Heading to the US that first student summer, a friend asked me to bring her back a pack of lasagne. She was sophisticated. She had been in America the previous year and discovered Italian food. I had no idea what she was talking about and had to write down the word “Lasagne” and the brand she asked for.
I had never seen pasta, pizza, spaghetti, never mind eating any of the same. I can understand how people were taken in by that BBC spoof on an April Fools’ Day some years before, where they broadcast a news report on major problems with the spaghetti harvest in Italy that year, with footage of dried spaghetti hanging from trees.
Not long before that trip to the US, a student friend and myself visited an Indian restaurant in Dublin and ordered the hottest dish on the menu. The tears ran down our faces. It was excruciating. I couldn’t eat curry for years afterwards. Indeed, where most people in Ireland were concerned at the time, Curry was a place in Sligo.
And, on arrival in New York that first time, a friend and myself went to a Chinese restaurant near Times Square. It was my first time in such a place and the beginnings of a life-long love affair with barbecued spare ribs.
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At the time, when it came to food, we lived in a very monochrome Ireland, spuds with everything, cabbage and carrots with most, plus meat or fish. It was an Ireland before fast-food. Burgers, even, were rare; fries non-existent, but chips/spuds were king.
There was just cheese and onion Tayto, rice was creamed and came in tins, coffee came in bottles, was known as Irel, but was really chicory. And water came from wells or taps. The idea of buying it in shops and paying as much for it as petrol or diesel would, in my part of the world, be enough to have you “put in Castlerea” (the psychiatric hospital).
Or “Cashel-ray”, as it was known locally. One man, trying to explain the misfortune of an acquaintance in the US, said he was then “in Cashel-ray, in America”.
In those days, muesli was for cattle, fish had no fingers, sugar came with everything, and only Americans were obese.
Food, from Old English foda, for “food, nourishment”.
