Smackerels! A Taxonomy of Eating
A very short essay, a diary entry, recipes, and notes on eating
Hello! My name is Rebecca May Johnson, I am a writer and cook and this is my new Substack. Each week I will send out a short piece of writing, recipes and notes on what I’ve been eating at home and elsewhere.
Some news: My nonfiction book SMALL FIRES, AN EPIC IN THE KITCHEN is now available for pre-order. After working on it for a long time, it is exciting for this moment to have arrived and I think the cover (designed by Jo Walker) is beautiful.
Smackerels! A Taxonomy of Eating
As a child I loved the Winnie the Pooh cookbook. It occupied a vivid place in my imagination. In particular, because of the new words for types of meal it introduced me to: ‘Smackerels, Elevenses and Teas’, ‘Provisions for Picnics and Expotitions (sic)’, ‘Lunches and Suppers’, ‘Dessert and Party Recipes’. A panoply of occasions for eating! It seemed that if you got it right, every moment could provide the opportunity for a different way to eat, each with its own name, underpinning logic and appropriate dishes. The Winnie the Pooh cookbook instituted a taxonomy of eating which ensured that at no point would I be left without an answer to the question: what should I cook? I made peppermint creams, gingerbread men, toad in the hole, cinnamon toast. I daydreamed about the word ‘provisions’, which held the promise of as-yet unknown delicacies.
The cookbook is also an instruction manual for how to use time: it establishes that the day can be organised through distinct ways of gathering with the people for whom we care, and deliciously so. Illustrations of Pooh’s friends and tidbits about their moods, preferences and quirks of character appear throughout the cookbook, with recipes in response.
The recipes I offer this week are in-between dishes that might constitute additions to Pooh’s taxonomy. It is fun to invent occasions and rituals for giving oneself (and others) pleasure, and to name them, too.
Lunch-snack and Breakfast-pudding
In preparation for two friends coming to stay, I loaded the car with rubbish from the house to take to the tip. We had hoarded a huge volume of cardboard, glass, plastic and had forgotten to take out the bins, too. The car was full to the top of the roof. I went alone to the tip (or rather, recycling centre, as it is really called) and it was there that after several months, I finally saw my allotment neighbour. As I was taking cardboard up the steps to the container for recycling, I saw his car drive in. I waved at him. I speculated as to what he would say. Maybe he would say that my allotment looked so bad he presumed I had given up the plot (which was my greatest fear, regarding what he might say). Then I said hi to a different man I know who has his own rubbish removal business. He took away the rotting shed that was on the allotment when I took it over. I see him around quite often, he is quite shy and very sweet.
My allotment neighbour got out of his car and remarked that he had not seen me in a long time. Then he made a circular movement with his hands around his head as he said, ‘you’ve not had [makes the gesture] again?’ I think he was referring to a period when I did not go to the allotment for a whole summer two years ago because I had fatigue. I said ‘no, I was away for work in Italy during the autumn and then I had an intensive teaching job’. He said ‘Oh, you have a thing about Italy, don’t you.’ He said that because I often grow Italian varieties of vegetables on the allotment and tell him about what I cook sometimes. He once told me about the last time he had eaten artichokes, about thirty years ago. At this point, the other man, who had been half-listening in said something like, ‘any Italian food is good by me, I love Italian food’. My allotment neighbour went off to put some weeds in the garden waste container (as he wishes that I would do too). Then the man who has the rubbish removal service said, hushed, and coming closer to where I was standing by the glass recycling container, ‘I’ve had to change my phone number because of…’ and trailed off, ‘anyway, I am still collecting rubbish if you…’ At which point he seemed to feel surveilled by someone behind him and said, ‘oh, perhaps not now’, and walked off. I said to my allotment neighbour, almost as an apology, slightly desperately : ‘I bought an electric strimmer to keep the grass down!’ He said, ‘yes, I’d seen you’d been doing things.’ It took me a long time to empty the car, so long that it became the subject of various remarks. The people working at the tip were trying to finish up. I told my allotment neighbour I would see him soon.
My allotment neighbour rang me on Saturday to say that my new shed had been blown over by Storm Eunice, but that it seemed intact. He advised me to put stakes deep in the ground at each corner to hold it up. ‘The people who built the shed might not have realised just how exposed it would be here’, he said.
Recipes
Mackerel pâté on toast (lunch-snack)
I gave our visiting friends a late breakfast of avocado on toast, but had not really thought of lunch. We had been for quite a long walk and then I left them on the sofa watching the winter olympics while I went to collect some vegetables. While out I suddenly felt hungry and realised that they would be hungry I bought some smoked mackerel and some yogurt. When I arrived home there was the tail end of some other snacking going on, quite understandably. At first I thought I should make a little salad to have with the mackerel and cursed myself for omitting to buy cucumber. But then I got down to it.
Ingredients (for four):
two smoked mackerel fillets, skin removed
natural yogurt – enough to make a spreadable pâté
teaspoon of mustard or horseradish
pinch of cayenne pepper
squeeze of lemon
bread
butter
How to make:
In a bowl, mash the mackerel with a fork to break it up. Add a spoon of yogurt and keep mashing. Keep adding yogurt – cautiously – until you have a soft, but not too wet spreadable consistency. Add seasonings to taste: a teaspoon of mustard or horseradish, a squeeze of lemon, black pepper. Spread onto hot well buttered toast, then sprinkle over a pinch of cayenne. It will keep in the fridge, covered, for a day or so.
Cinnamon toast (breakfast-pudding)
As I approached the task of making breakfast during the weekend of storm Eunice I felt a hankering – very sudden – for cinnamon toast. And so, following one piece of toast with a poached egg, I made a little dish of cinnamon toast from the Winnie the Pooh cookbook. Excellent with coffee!
Ingredients (for two):
Two pieces of toast (I had a nutty brown loaf, which worked well)
3 teaspoons of caster sugar
1 teaspoon of powdered cinnamon
butter
How to make:
Heat the grill. Mix the sugar and cinnamon together. Make the toast then spread it with butter (salted is nice here, otherwise add a few grains of salt). Then sprinkle over the sugar cinnamon mix. Put the toast under the grill for a minute or two to melt the sugar (watch it doesn’t burn). Serve.
Fennel orange salad (churros-enabling-starter)
This enlivening salad was an essential element in a meal that was designed to be the right size to allow for the eating of churros for pudding (details in my eating notes below)
Ingredients (for 4):
2 small fennel bulbs, finely sliced using a mandolin or sharp knife
2 oranges, segmented (cut off the top and the bottom of the orange, then place it on a chopping board and make your way round the orange, slicing downwards along the contour of the flesh with a sharp knife to remove the pith)
1 small onion, sliced and left in cold water for 10 minutes then drained
Olive oil
½ lemon
Salt
How to make:
Place the fennel, orange segments and onion on a serving plate. 10 minutes before serving, dress with 3 tablespoons of olive oil, a hefty pinch or two of salt and a good squeeze of lemon and toss well.
Eating Notes
The issue with churros – hot, sugared, deep-fried dough – is that it is too much after a hearty meal. And yet, one does not want to feel underfed having eating the main savoury part of the meal. In this menu for two visiting friends, I found a menu that allowed for churros. First: thinly sliced fennel, orange and onion salad dressed with olive oil, lemon juice and salt. Then chickpea and salt cod soup to Rachel Roddy’s recipe. After these relatively light dishes the greasy hot sugary dough was still wanted, yearned-for even. Deep frying added drama to the end of the meal. We dipped strands from the swirl of dough into a bitter chocolate sauce. Initially, it split because I began telling a story as the chocolate melted and lost focus, but Cornelius made a suggestion of adding whisky to bring it back together, which it did, and returned to the desired satin-like texture.
First porridge since last winter eaten at midday as the first meal of the day. One cup of oats, two cups of water cooked until soft. A pinch of salt, muscovado sugar, whole milk, double cream, a dot of butter.
Elevenses-cum-lunch lentil and bean soup mixed together in a Moroccan cafe in London with my friend Zoë and her baby after she went swimming and I held the baby and listened to Sherlock Holmes. Topped with powdered cumin salt and olive oil.
Tomato sauce and pasta. I cooked this while I chatted to Margaux and Irene of the Salmon Pink Kitchen podcast about home cooking. I had intended to go out and buy basil for it, but I did not have the energy to leave the house. Even though it was a podcast, I put make up on! I opened a beer and some fried corn and relaxed. We cooked together via zoom, making different forms of tomato sauce. I am still quite new at talking about my book and words came out very intensely and I can’t remember what I said – though I had fun, they are very lovely to talk to. At the end there was tomato sauce, and I cooked spaghetti and tossed it with the sauce and ate it while watching TV with Sam. It was very good. Listen to the podcast! The episode with me goes live on Tuesday morning – but there are lots of excellent ones up already.
Sitting outside a favourite café in London eating mortadella, mozzarella, artichoke and salad ciabatta dressed with oil and vinegar and a peach iced tea, then black coffee and a chocolate cannolo. Furious and joyful chattering in wild winds with two friends, So and Laura. Coincidentally, this was the day my book cover was announced, and the café appears in my book.
You write beautifully. I enjoyed this very much.