It’s easy to forgot the appeal of a few days of pleasant food. A few weeks ago I ate dinner with colleagues at Café St. Honore: a soft and sweet beef carpaccio with potato salad and watercress, a main dish of lamb shoulder over beets, swimming in a sweet rich sauce, with mashed potatoes and a kind of fried roulade-disc of pork belly, and for dessert, crème brûlée, a dish threatened with extinction as a result of its obviousness and familiarity: compare tiramisu, pork chops, gin and tonic, the liberal arts, marriage, Western civilization. In other words: it’s easy to forget the appeal.
The following day I found myself in the evening at Bar Kohl, on George IV Bridge, an unexceptional sort of place, which managed inexplicably to serve up a tolerable burger — tolerable relative to our local low standards. With such minimal standards perpetually degraded, we can easily forget that they are even capable of being met.
And the next day, another professional dinner, this time a the new South Indian place, Tanjore, for a three-foot long dosa, a very fine coconut chutney, a wonderful tomato & onion chutney, sweet and spicy at once, some nice lentil doughnuts, a few kinds of idli, sambore, and a masala dosa. I went home that night tired and alone, but nevertheless sated.
The last few days once again reminded me of the salvation lying in ordinary meals. Vacationing in Pitlochry with Alyssa Ney, after waking back at dusk from Edradour, the sun setting in a clear sky over the forest east of town, the Atholl Hotel rising up out of the woods, we had a good cullen skink at the Old Mill Inn, and the following night a fine dinner at Fern Cottage — I ate, first, smoked salmon over salad, with capers and balsamic vinegar, follow by, second, several pieces of breaded pork, served with a sweet and creamy whisky sauce. We drank a bottle of extremely crisp and cold Chenin Blanc, and discussed what was to be done.
For breakfast we ate black pudding and rashers, yogurt and rhubarb compote, toast and plum jam. (Tir Aluinn guest house is outstanding.) Back in Edinburgh, I introduced Alyssa to fried pizza supper, we had dinner at Kalpna (their àla carte menu is better than their thali menu), and, while she ate haggis with neeps & tatties at the Albanach Bar, I had a lovely butternut squash soup.
Between these two memorable periods of eating out, I made an enormous pot of refried beans — pintos, broth, sautéed onion and garlic (plenty of this), and four or five chopped chilies of medium heat, all cooked slowly for four hours — and spend several weeks enjoying it with British cheddar inside flour tortillas and (especially) with spring onions and black olives over corn tortilla chips. This might have been the most pleasant food of all — the creamy, rich, spicy beans were, and remain, a force to be reckoned with, another bit of elusive appeal in a world gone mad.
