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Wally was our family's gardener, my father's
greatest friend and my frequent childhood
dining companion.
What is it about American meat lovers that they refuse to eat or even taste wonderful British staples? My theory is that they must visualize the raw organ and its function. If that was my way, I should never have eaten the part of a chicken that my father called “the parson's nose.” Indeed, my siblings and I would fight over who got to eat the chicken’s bottom! Try it, it’s delicious.
Tongue sandwiches I learned to love from Wally, my grandmother’s gardener. He was also our own family gardener, builder and a great friend to all of us. He was Buckinghamshire born and bred and had the accent of the English countryside; imagine if a home-churned pat of butter could speak -- that’s how Wally spoke.
Wally worked in our garden every day, and he was my father’s greatest friend. (When my father died in 1990, Wally -- then 87 years old, and four years from his own passing -- insisted on digging the grave. After the coffin was laid to rest, Wally returned the soil to the ground, “Ever so gently for the boss,” he said.) Every summer, the two men would compete to grow the biggest onion. Both took this very seriously and spent months, independently traveling many miles around England looking for the nursery with the highest quality of giant onion seed.
Phil, Wally’s wife, was tall, thin and I never saw her without an apron tied around her waist. She had fashionable blue-tinted hair, held perfectly in place with a net of the same color. She always looked stern, even when she smiled. But she took great care of Wally. Every day, she would send him off to our house to work, with his lunch that was always the same -- a cow tongue sandwich with butter on white bread. As a young girl, I would sit with Wally on a garden bench, greedily accepting when he offered me half his lunch.
The weekly dinners with Wally and Phil always
descended into pea-flicking.
The supper game was always the same. Pea flicking! Wally would distract Phil and then flip his peas with a spoon at us across the table. “Phil, look at that finch!” he would exclaim, she would turn to the window, and peas would fly! We all laughed hysterically. Except Phil. I’m sure she knew what we were up to, but she always played along.
At the end of the meal, Wally would scrape his plate clean with his fork and lick his knife, as either a sweet ode to Phil’s good cooking, or a demonstration of extremely bad manners. I was always afraid he would slice his tongue right off.
There was no pea flicking at the table at home, and certainly no knife licking. We ate slightly more sophisticated food like roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, gammon, or smoked haddock baked in milk and butter. Depending on the season, sometimes we roasted a freshly hung pheasant, brought over by a neighbor.
Although the foodstuffs were different, the suppers were the same in both houses: always good conversation, laughter and feasting. None of us even considered (as children do today) rejecting any of the delicious food, but always asked for seconds and thirds.
My husband tells me that his unwillingness to eat my favorite foods is cultural. However, he wasn’t raised on sushi, which he loves, or foie gras -- whose origin is far more repulsive than an oxtail. But then I’m not sure Wally would have thought much of toro. Is it snobbery or fear? Probably a little of both. All I can say is I am very glad I was raised not to be snobbish or fearful because some of the most delicious food comes out of some of the most unlikely kitchens.
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