Like all sane people I try to avoid being in hospital, but you know, stuff happens. The secret of being in hospital, I’ve learned, is to have a good book with you. That’s likely to be your only source of comfort. The food certainly won’t be.
I was eleven years old when I was first in hospital, with an exploded appendix, and although I have no memory of the food I do remember the book. It was H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, though not the edition seen above.
I vividly remember a scene in the book when the explorers are running out of food, and Umbopa, their native guide who is not what he seems, “was marching along beside me, wrapped in his blanket, and with a leather belt strapped so tightly round his stomach, to ‘make his hunger small,’ as he said, that his waist looked like a girl’s.’ Literal belt-tightening though I’m not absolutely sure that’s a great cure for hunger.
Anyway, last week I was in the local hospital for a spell while they did various old-geezer tests on me. The amazing thing was that the hospital kitchen (if they actually have a kitchen) was able to make all the food taste exactly the same, whether it was beef stew, or shepherd’s pie or sausage and mash. This, I think, though I wouldn’t swear, is the shepherd’s pie:
Actually I shouldn’t be too hard on my local hospital – I’m sure they’re doing their best in adverse circumstances. When I first arrived they did offer me, and I accepted, this reasonably edible sausage roll.
And this time the book I had was Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens, and this turned out to be a very very good thing. It’s a long way from being a foodie book but it does contain some great writing about food.
A minor character named Raven Sable invents a food called CHOW™ “a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn’t matter how much you ate you lost weight.”
Sable sets up a chain called Burger Lord, international but with local variations. ‘German Burger Lords, for example, sold lager instead of root beer, while English Burger Lords managed to take any American fast food virtues (the speed with which your food arrived for example) and carefully remove them; your food arrived after half an hour, at room temperature, and it was only because of the strip of warm lettuce between them that you could distinguish the burger from the bun. The Burger Lord pathfinder salesmen had been shot twenty-five minutes after setting foot in France.”
There is also a fabulous footnote, and maybe I should I have known this already, about Casanova’s traveling arrangements. He carried with him at all times a valise containing “a loaf of bread, a pot of choice Seville marmalade, a knife, a fork, and small spoon for stirring, 2 fresh eggs packed with care in unspun wool, a tomato or love-apple, a small frying pain, a small saucepan, a spirit burner, a chafing dish, a tin box of salted butter of the Italian type, 2 bone china plates. Also a portion of honeycomb … Let my readers understand me when I say to them all: A true gentleman should always be ready to break his fast in the manner of a gentleman, wheresoever he may find himself.”
The morning after I got home from the hospital I had Coco Pops for breakfast. I am less of a gentleman than Giacomo Casanova, but you probably knew that already.
