Cooking The Books

Melamine Tables

As my last post shows I do love a bit of fine dining but looking back over the years I think a majority of my most memorable meals have been eaten off of melamine - cheap, cheerful and wipe clean.  From a Full Monty breakfast in Northampton's Giggling Sausage cafe through to marinated raw fish and congee in Tawau (Malaysia) my mind is full of amazing meals in places that look, if you're being polite, pretty crappy.  I find if you know where to look though, or just get lucky, then the places can throw up the most fantastic meals.  Maybe all their effort goes on the food rather than the interior.

 On Saturday I got to add another to the ever-growing list of melamine memories when I visited Sweet & Spicy in London's Brick Lane.  We'd been drinking with friends and decided a bit of food was in order and our Bengali friend suggested we try this place, saying they frequently made the drive down to grab take out from there.  With him coming from a family of restaurateurs I was happy to go along with the suggestion.

Post-beer and with more beer due we wanted somewhere quick so this place’s canteen layout, with food ordered at a counter, ladled from big vats and then delivered to your table promptly, was perfect.  The menu was short with only 4 or 5 options each of vegetable, chicken and meat curries.  Talking to the man behind the counter he suggested hot meat curry or mince, potato and egg curry - looking on the menu the same choices were called meat madras or aloo keema.  

Mince and Peas

Mince dishes, well specifically mince in sauce, do very little for me.  Recipes that many hold in high regard, old favourites like spag bol, cottage pie or lasagne, send shivers down my spine. This is all down to my mum's cooking.  My mum is by no means a bad cook, pretty much everything was cooked from scratch and there was always lots of veg, and her willingness for foreign foods has played a big part in my broadness of taste now.  She loved cooking with mince though and she would happily serve lasagne, spag bol and chili in the same week, and the week after, and the week after, and so on and so forth.  And so whilst the stir fries, fajitas and kebabs have left me loving all foods foreign I've got no time for mince.

Mince and peas holds fond memories for me though.  I've only had it a couple of times too, at about age 15 when working as a labourer on a Wolverhampton high rise council estate.  I was doing a couple of weeks work for a friend of my dad and every morning I'd leave my house in the Buckinghamshire countryside and make the hour journey up the motorway to the kind of estate I'd never seen before.  I'd spend a morning lifting and cutting blocks for block paving and then at lunch head to the chip shop where, alongside the various battered delicacies, you could pay 70p for a polystyrene plate of chips with a ladle of rich, beefy, salty mince and peas poured on top.  Whether it was the chips or the flavour enhancer laden gravy, something about that mince and peas didn't have the usual effect.