Shelling Peas

London, Wed. Sept. 10   

From Bridget's living room

     I offered to make dinner tonight, so I'm sitting here shelling peas.  Pop, zip, slide; the motion is as familiar to me as brushing my teeth.  How many times in my life, I wonder, have I done this?  In the U.S., fresh peas are a once-a-year treat. We ate them with every Sunday roast when I was growing up; cheap, prolific, easy to grow.  And despite all the vegetables I've been introduced to, and enjoyed, in the decades since, fresh peas, lightly steamed, tarnished with butter and just a hint of salt, are still my favorite vegetable.

     Which led me to meditate on the edibles I return to when I revisit England.  McVitie's Chocolate Digestives - not those fancy-ancy dark chocolate johnny-come-latelies; milk chocolate - the real deal.  A biscuit and a nice cup of tea - thick, dark, laced with whole milk.  Robertson's Thick Cut Seville Orange Marmalade; spread thickly atop lashings of creamy English butter on a hearty slice of whole wheat bread.  Jam.  When we arrived home from school, we'd dash upstairs to watch our tiny black and white telly, and Mum would call: "Bread and jam, bread and butter, bread and sugar or bread and dripping?" - our choices for tea.

     Growing up in a County Council estate outside London, we walked to the shops to buy food:  bread at the baker's (split tin, 11 1/2 d.); fish (and herring roe) at the fishmonger's; turnips, potatoes, carrots, peas at the greengrocer's.  There was also a fish and chip shop, a salon where my mum had her hair "done" every two weeks, and a Coop where my sister and I purchased, with our meager savings, four rather useless tiny glasses in different colors for one of Mum's birthdays.  Across the street, and past the entrance to the Tube, a quonset hut housed the Brownies' weekly meeting.  And up the road was the stationer's (newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, sweets) where I spent my weekly sixpences on Cadbury's milk chocolate.

     I still love Cornish pasties, pork pies (about as healthy as Spam), and scones, with or without clotted cream.  But it's impossible not to acknowledge some of the harsher historical realities that color my childhood.  Until I was at least 10, orange juice only came powdered; the Seville orange you got in your Christmas stocking was a once-a-year treat.  Bread was rationed from 1946-1948, sugar until 1953 and meat until 1958.  And austerity wasn't the worst of it.  As a child, I'm ashamed to recall, we collected the paper figures inside the lids of the Robertson's jars (jam as well as marmalade): "Golliwogs," thick-lipped, large-eyed caricatures of Africans.  You got a prize if you collected enough; no one in England in the 1950's thought twice about racial stereotyping.

From Anna Jones's A Modern Way to Eat

     Cadbury's Flake bars, Bassett's Licorice Allsorts, Maltezers, Ribena (blackcurrent cordial) - these are still part and parcel of every English child's life.  But they also have the benefit, in London as in most other urban areas of Britain, of living in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual society.  Prejudice not only still exists but is a tangible undercurrent here in London, but Pamela and Christopher live, and learn, alongside Raul and Ahmed, and that has to be better for everyone than the lily-white, homogeneous England I grew up in; I was 13 when I remember seeing my first person of color, an American serviceman who purchased some musical instruments from my dad before we emigrated to the U.S.

     Every time Anglophilic Americans drool over England - how cute, picturesque and quaint it is - I have to measure my response.  Yes, there are wonderful things here, but intractable problems, too.  At least the cooking is a lot better than in my childhood; until I went to college the only salad I had ever eaten consisted of iceburg lettuce, tomato and cucumber with salad cream, a peculiarly English invention that tastes like mayonnaise with a dash of relish.  Tonight those shelled English peas, along with leeks, fresh asparagus and broad beans, will go into risotto, a dish I never heard of until I grew up in a different country.