Food, Glorious Food

Staying in a house where two of the other occupants experienced, as I did, English boarding school food (three different schools, identical kitchen) has led to some interesting musings on what the effect of that has been on us: we all agree that we spend more than the average bear on groceries. In my case, I also go to the local co-op several times a week in order to have fresh food all the time, as green as possible, organic mostly, and not inexpensive. Nor do I eat meat.

I can’t help it. When you’re still recovering, decades later, from battered spam and spotted dick (a suet pudding with currants in a long tube shape, served with custard), which you had to gobble quickly, where the kitchen’s response to the oceans of stodge they crammed down the gullets of ravenous teenagers was rhubarb stewed to oblivion, and where the only fresh fruit was orange quarters at half-time in field hockey matches (too bad if you weren’t on the team), you develop a certain aversion to institutional food. The odor of overboiled cabbage that lingered through the wooden hallways until the next installation of overboiled cabbage made going to smell the corpse plant last week an almost nostalgic experience for me.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes out on Saturday. Apart from the magic, the only thing that distinguishes the experience of these children from our own boarding school experiences is that the food’s good. So we eagerly await the publication of the book (I’m getting it delivered here and left copious room in my bags for it) in an effort to rework the memories.