‘We have let the tyranny of bagel, wrap and burger overwhelm us and replace our national cuisine’
IN A MEXICAN restaurant recently, I was reacquainting myself with the strange beauty of the burrito and got to wondering why it was that Ireland has never pioneered a similar type of food, or a similar food delivery mechanism. For those who who haven’t eaten one, the burrito is a large soft flour tortilla wrapped around rice, beans, cheese, guacamole and a meat of your choice. It is a transportable and substantial; cheap, delicious and easy to eat with your hands. That I still favour the burrito despite having eaten half of one for lunch and kept the other half for dinner for a six-month period of unemployment in my early working life is a testament to its qualities.
The burrito belongs to a genus of meal that can be called the food sock, and most countries have their own take on it. The Greek national food sock is the gyro or the souvlaki, soft bread wrapped around your choice of rotisseried meats, salad vegetables and a yogurt-based tzatziki sauce. Lebanon’s contribution to food sock culture is the falafel – deep fried, spiced hummous balls, pickled vegetables and hot sauce, drizzled with tahini sauce, yoghurt and garlic, served within a flat bread . . . sock.
Then there is the shawarma, referred to in France as a Turkish baguette, known in Mexico as an Arab taco, but similar in some respects to the most celebrated food sock of them all . . . the kebab/kebap/kabab/kebob/kabob/kibob/ kebhav/kephav. On a recent trip to the Berlin neighbourhood of Kreuzberg, I paid homage at the restaurant in which the first döner kebab was synthesised by crazed Turkish pioneer, Mahmut Aygün. Apparently, it was in 1971 that “Hasir” served the first slices of meat into pitta and created the Turkish food sock; the greatest of them all.
At least in Germany it’s considered Turkish. In Turkey they refer to the doner kebab as German food and perhaps that has something to do with the global reputation of the World’s Greatest Food Sock, tarnished by the night-time habits of those who love them. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that they taste great, people tend to associate kebabs with the untucked shirt fronts of brawling drunks, and let’s face it, what meal would not suffer from such an association? I confidently predict that you’d never contemplate eating Kobe beef or Dublin Bay oysters again if you saw them being torn apart by a gang of pigeons on a Monday morning pavement, or smeared across the face of a pugilist.
I don’t like messy food, and I don’t like eating with my hands. In this (and in other regards) I’m considered slightly odd by those who have eaten with me, who watch in amazement and barely concealed pity as I patiently work my way through the thick base of a pizza with a bendy plastic knife and a fork whose spines will snap under the slightest pressure – because it looks too sloppy to pick up and eat.
The same applies to a sandwich or a burger. If they are stacked too high to be eaten easily and cleanly, I’ll use cutlery to dismantle the creation, piece by piece. Of course, with chicken wings, I’ll bite the bullet and pick them up, but that’s because not eating them can’t be contemplated. But I’d hesitate to order ribs.
The best food socks are neat, silver bullets. With the burrito, falafel, gyro and shawarma you can unwrap the foil to reveal the top, eat that and continue unwrapping it, south bound, all the way to the end. Throughout the experience, your hand touches only foil, and the very best kebabs are the same. The very worst, though, are an obsessive compulsive’s nightmare; onions spilling everywhere, sauce on chin-and-shoe, grease transported from meal to hand to forehead.
We don’t have much of a culture of fast food, yet the proliferation of burger restaurants and rising obesity levels suggest that we certainly like a fast-food snack. I can tell that we don’t have time to sit down and eat corned beef and cabbage from a plate at lunch time because the evidence is there in the form of hundreds of Facebook status updates every day. “X is insanely busy right now” (and yet on Facebook) – fair enough. Into the time-constrained breach must come something Irish that can be eaten in front of the monitor, without a knife and fork. Armenia, Bosnia and Serbia have the boerek, England has multifarious pasties and the pie – which has also been taken to another level in Australia. The South William pub on . . . South William Street has a great bacon, cabbage and parsley sauce pie on the menu, albeit at an outrageously inflated price, but it would be nice if someone could take their lead and repackage some of what we do best in a way that is modern, cheap and easy to eat.
Clearly, it is time for the Irish food sock. It might be lamb and potato stew in pitta bread, or bacon and cabbage in a tortilla. Maybe even some kind of Irish breakfast sock involving black pudding, or a corned beef type of a thing. It’s not my job to know what tastes good until I eat it, but I do know that we have let the tyranny of bagel, wrap and burger overwhelm us and replace our national cuisine, instead of cooking what we have always cooked and wrapping it in a tortilla or a piece of bread. And it doesn’t have to be bad for you.
In response to the onward march of fast food in France – which now has halal branches of McDonalds – Alain Cojean has opened an eponymous chain selling French classics, fast. Belgium has “Exki”, and London “Leon”, famed for serving good food quickly as opposed to fast food. And we have our national snack, the hideous, ersatz nightmare, yes . . . the panini.