Daft Old Duffer returns. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
When the world and me were both a bit younger, every dinner table in the land it seemed, boasted a central display of pepper and salt.
Salt I can understand. In fact it still forms a major – some say too major – part of my diet.
But pepper – what’s that all about? It doesn’t taste of anything, doesn’t appear to do anything. Except spray mucus particles across the table and transform elegant ladies into frantic hanky searchers.
English snobbery
I’m sure it all began as another exercise in good old English snobbery. Like squeezing lemon onto that too-small fish instead of using vinegar. Which tastes precisely, exactly and entirely the same without getting your fingers sticky.
For pepper, just like salt, was first introduced as a highly expensive exotic that grew only on some remote and mysterious island, and was conveyed to the tables of ‘Our Betters’ by sturdy men-of-oak types after they had suffered the obligatory salt sores, scurvy and plentiful back lashings.
A substitute for salt?
In other words it began as nothing more than an attempt to substitute for salt, which had itself once been a luxury but had become affordable by even common people.
Unfortunately for the guardians of snobbery however, pepper in turn became common place, available even to the likes of chimney sweeps and costermongers.
Food fashions
The forces of upper-classery have attempted a fight back of course, inventing the ridiculous fashion for serving it up via a waiter wielding a large lump of hollowed out wood and demanding to know if you were sophisticated enough to allow him to spray your perfectly good dinner with the stuff.
But it still doesn’t taste of anything.
“Eat it up and think yourself lucky”
So what’s it for? I can only offer my father’s explanation. Which was, “Good honest folk have suffered so’s you can enjoy that, me lad. So see you just eat it up and think yourself lucky!”
In word, the good old bulldog spirit.
