210. ✒️ A letter to Terry: #25-06
Spamwiches, a missing meatball and waiting a very long time for pudding.
In which Rebecca explores some strange food, sings for her supper and takes renewed pleasure in the printed page.
✒️
This is the latest letter in my regular, informal correspondence with Substacker and fellow Brit Terry Freedman, in which we take it in turns to delve into the things that British people talk about the most. We’re inviting you to read our letters over our shoulders!
Dear Terry,
Many thanks for your latest letter. I thoroughly enjoyed the read, not least because it was largely about eggs: my breakfast food of choice.
🥪 Would you choose this for lunch?
Your description of your favourite youthful indulgence of a fried-egg sandwich with a layer of tomato ketchup inside it has reminded me of what Jim tells me was the best part of every school trip. Whereas I was used to taking a packed lunch with me to my school every day, Jim would only take his own lunch when a class outing had been planned, and would ask his mum to provide a Spam sandwich, the sliced bread having first been ketchupped.1
As if a Spam-and-ketchup filling weren’t enough of an affront to sandwich culture, Jim tells me that most of the kids – including him – would eat their packed lunch before the coach had even left school premises. What those tearaways then ate at lunchtime is anybody’s guess.2
🚌 Educational away days
Ahhhh, school trips! My classmates and I used to entertain ourselves with ‘music’ on long coach rides to places like Fishbourne Roman Palace, Hever Castle or Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. We’d begin the cacophony with a four-part round of ‘London’s Burning’, moving quickly on to ‘Found a Peanut’ and ‘One Man Went to Mow’, both of which could last for hours. My favourite, though, was this:
The Meatball Song
(to be sung to the tune of ‘On top of Old Smoky’)
On top of spaghetti
All covered in cheese
I lost my poor meatball
When somebody sneezed.
It rolled off the table
And onto the floor
And then my poor meatball
Rolled out of the door.
It rolled down the garden
And under a bush
And then my poor meatball
Was nothing but mush.
🍝
I’m sure it went on (and on and on and on…..) from there, but it will no doubt come as some relief to you that I don’t remember any more of it.
The song’s being going round in my own head, though, ever since this packet of meatballs arrived in a grocery order earlier this month:
The packet was sealed when this picture was taken, and when I peeled back the film to take a roll call, meatball attendance was recorded at just 95%. That’s right: the empty space represented a missing meatball, not one which had been hiding beneath the label.
Well, nineteen meatballs are still far too many make a perfectly decent nosh-up for two hungry people, so we didn’t starve.
🐌 Slooooooow food
Do you enjoy slow-cooked dishes, Terry? I came across a recipe from Mark Hix in the Telegraph recently which clearly takes the idea of the ‘slow food movement’ too far. Sure, good things come to those who wait, but no pudding should take this long!
Prep time 20 minutes, oh, plus months and months of steeping. Yeah, thanks.
I have another bone to pick with this recipe, too. ‘After entertaining, you often end up with random dregs of booze and no idea what to do with them’, Hix tells me.
Erm, no I don’t, and no I don’t. 🙄
🥕 It gets worse!
The long wait for rumtopf with rice pudding is perhaps less problematic than what came into my head after I’d spotted this headline in Friday’s Daily Mirror:
Carrots taste better when they’re not boiled and soaked in one 42p ingredient
Call me a cynic, but surely there are plenty of 42p ingredients in which to not soak your carrots in order that they will taste nice? With today’s UK average price being 134.4p per litre, I could, for instance, spend 42p on 312ml of petrol in which to soak my carrots, and I can absolutely guarantee that yes, my carrots would taste better if they’re not boiled and soaked in that stuff.
And Terry, I know what you’re thinking, but don’t be difficult. I know that petrol isn’t a common ingredient in cooking, but what makes an ingredient an ingredient is the intention of the cook to use it in a recipe. If I am daft enough to wish to include petrol in a dish I am making, then heck, it’s an ingredient.
🙄
Disclaimer: Don’t do this. Thank you.
🧩 The Puzzle Corner
Terry, I’m glad to report that I’ve solved your brain teaser!
‘Somewhere in this letter,’ you told me, ‘is an allusion to a Beatles song. What is the phrase in question, and which song does it come from?’
Ha! Well, you opened your third paragraph with the phrase ‘When I was younger, so much younger than today’, which is the opening line of HELP! by The Beatles.
I’ve got a short and sweet cryptic crossword clue for you in retaliation response. It’s from Saturday’s Daily Telegraph:
Six about to face unknown lady (3)
What’s the answer, and why?
📚 On reading
I’ve been doing a great deal of analogue reading recently, because I’ve been finding on-screen reading tiresomely tiring. It’s lovely to handle books, though, and it’s been rather a voyage of rediscovering that.
Anyway, I found this lovely passage in a book I’d picked up secondhand recently, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman:
I have always enjoyed reading, but I’ve never been sure how to select appropriate material. There are so many books in the world – how do you tell them all apart? How do you know which one will match your tastes and interests? That’s why I just pick the first book I see. There’s no point in trying to choose. The covers are of very little help, because they always only say good things, and I’ve found out to my cost that they’re rarely accurate. ‘Exhilarating.’ ‘Dazzling.’ ‘Hilarious’. No.
It's gorgeously ironic that I found the time I spent (two days straight) reading Eleanor Oliphant to be exhilarating, dazzling and hilarious, and I can thoroughly recommend the book. Perhaps next time I’m in a bookshop I shall pick up the first volume I come across – not to buy, necessarily, but to see what adopting the Eleanor Oliphant Method might reveal. Will it be a new discovery; the fulfilment of an unforeseen literary destiny?
Or rather, will it be something which my conscious brain would never allow me to consider? Like, for instance, a spam-and-ketchup sandwich… 🤔
All the very best, as ever,
Rebecca
If you’ve enjoyed reading this letter to Terry, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you!
Terry and I take it in turns to write to each other, and I really enjoy our light-hearted correspondence! Check out Terry's fabulous newsletter, and to make sure you don’t miss his reply to this letter, why not subscribe?
Last but not least, do please share and subscribe for free! Thank you!
Yes, this is a word. DEFINITELY a word.
The first morning I’d made Jim a sandwich to take to work I got a phone call at about 8.45am thanking me ‘for my delicious lunch’. ‘It’s a pleasure: I hope you enjoy it!’ I said to him. ‘No, I’ve had it, and it was yummy!’ he told me.
I reckon if people still received letters like yours and Terry's in the actual snailmail letterboxes, the world would be a much happier place.
As for that pudding, what wanky tosh! Who'd bother?
The AWOL meatball ... where she ended up, one can only imagine. As for the two-month wait for pudding? To hell with that. Pass the Bourbons, the Ginger Nuts and the Jammy Dodgers - right now. Delightful read, Rebecca. As always.