Craig Menzies 2.0

Published in Victoria’s Monday Magazine and Bowen Island’s The Island News.

By CRAIG MENZIES

I passed a milestone of staggering importance the other day. For the first time in my adult life I bought and consumed an entire package of alfalfa sprouts. I’m certain that if my parents were to discover this fact, I would be immediately disowned. You see, I was born in Scotland in 1969, and moved over to Canada when I was just a “wee bairn,” which is a Scottish term for “too young to move out on your own.” In University a professor once told me that the average Navajo family in the Twentieth century consisted of a Mother, a Father, several children and an anthropologist. It was a good joke, but I was raised to believe that the Scottish nuclear family consisted of a Father, a Mother, several children, a grandmother who loves the Queen Mum, and a Deep Fryer.

Consider the national British obsession with the deep fryer, a contraption that should be displayed in the Infamous Torture Devices section of Madame Tussauds, somewhere between the Iron Maiden and the Guillotine. Certainly you’re wondering what I could possibly have against something as innocuous as a deep fryer, but it is my personal opinion that this infamous device is not only responsible for my unsightly teenage acne, but has probably killed more people than American foreign policy. I imagine if the fryer was filled with sesame oil, or some kind of organic vegetable oil, that I might not have so much to complain about. But, at my house, the reality was that the fryer was usually filled to the brim with several brick-sized chunks of lard and animal fat. The lard would remain in the fryer until the bits and pieces left over from previous meals outnumbered the portion for the present one (we called them “flavour crystals”). Then, with an audible sigh of regret, my Dad would scoop out the lard that looked like melted oreo ice cream, and replace it with five or six more bricks of pristine white Crisco. Yum.

Every night the fryer was plugged in, and we’d wait for the lard to melt into bubbling oil. When I read old books about medieval castles under siege I always conjured images of huge deep fryers filled with bubbling oil and popping bits of old chips and yesterday’s haddock chunks, ready to be poured down onto the ranks of the invading enemy below. What a way to die.

It’s really not just the Scots either. I nursed a theory for a while that the English were only able to conquer the Scottish people by giving them deep fryer’s and showing them how to make potato fritters. The English knew that in ten or twenty years, the whole nation would be so desperately in need of a bowel movement, they wouldn’t have any desire left to fight. It surprises me sometimes that, considering British national cooking, that there aren’t more heart attacks in the streets of London. I think their health officials should hire ex-ballboys from Wimbledon to stand on the streets of the city. When a pedestrian grabs their arm suddenly and goes down with a coronary, they rush out from the sidelines, administer a jolt from their backpack defibulators, and get them back onto their way.

So, every night my father would say it was time for dinner, plug in the deep fryer, grab some kind of canned vegetable from the cupboard and some kind of pre-frozen meat product from the closet-sized freezer. It was the standard Scottish meal. Forget Haggis, most Scots hate the stuff. I think it’s because they secretly suspect that it might just be primitive enough to still contain healthy nutrients. Disgusting, but healthy. But, I don’t want you to think that it was my Father’s job to do all the cooking. My Dad was given four jobs in the kitchen: prepare and operate the deep fryer, prepare and operate the BBQ, prepare soups of varying shades of orange, and freezing anything (usually the soup). He also held the honourable title of “The Nose.” My Dad has the most amazingly developed olfactory sense, and can tell you at thirty yards if your milk is sour, your beef tongue cold-cuts (the food that tastes back) are past their prime, or to my utter embarrassment as a self-conscious teenager, if your breath “smells like kitty litter.” Though, regrettably, it seemed like many Scottish super-powers, to be used only for evil. He couldn’t tell you about the properties of a great glass of wine, or describe the subtle aromas of a lovely coq-au-vin, but he could tell if your best friend smelled like BBQ chips.

My Mother was really the great cook in the family in the Scottish tradition, meaning she never once let a nutrient survive the cooking process. I have lived in British Columbia for four years, arguably the great-tasting-fish capital of the World. But I only tasted salmon for the first time three months ago because my mother once served me boiled haddock when I was four years old. Two years ago I had brussel sprouts served with dinner in a Vancouver restaurant, and had to call the chef over to ask how he got them to taste like something other than stale potato water. In our house, if a brussel sprout fell on the floor it didn’t bounce, it disintegrated. I won’t even go into black pudding.

But, even in Canada, there are differences in our national cooking standards. Here in British Columbia, we are very fortunate to enjoy some of the World’s best, if sometimes confusing, cuisine. Here it takes ten minutes to order a sandwich, which is invariably delicious and healthy when it arrives. Last year I flew back to Ottawa to attend my brother’s wedding. Two days before the wedding the guys in the wedding party gathered at a local restaurant to drink cheap pitchers of beer, exchange ever-so-witty comments about each others haircuts and weight gain, and have lunch. I scanned the menu for something that was not going to cause instant kidney shock, and settled on a “Club Sandwich.” I was prepared to modify it by asking for no bacon or mayonnaise, and if I could please have it on some kind of multigrain or perhaps a herbed foccacio, that would be nice. Thanks. The waitress came to me, I said “Club Sandwi…” and she was gone. Fifteen minutes later a sandwich arrived that resembled a model of a guard tower surrounded by a moat of glistening, popping french-fries. I suspected the main construction ingredient of the tower was white Wonder Bread. Which makes sense – if you’re going to build a tower, you should use something that will last and last and last. And so I ate the sandwich, and guiltily enjoyed the way the Miracle Whip collected in the corners of my mouth, and yearned for the taste of organic alfalfa sprouts on multigrain yeast-free sourdough.