by Martin Field

Splashing around at St Andrews Beach in brain-boiling 40C degree temperatures, during the Australia Day holiday week, I came over all strange. Despite the liberal application of aged, slightly rancid coconut oil, with an SPF rating of minus 25, my skin turned the colour of a two year old Beaujolais – a sort of sickly brown-edged red – and I felt faint.

After a relatively short wait (less than a day) in the local medical centre, the doc asked me what was the trouble. I described my symptoms. ‘Were you drinking?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘Plenty of water.’

‘If water was any good,’ she said, ‘we’d have it running through our veins instead of blood. I’m sorry to say you are severely debeerated.’ ‘What does that mean?’ I asked naively.

‘Debeeration,’ she explained, ‘Is a condition that occurs when a person has not consumed sufficient brewed liquid. Deprived of essential complex alcohols and other associated vitamins and minerals, the victim’s system will then start to fail, their muscles will melt down and eventually they may die.’

‘But along with water I’ve also been drinking a lot of light and mid-strength beers.’ I countered in mitigation.

‘Aha! There’s your problem.’ she said. ‘They’re not actually beer. If I may speak scientifically, they are a sort of no-frills substitute for the real thing. In laypersons’ terms, they are the tragic equivalent of drinking instant coffee.’

Horrified and chastened at her insight into my condition, I replied plaintively, ‘Please Doc, what am I to do? I place myself entirely in your hands.’

‘Well, first we’ll have to urgently rebeerate you. I don’t think you’re that far gone that we need to put you on a beer drip but I recommend the immediate consumption of half a dozen stubbies… of ice-cold, full-strength, amber fluid. After that I want you to drink at least two litres of genuine beer daily, avoid imitation beer and strenuous activity and come back and see me in a month.’

With this she wrote out a prescription listing a number of local and imported ales, advising me, ‘Unfortunately these are not subsidised but they should be available on discount at your local drugstore*.’

‘But Doc. What about driving? You know it’s illegal for me to drink and drive.’

‘Do you want to live or do you want to drive? she snapped. ‘You clearly have a problem identifying life priorities!’ ‘Next.’

*liquor store.

Noshtalgia
Chatting at the local hostelry we were discussing the worst meals we’d ever eaten. Nearly everyone had bad memories of the dish, Apricot Chicken, which, plague-like, swept the dinner tables of Australia in the late sixties and early seventies. From memory, the recipe involved placing partially thawed chicken legs and thighs in a casserole, sprinkling them with a packet of dried chicken noodle soup then immersing the lot in apricot nectar. The casserole was then left in a tepid oven for nowhere near long enough.

The result was excruciatingly awful. You were served a pale hunk of salty, sinewy, goose-pimpled flesh floating in a greyish yellow goop. Inedible on the outside it was inevitably bloody around the bone. A mate still recalls eating some at a dinner party. After saying good night his unsettled stomach transfigured the partially digested chook into a pavement pizza before he even reached his car and he suffered salmonella like symptoms for days. Does anyone still make this abomination?

Vindaloo
In the wonderful curry restaurants around Manchester years ago the young macho types liked to show off by ordering the ‘Hottest vindaloo you’ve got.’ When the volcano of smouldering curry arrived they’d shovel it down, eyes popping out of their florid faces and, while suppressing a mild coronary, muttering, ‘Doesn’t hurt a bit.’

I, like them, always thought that vindaloo was an Indian culinary term but a friend who knows these things pointed out that the term is Portuguese in origin. Seems the derivation is from the Portuguese vinho de alho, that is, wine (or wine vinegar) and garlic sauce. This was introduced by the Portuguese to Goa and ‘adjusted’ by generations of Indian chefs into its current form.

Wine and cheese
Saw this article Wine is all the same after cheese in New Scientist. Seems UC Davis researchers have found that when cheese is served with wine the cheese actually masks both the good and bad elements that may occur in any wine.

French winemakers have of course known this for centuries, hence the saying, ‘Sell with cheese. Buy with apples.’

Drunken cheese
There was this chef chatting to Caterina Borsato on Channel 31’s fine cooking show, Regional Italian Cuisine. He mentioned, in passing, a dish known as drunken cheese and said (this is from memory) that it was a dry cheese marinated in an Italian sweet red wine for 40 days and then further matured in barrels.

Sounds like my kind of cheese I thought – I’ll make some. Not knowing what wine or cheese was used or the recipe, I faked it with an aged Australian ‘parmesan’ and Australian fortified wines. I sliced the cheese into cubes of around three centimetres and placed them into sterilised jars, covering one lot with tawny and one with muscat and left them in the fridge for about eight weeks.

The result is interesting. Both samples have acquired a dark brownish coating – probably from the pigments in the wines. The cheese is pungently aromatic, still redolent of parmesan but, as expected, it has a significantly fortified wine bias – slightly sweet and with noticeable alcohol. Inside, the cheese is quite dry. There is no sign of mould or deterioration.

Drunken cheese works well when shaved with a vegetable peeler over dry biscuits – served with olives and dried tomatoes. The muscat flavoured version is marginally preferable to the tawny.