Much Depends Upon Dinner

Food is very important to me, so forgive & indulge me, Dear Reader, if I reminisce about the culinary aspect of our Ruskin experience.

When we arrived at Headington for the first time, a student from the previous year promised to arrange for Red Cross food parcels to be sent to us as he wandered off chuckling. What did he mean? We were soon to find out.

We were welcomed with a sumptuous buffet and I clearly remember the leftovers being piled up for consumption in the evening. I could hardly move & my belly was like a drum. I looked backwards to the many NUPE & TUC courses where the food had been superb & plentiful, and projected this vision of abundance onto the future. I believed that the two years ahead would be ones not only of educational opulence, but of a full stomach & happy taste-buds. The early signs were certainly encouraging.

How wrong can you be?

Without further delay, we were introduced to “Chicken a la mode de Headington”. This delicacy was distinguished by the manner in which the blood dripped out of the fowl to pool on the plate or soak into the veg. It was practically still clucking. Then there was the innovative use of technology (always a touchy subject for the more traditionalist chefs) to produce an item which would not have been possible in years gone by. I speak, of course, of the Ruskin Potato; raw on the outside but cooked on the inside; a sort of soft-centre spud. How did they do it? The answer lay in Microwaves, which cook from the inside out.

Then there was the mid-year cutback in breakfast provision. “Continental” breakfasts began to make more frequent appearances. Now the use of this term, in this context, is a slander on Europe. I mean, I’d be quite dis-chuffed if I knew that a hotel in, say, Frankfurt was serving up dull & undersized rations to its punters & calling it a “Welsh Dinner”. Continental breakfasts, as we know, are tasty affairs which vary from region to region - sausages, omelettes, yoghurts, preserves, cheeses, lovely fresh breads, and for the sweet-loving Viennese, even cream cakes (I’ll pass on that, though). Sorry, but a dry bit of toast & a field-ration-pack portion of jam is NOT a continental breakfast.

How important breakfast was, too (Badger, you’ll have to take my word for it; you were never out of your pit in time to see it. You’ll also have to take my word that Ruskin had a library). Stuck in the Cole Library writing that last-minute essay through the night, you had to know that there was at least bacon and egg to look forward to after the all-nighter. I remember Ian Russell nearly breaking down after a night in the Cole & wailing “Jacks! Fecking Jacks! Jack the Bastard Rippers!”. This bit of rhyming slang was new to me and he explained, close to tears, that kippers were on the menu. Now I never minded them, but each to their own...

Once, an edict was issued to the serving staff that students were not to get seconds. The actual reason was in order to prevent the food running out before all had been served; all fair & reasonable, of course. But the rule wasn’t qualified by the addition of “unless there’s any spare at end of mealtime”. So the rule was interpreted inflexibly with no consideration for the original intention. The result: a tray of fried eggs being slung in the bin whilst requests for another egg were turned down. I understand now that this was part of the college’s subliminal education and was aimed at preparing us for dealing with bureaucratically inflexible local authorities.

Pat McCartney was the food rep in the first year, poor soul. But it was a hopeless task, rendered impossible by the very nature & essence of the institution. Having a food rep at Headington was like having a health & safety rep on Death Row.

The curious thing was that Headington kitchens got the same budget allocation per student as did Walton Street. Yet the food at the latter place was like cordon bleu restaurant after a year at Headington. “Baked potatoes & various fillings” meant very different things in the two places. In Headington, it was cheese or (note “or” not “and”) baked beans with the spud. In Walton Street, it was cheese, and beans, and beef curry, and tuna mayonnaise, and salad. “Bread and Soup Day” was no hardship in the second year: the soup was usually made from proper veg & was tasty. In the first year, it was that powdered grey gloop as used by NASA in earth orbit.

Why the difference? As always, the answer is the human element. Walton Street had the amazing Evelyn who was not only a highly skilled cook but an expert buyer and an effective “kitchen brigade” leader too. A fantastic woman & a living legend.

And she stood no messing. I remember Joe holding forth one morning about the lack of vegetarian alternatives to food. Meanwhile, Mike Oliver, Harry, me & a few others demolished a fine spread of sausages, bacon, beans, hash browns, tomatoes, fried bread etc. Mike's words were "Joe - as a veggie you volunteer for bad grub, Comrade". This only spurred Joe on to further laments about the general lack of tofu & soya at the breakfast table. Evelyn appeared behind him, arms folded across her chest. Seeing her, we looked down, tucked in with renewed vigour & made sure that she knew how much we appreciated her grub. Joe carried on, unaware. A large hand, on the end of a large forearm, reached around the hapless lettuce-lover and swiped his breakfast. The tirade began with “Is it shite, then? Shall I take it away?” and became less restrained from there. The mighty Joe – never usually lost for words - drooped silently. Brilliant.

Evelyn even put on a special spread for the “national days”; St David’s, St Patrick’s & Burns Night.

Over both years, we were left to fend for ourselves between Saturday lunch & Monday morning, but we were given some plastic bread & a block of something similar to, but not the same as, cheese. This led to acts of desperation. Eileen Tulley & I once made Spam Korma. Disgusting, but we ate it.

There is another memory which springs to mind: Ian’s mother sent him a load of spiced beef which she’d cooked up. It was in a glass coffee jar. Unfortunately, the Royal Mail had worked their magic on the parcel and (no offence, Henry) it was as if the posties had used it for a game of sorting office five-a-side. So there’s us, famished, on a Sunday evening & driven by longing to extract the damaged parcel from Ian’s cupboard. There was this lovely Jamaican home-cooking, tormenting our nostrils with amazing aromas, and glittering with slivers of glass. We were that desperate that we really, actually considered trying to pick out the shards & eat the grub. Then we considered the prospect of a lingering & agonising death from perforated intestines, decided "Hmm, best not" & binned it tearfully. It breaks my heart to this day.

On another occasion, fortune smiled on us. We were trudging along Walton Street on a rainy Sunday evening, bellies rumbling, end-of-term skint, when what should we see but a tenner plastered to the pavement. Cue a diversion to the Chinese takeaway & full stomachs.

Another tasty memory is from Bowen block times, when Pat McCartney had been back home to Leeds. He brought back loads of black pudding on a Sunday evening. Not the Asda stuff, but the real Yorkshire thing. He fried it up with onions and Bowen tucked in. Gorgeous.

Talking of Bowen, I’ll leave fellow Bowenites with this question: is anybody now ready to cough to stealing Harry’s sausages from the fridge?

p.s. Coming soon: