You can’t educate pork

I read a very funny Facebook post the other day which was about someone who had purchased a ready meal which included Pancetta, but then complained that as a vegetarian they were disappointed the product had meat in it! I was going to say that you can’t educate pork, but given what Pancetta is, which is pork, it didn’t seem appropriate. The big mistake this person made, in my opinion, was not so much not knowing what Pancetta is but to say so on a public forum without checking first! Because when it comes to ignorance about food, your humble blogger is right up there.

It could be an age thing, or it could be my sheltered upbringing, but many types of food were alien to me as I was growing up. For instance, I never knew one meat from another when I was growing up. I thought meat was meat and it never occurred to me that it might be the parts of different dead animals. When more fancy Dan types of food arrived, I didn’t have a clue.

Remember Vesta ready meals? I was aware of them at the time but in my little world where my mum waited outside the butcher shop just before it closed to get cheap offcuts they appeared to be for the better off, particularly those who had things called fridges. We had a larder to store cool things which of course it didn’t because our larder was basically a cupboard at the end of the kitchen. I went to one friend’s house and they were having a Vesta curry for tea one night.  I nodded in approval although in truth I had no idea what a curry was. As it turned out, I was in a large majority; indeed curry today is a generic name for many sauce based dishes which aren’t curry at all. It also had rice with it, which I had briefly experienced as a child in the Netherlands when once in a blue moon we would enjoy an Indonesian meal, but never at home.

I was probably in my 30s when I finally had a proper curry, or what constitutes a curry in Britain and older still when I discovered thinks like Chorizo, Salami and, going back to where we came in, Pancetta. Not only had I never tried these meats, I had never heard of them. At least I kept quiet about it.

Fast forward to the modern day and my food ignorance has only grown deeper. Bristol in particular offers a staggering range of food types which I have never tried or heard of and I tend to keep quiet when others wax lyrical on a particular type of dish. I adopt the Mark Twain position which says: “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

A friend of mine once took his girlfriend to Paris for a romantic weekend and decided to surprise her with a bottle of bubbly. He popped out and found a local store and set about impressing the proprietor with his pidgin French. “Bonjour Monsieur. un bouteille of Champignon silver plate.” With a puzzled look, the owner popped out the back and return with a large jar of pickled mushrooms. My friend nodded in approval, adding “And I’ll take a bottle of Champagne, please”. I think the Champignon jar remained unopened.

The lesson to be learned is don’t try to be an expert, something I learned when once carrying out a blind beer tasting and getting every single one wrong. If you don’t want to make an arse of yourself, ask someone who you hope won’t take the piss or better still ask Mr Google.