me, 'Congratulations, you are now oflTicially middle-aged'. As the words came out of her mouth, I could practically feel my prostate swelling inside me and see the remaining years of my life filled with night-time visits to the bathroom, with only a pathetic little dribble to show for it. There are many signs that you are hurtling towards the middle years. You become entirely invisible to attractive young women, that's a given. Worst of all, you lose all ability to move urinal cakes around the bowl. Men may deny it, but we all do it. Once I could have them moving around at a pleasingly brisk pace. Now a few begrudging millimetres and that's it, as they refuse to budge any more, taunting me with their fluorescent unmovingness. b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. It became increasingly obvious. I had more sand in the bottom of my egg-timer than the top. A sobering thought.
That same year my mother died. It happened quickly from that most pernicious of diseases, leukaemia, and I was not there to see it - a fact that did, and still does, haunt me. Most people you meet will tell you that they love their mother and that she is an incredible person. My mother truly was an incredible person, the biggest influence on my life and certainly the inspiration for my obsession with food.
Gwen Majumdar was one of three nursing sisters from south Wales and first met my father in the mid-i950s, when he came from India to complete his surgical exams at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, a training centre for many doctors from around the former empire. Despite the moral restrictions of the day, many liaisons took place between the exotic young men with dark skin from the former colonies and the hot-tempered young Welsh women with fiery red hair.
My father, Pratip (known as Pat), asked my mother out, under the pretence of wanting to take pictures with a new camera in the local park. It is a ruse I used myself a few times in my teenage years, with considerably less success, probably because I didn't own a camera. Despite the fact she was, at first, going to send her identical twin sister, Ann, she eventually went along and yours truly, along with three other siblings, was the result. To her credit she never once looked at us in times of profound disappointment and said, 'If only I had sent Ann.'
Theirs was a fairly chaste courtship. These were more innocent times, and my father - Baba, as he is known to his children - used to tell us to his great glee and my mother's great embarra.s.sment that on their wedding night, spent at a small hotel in the Lake District, he requested a hot water bottle from the management.
Despite the inauspicious beginning, the marriage lasted for over forty years, and my mum went from being Gwen John to Gwen Majumdar, a wonderful combination of names that I have had to explain to people over and over again. It was not uncommon for the Indian doctors and the Welsh nurses to marry, and I suspect that the children of Myfanwy Bannerji and Blodwyn Patel have equally interesting stories.
Soon after they were married and not long after TGS was born, my parents moved to India, where this young woman, who had never strayed too far from the valleys, found herself in a high-caste Brahmin family in Calcutta, with servants and drivers to wait upon her but with precious little to fill her time. Fortunately households such as these also had cooks, and my mother spent her days peering in the kitchen and watching the various wives of the family work with the cooks to supply the constant supply of food required by the Bengali men, possibly the most demanding creatures on earth.
She returned to the UK with my father in the early 1960s with an ability to cook Bengali food that she used to good effect feeding her brood. I grew up on the thin but deeply delicious dahl made with red lentils, stews of bony fish flavoured with mustard oil and, best of all, a simple chicken dish with yoghurt and a few spices that is one of the great tastes of my life and to which I dedicate this book. Add to this the baking prowess inherited from my Welsh grandmother, and the smells emanating from our kitchen were a unique combination.
My mother's death shook me to the core, and I miss her every day, not only for her intense loyalty to her family but also for her fiery temper, which was often hilarious and aimed at the most quixotic of targets. TV presenters were a particular favourite, and she developed an unexplained loathing of Sue Lawley, whom she denounced as 'all fur coat and no knickers'. Local dignitaries too got short shrift. For a time she was a local magistrate and had soon acquired the well-earned nickname of'The Hanging Judge' for her conservative views, which would have meant the return of flogging for dropping litter. Other magistrates were seen as too soft or lenient, which obviously meant they were 'communists' - ironic really, since my father's family had been leading members of the Communist Party of India, a fact that seemed to faze my mother not at all.
Most hated of all was my father's secretary, for whom she dreamed up exquisite punishments for whatever imagined transgression crossed her mind. Usually this meant buying expensive but appalling Christmas presents, and I can still recall the delight in her voice as she announced in a Welsh accent, which she never quite lost, that she had bought the victim a large bottle of 'Elizabeth Taylor's Pa.s.sion. It's really disgusting.' My mother was not, it has to be said, someone you would ever wish to cross.
Most of all, however, I miss her for her food, for the stupendous smells of cooking and groaning tables that used to greet me on my return from school and, in later years, fleeting visits to Rotherham from London. She had no concept of the word 'ample', and both the larder and the fridge were constantly fdled to bursting with the fruits of her labours. Pies and Welsh cakes, chutneys and pickled onions, curries and stews. It is little surprise that the fondest memories of friends who were lucky enough to visit are of the sheer volume of food she put in front of them and the clucks of disapproval if they turned down fourth helpings and bemus.e.m.e.nt if they did not want to try all the eight flavours of ice cream in the large family freezer.
I was forty and feeling it, in a job that I loathed and dealing with the loss of a parent, perhaps the hardest thing that any of us will have to face. Any one of these could make a person unhappy with their lot. Added together, they began to make me feel as though I was rapidly heading towards the sort of breakdown that could see me featuring in a newspaper story that ended 'and then he turned the gun on himself.
The night of my negative e-mail-fest I returned home and flopped down on my deep, comfortable sofa with a large gla.s.s of a favourite Spanish red wine in my hand and stared out of the window at the glittering lights of London's financial district. The scent of onions frying, drifting up through a vent from the flat below, woke me from my torpor, and I realized that I had been sitting there in the dark for nearly two hours, and I had not eaten a thing since lunchtime. I got up determined to lose myself for a while in cooking - one of the few things that, at this point, I knew would stop me feeling quite so miserable.
Checking on what was in the cupboard, I saw a bag of red lentils and decided on a stand-by of Bengali dahl made with mustard powder, ginger and turmeric, cooked slowly with quartered lemons to give a gentle citrus flavour. For our family this dish is like chicken soup. I call it LSD, 'Life-Saving Dahl', the sort of dish you turn to when you need emotional as well as physical nourishment.
After toasting the lentils until they released a pleasing nutti-ness, I added the dry spices and water, followed by the lemons. It began to bubble gently, and I turned my attention back to my wine. It was at this point that I noticed, among my cookery books, an old notebook that I had bought when - don't you dare laugh - I had decided to follow a course by that rather scary, perma-grinned, American self-help guru Anthony Robbins.
I can't recall the name of the course; it was probably something like 'Awaken the Unleashed Giant inside Your Inner Child for Abundant Success'. I don't even recall whether I ever listened to all the twenty-four CDs that came with the course before I got bored with the whole thing. I did, however, follow one piece of advice. I wrote down a set of goals to achieve once I had turned forty. As I absent-mindedly stirred the lentils, which were by now giving off a familiar whiff" of lemon and spices, I began to read.
'i. Fix Teeth.' I am British and of a generation when teeth were considered things of function rather than of aesthetic worth. Consequently, by the time I hit my fifth decade, I had choppers that were healthy but looked like an abandoned cemetery. No one else seemed to notice or care, but it bothered me a great deal. Six months after my milestone birthday I found myself sitting in a dentist's chair being fitted with a brace. I can't pretend that I enjoyed the next two years, wandering around with a metal mouth like a teenage girl, but at least now the offending appliances are off I have teeth that are determinedly straight and pearly white. I am officially gorgeous.
'2. Have a Suit Made to Measure.' The made-to-measure suit must be every man's dream and ultimate clothing indulgence. It was worth the time and money: a striking suit of grey herringbone that garners admiring looks and comments every time I can find an occasion to wear it. The process, however, was not as much fun as I expected, particularly as the man taking my measurements made no attempt to spare my feelings. At the first fitting I offered up helpfully, having read about such things, 'I dress to the left.' The tailor looked at where my obviously less than John Holmes-like appendage was situated and sniffed, 'I don't think it is really going to make a difference, do you, sir?' Moving around to get a glimpse of my behind, he added, 'Sir has got quite a wide seat, hasn't sir?' as he pulled the tape across my rear end. I suppose, as a way of telling you that you have an a.r.s.e like an old sofa, it is one of the nicest, but it did rather take the gleam off the whole occasion.
'3. Run a Marathon.' As an early riser, in the morning I can often be seen pounding the streets, wherever I happen to be, or lifting weights in the gym with all the prerequisite grunts. At the beginning of 2006 I decided that I should try and put all of this to good use and aim for the ultimate challenge. Timing meant that the next opportunity was the New York Marathon in November 2006, and the following months saw me running 40 miles a week until the big day.
The race itself was the single hardest thing I have ever done, particularly when my hip gave a loud 'pop' at the 23-mile mark and I had to limp the rest of the way through Central Park while well-meaning Americans shouted encouragement through mouthfuls of bagels and m.u.f.fins. There is no chance in h.e.l.l that I will ever repeat the exercise, but I did it and I have a medal to prove it.
I had Hsted a few other things on my goals list, most of which were either too stupid or implausible to worry about. It is, for example, unlikely that I am going to live on an island with Sophie Marceau and/or the woman from the Olay anti-wrinkle cream ad. Nor am I ever likely to own my home-town football team, Rotherham United, and take them to European glory. However, at the bottom of the page, in large, capital letters were four words: 'Go Everywhere, Eat Everything'.
I can't recall exactly what I was thinking when I wrote them down, but as I stood in the small, galley kitchen of my flat the seed was definitely planted. I chopped a large bunch of spinach and scattered it into the pot to wilt among the lentils, and then spooned my dahl into a large bowl into which I had placed a couple of hard-boiled eggs. The perfect comfort food. As I sat back onto the sofa and placed my supper on the coffee table in front of me, I turned the TV, tuned inevitably to a cookery programme, to 'mute' so I could still look at the pictures, and began to write in the same notebook what 'Go Everywhere, Eat Everything' could possibly entail. The more I wrote, the more excited I became.
A friend in the USA had been inviting me to the American Royal Barbecue compet.i.tion in Kansas City for years. I adored sushi, yet I had never been to j.a.pan. I knew nothing about Mexican food. I had always planned to go to Buenos Aires, arguably the home of the world's best beef What would Beijing roast duck taste like in Beijing, or pad thai in Bangkok? What about Africa and, of course, my father's homeland, India?
By the time I had finished my second bowl of dahl - one is never enough - I had written down over forty things. At the bottom of the list I had written the words that you see on the front of this book, 'Eat My Globe'. I might not have gone anywhere yet except my living-room, but the journey had definitely begun.
The next morning in the gym, as I pottered along in my usual stately fashion on the treadmill, my mind kept turning to my list. People told me that Melbourne was a great eating city. What about mouldy shark in Iceland? Was it as disgusting as people say? Perhaps I could learn how to mix c.o.c.ktails or persuade myself that wines from California were not all like melted sweets? What about whisky or gin? I loved them but did not know how they were made. What about my favourite things in the UK: pork pies, black pudding, cheese? It was no longer just mild curiosity; as I ran I began to think it was a real possibility. One hour and ten kilometres of sweat later, the decision was made.
I showered, dressed in a hurry and headed off on the short walk to work. For the previous few months, as I approached the office, I had begun to develop a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. In more recent weeks it had become closer to a panic attack, as I forced myself towards a day that I knew would be filled with arguments and tortuous meetings that achieved nothing. Today was different. I felt exhilarated. Not just from the great run, which had flown by with thoughts of food, but because I had reached the point of no return and there was no stopping me. A colossal weight had been lifted from my chest, and I was surprisingly well behaved, spending the morning smiling beatifically through a board meeting that would normally have contributed a great deal to my future ulcer.
Meeting over, I returned to my desk, switched on my computer and began to write a short, standard letter of resignation. I printed it out, signed it and placed it in a crisp white envelope, which I handed over to the owner of the company, my friend Zaro, who uttered words I was to hear more than once on the trip: 'Can I carry your bags?'
That afternoon I wrote forty-two e-mails to the same people who had received the previous rather depressing missive. This one simply read, 'I did it'. I am not sure quite what I expected, but, apart from a few return e-mails from people saying 'Ooh, that's brave', the world seemed to be fairly well attached to its normal axis. Inevitably, word began to get around to colleagues and clients that I was leaving, and I began to receive e-mails asking me what exactly it was I was going to do.
It was a good question. What the h.e.l.l did 'Go Everywhere, Eat Everything' actually mean? I had done the easy bit, handing in my notice, and I had indulged in a few fanciful thoughts about jetting off. Now I had to do the hard bit of figuring out where to go, who to meet and how to pay for it all.
Money was an issue, of course. However, for the previous five years I had been putting by a decent sum away every month and had always promised myself that, when I reached a my set goal, I was going to do something different, even if I had no idea what that might be. I was fortunate enough to have no mortgage, and I was pretty sure I could get by for a year on the road even if at the end of it, I would be penniless, jobless and could see myself standing on a street corner with a sign reading 'Will drop trou' for foie gras'.
For the 'who?' I turned inevitably to the internet. A few years earlier I had discovered food discussion sites. Sad though it may seem, it changed my life. Until that point, with the exception of my family, I felt like I was the only person in the world for whom food was the first thing one thought about in the morning and the last thing one thought about before heading up to bed.
The people with whom I worked were not like me. They wanted to have water-cooler conversations about music, a TV programme from the night before, a film or even politics. I joined in, but inside I wanted to talk about what to serve with hake (floury potatoes, in case you were wondering), the latest restaurant openings and what I had cooked the night before, why it was good or how it could have been better.
Then one night TGS sent me a link to a website called 'Chowhound'. I couldn't believe it. It was like discovering Narnia at the back of my refrigerator. There was a wonderland filled with people like me, where I could ask 'Where can I find a decent salami in east London?' or could write a thousand words about a new restaurant without people thinking I was stark raving bonkers. I felt at home immediately and soon began to post lengthy accounts of my dining experiences. One website soon begat another until I was, at one point, a member of four at the same time. I was easily one of the most active contributors, clocking up over 10,000 posts on one site alone as I became embroiled in lengthy arguments about such important matters as 'best Sichuan hotpot in London' and 'Lobsters tastier big or small?'
I am happy to admit now that I spent far too much time on these sites. I would look at them as I ate breakfast and lunch and often sneak peeks during the day, when I should have been doing something altogether more productive. But this was my world and these were my people, and I felt happy there and with them.
By 2006, however, I had weaned myself off them, primarily because I had started a blog with TGS called Dos Hermanos, on to which I was now posting the same extensive reports of every meal home or away. When it came to Eat My Globe, however, the food websites were a G.o.dsend.
Over the years I spent poring over these sites I met many people - at first virtually and then, as my travels allowed, in person. In the UK I began to organize regular get-togethers where those as afflicted as me could sit around large plates of food and have arguments in person. Business trips to New York saw me sitting with people I had never physically met before but knew everything about (often far too much about) and having astonishing meals in Manhattan, Queens or Brooklyn at restaurants or the houses of people willing to feed like-minded souls.
Now, as I prepared to head off into the world, I decided to call in every offer that had ever been made of a bed for the night or a home-cooked meal. I made a reappearance on one or two of the sites and posted about my planned trip. Almost immediately I started to receive e-mails with offers. Did I want someone to guide me around Mexico? Had I ever experienced a 'proper' Thanksgiving meal? Did I fancy a day on the barbecue trail in Texas? Would I like someone to put me up for a week in Melbourne? The response was astonishing but one that I later found throughout my trip to be nearly always repeated. Like nothing else I have ever encountered, food and the desire to share it bring out generosity in people wherever they are in the world.
The suggestions did not just come from over the Web, however. Friends from my 'real' life were soon chipping in. A Finnish friend dangled the possibility of a hunting trip in the Nordic countryside with an eighty-year-old man who only knew two words of English, of which one was 'vodka' and the other wasn't. Another suggested that I head up to spend a week in Scotland at a whisky distillery. So it went on. It would be a case not of what to do to fill my year but of what I was going to have to leave out for lack of time.
'When?' was pretty clear too. I had agreed that I would leave work at the beginning of March 2007. That gave me a little over two and a half months to plan. I spent most evenings in the next weeks flopped on the sofa with my laptop open and a large mug of tea to keep me fortified while I fired off" e-mails to everyone and anyone I could think of Slowly things began to take shape, and by the end of the year and with a few key dates in place I had my itinerary pretty much set in stone: March and April: The UK and Ireland May: Australia June: UK July: j.a.pan August: Hong Kong and China September: Mongolia, Russia and Finland October: The USA November: Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and back to the USA for Thanksgiving December: Home for Christmas and a little bit of a nap January: Germany and Iceland February: Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia March: The Philippines and India April: South Africa, Mozambique, Senegal and Morocco May: Turkey, Italy, Spain It was an intimidating list, but two things made me determined to carry on.
The first was that, now I had told everyone what I was about to do, I would look like a prize tool if I gave up at the first hurdle. The second was that, as TGS put it none too kindly, 'an old git' hke me would never get this opportunity again. Circ.u.mstances, finances and emotions had collided in a once-in-a-lifetime way, which truly meant it was now or never.
My plans were well under way but were the cause of many sleepless nights. I was not used to being out of work, and I developed a dread fear that I would turn into one of those people who spend all day in their dressing gown, slumped on the sofa watch-ingjerry Springer while eating broken biscuits or baked beans out of a can. Actually, I like baked beans out of a can, particularly if they have those little sausages and burgers made out of reclaimed meat in them, but that is another story.
I made a conscious decision to treat what I was doing as work. I was not out of a job or on holiday. I was organizing a 'project': the fact that I was doing it at home and was never more than five seconds from a Chocolate Hobn.o.b was just an added bonus. I kept to my normal schedule. I got up at 5.30 every morning and went to work. It is just as well that I did. I had no idea what was involved in organizing a trip like this. Flights, accommodation, visas, currency - it was more than a 9-5 job.
With the help of the internet I put together the schedule for the first leg of my journey, and before you could say 'although the bag will not inflate, oxygen will be flowing through the mask', I had handed over the best part of X^2,ooo for my first set of flights, to Australia and around Asia. There was now, officially, no turning back.
Eating Britain (and Ireland).
Before I headed off around the world looking for great things to eat, I wanted to go in search of some of the astonishing food we have to offer closer to home. Britain and Ireland's relationship with their food is one of the most confused in the world. With the possible exception of the Americans, the British are probably furthest removed from the source of production of their food of any people on earth. You could point towards the huge sales of celebrity cookbooks and to the extraordinary popularity of cookery shows on TV as proof of a renaissance in the UK's interest in food. However, the truth is that the majority of people in the UK are perfectly happy to eat c.r.a.p as long as it is cheap c.r.a.p, served in huge portions, with little thought about why it is so cheap. It certainly isn't altruism. It is down to sourcing of the cheapest industrial ingredients and delivering them to customers through a process in which no skill or care is needed, carried out by lowly paid staff. In the ration-blighted post-war years the view was promulgated that cheap was good, and the majority of people in this country will still put up with food that borders on the inedible as long as the portions are filling and the dent in their wallet small.
This does not mean, of course, that good food has to be expensive. A plate of fabulous fish and chips from my home town of Rotherham costs well under and can be as delicious, in context, as any three-star meal I have ever eaten. You can buy cuts of meat such as brisket or lamb breast from any decent butcher for less than it costs to feed a cat for a day. Slow-cook the brisket with winter vegetables or roll and stuff the lamb breast and you will have something delicious, nourishing and affordable.
It is hard not to view as schizophrenic a country where mediocre chefs can become megastars, selling millions of books and DVDs, but where you can still find the words 'Thai Vegetarian Schnitzel' scribbled on the blackboard menu of a pub.
It certainly is not down to a lack of ingredients. Britain and Ireland have some of the best raw materials in the world, but precious little of it ever finds its way onto our dinner plates. Despite the farming problems of recent years, we have fantastic beef, pork and lamb and spectacular seafood from Scotland or Cornwall; and don't get me started on the wonders of English asparagus. We have hundreds of varieties of apples and pears, artisa.n.a.l bakers and more cheese-makers than France. Yet it is still a rarity to see these appearing on menus with any regularity, and much of what we produce is whisked off to more appreciative audiences in Europe.
In part, of course, cost is involved. Producing good food is not cheap. It is less intensive than standard methods of farming or fishing and requires time and patience. Consequently the end-result is going to cost more, which requires a long, hard education process for suppliers, retailers and consumers alike.
It is also down to a lack of confidence. Like an abused child, Britain has lost confidence and any sense of worth in what it produces and how to cook it. Nearly a century being the b.u.t.t of the world's jokes means that we British have lost all pride in some of the fantastic things we produce - foods that, if they were made in any other country, would be national treasures. Foods that, when made with ingredients of the highest quality, are as good as anything you will taste anywhere in the world. I thought about this a lot as I was planning my trip and drew up a short list of things I adored but which have a bad reputation in the UK, primarily because most people's exposure to them has been, badly made, ma.s.s-produced examples. I decided go in search of just three things. My list read: black pudding, pork pies, cheese.