Around the world

Reader, what images do the words “tea ceremony” evoke for you? A beautiful young geisha or a white-haired old tea master kneeling on a cushion whisking frothy green tea in a priceless old bowl? Or the Chinese version, seated round a low table watching the careful steeping of fragrant tea leaves in a red clay pot, before sipping the result from minute cups? I was privileged to experience the Chinese version on one occasion myself at a wonderful tea house in Singapore called Tea Chapter, but alas, when I hear the words “tea ceremony”, a very different image tends to come into my mind.

A group of people are sprawled on barrow-boards, in wheelbarrows, or cross-legged on the ground. Oh, the relief of sitting down for fifteen minutes after several hours with a pick and shovel in the blazing sun or the pouring rain! The tea is poured out of a battered tin tea pot into mugs which are sordid in the extreme. Hot water is hard to come by, sometimes even cold water comes in plastic jerry cans, and nobody really has time to spare for thorough washing up. The experienced keep a mug clearly labelled with their name, to avoid cold sores. The tea itself is the colour of dark mahogany and we often add flavour by idly lobbing lumps of mud into each other’s cups.  This is the tea ceremony as performed on almost every British-run archaeological site I ever worked on.

Mind you, it could get even worse. I went on an awful training dig in the Western Isles of Scotland during my second year at university. It took place during the Easter vacation. We spent a fortnight outside on the seashore, digging up an Iron Age wheelhouse in the freezing wind and rain. We had to wear goggles because the wind blew the sand back into the trench as fast as we could dig it out. At morning tea break, a large boiler in a hollow in the sand dunes provided us with tea and coffee. At lunch time it provided us with synthetic soup. At afternoon tea break it provided us with soup-flavoured tea. Of course there was nowhere to wash out the boiler. The tea was warm but I do not recommend it.

On the French-run sites I worked on there was no formal tea-break and no tea. Instead we were urged to take the odd break and help ourselves to iced water and fruit from a cool-box. But when I was working with a French team in the Lebanon, we were taken to visit the museum in Damascus in Syria. After we had been given a guided tour of the museum, we were served glasses of the most wonderful mint tea I have ever tasted. I have been trying without success to recreate the taste for the last fifty years.

I think I’ll go and put the kettle on…..

 “…the breakfast, a meal in which the Scots, whether of the lowlands or mountains, must be confessed to excel us. The tea and coffee are accompanied not only with butter, but with honey, conserves, and marmalades. If an epicure could remove by a wish, in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in Scotland.” 

Thus spoke the 18^th century English writer Dr Samuel Johnson, who made a tour of the Western isles of Scotland in 1773. Although extremely rude about much of the food he was offered on the journey, he was whole-heartedly in favour of Scottish breakfasts. So I am currently living in the right country, and I strongly agree with the marmalade bit.

When I was working on a dig in France, we lived in tents in the field next to a small country restaurant. We had our breakfasts (jam not marmalade but it was good and the coffee was marvellous) on the terrace of the restaurant in the early morning sunshine, surrounded by tubs of petunias and geraniums. The owner of the establishment had an ancient father who used to come and sit on a corner of the terrace while we were eating. His breakfast consisted of a piece of salami and a large glass of cognac.  To each his own…

I saw an interesting breakfast in a Singapore café. A little old Chinese lady came and sat at my table, bringing with her a very large bowl of curried noodle soup. She was a tiny, skinny little thing, and I watched with interest as she steadily spooned and chop-sticked the enormous bowlful into her diminutive person. She looked very perky so it was obviously doing her good. Maybe I should try it. Probably this form of breakfast was the inspiration for my son’s current favourite, which is to take a pot of instant curried noodles, break two eggs into it, and pour boiling water over the lot. When the noodles have had their due time, the eggs could by a stretch be said to be poached.

I myself was eating the signature breakfast of the city, or at least part of it. This is coffee and kaya toast, eaten with two boiled eggs. I skipped the eggs as I am not fond of soft eggs in any form, and the eggs that go with this breakfast are so soft boiled that you are expected to break them into a bowl, stir them up with soya sauce and drink them. ‘Kaya toast’ is white toast made into a sandwich with kaya jam. Kaya jam is a combination of coconut milk, egg and sugar flavoured with pandan leaf, and is very nice. My first attempt at this breakfast was a bit oversweet, as I did not understand how to specify that I wanted my coffee without sugar.  I watched the man preparing it  put a tablespoon of sugar into the (glass) mug, then about an inch of condensed milk, and then fill it up with coffee. But once I had got the coffee sorted out it was a fine tropical start to the day’s sightseeing, especially when I started adding miniature, perfectly fresh bananas bought from a nearby supermarket. Oh joy!

The Full British Breakfast, in its English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish variants, is part of the pleasure of staying in B&Bs all over the British Isles. Sausage, bacon, egg, fried bread, baked beans, fried mushroom and fried tomato: a decadent combination of saturated fats to begin a day walking up mountainsides or along the seashore in the freezing rain and/or howling gale. I like the Scottish version (Lorne sausage and haggis) even better than the traditional English one. The Irish version (black and white pudding, soda bread and potato cake) is not to be sneezed at either. I haven’t yet tried a Full Welsh, which allegedly includes seaweed and cockles made into a patty with oatmeal, but it sounds promising.

But I think my favourite breakfast is the bacon butties you get on the local ferries to the Outer Isles of Orkney. Coffee and really good bacon butties munched as you sail across a brilliantly blue sea past small green islands on your way to visit a chambered tomb is the absolute best. Oh, how I’ve missed them during Lockdown!

Have you ever heard of the Kirkwall Ba’? It is a form of street rugby traditionally played in Kirkwall on Boxing Day and New Year’s Day. There are two teams: the Uppies (Up the Town, the south end) and the Doonies (Down the Town, the north end). In medieval Kirkwall, the south end of the town, the Laverock, was the preserve of the church and the Bishop of Orkney, while the north end, the Burgh, was the domain of the earl.

The first time I saw the Ba’ was on a New Year’s Day shortly after I came to Orkney.  It was a clear sunny day, with brief showers which came and went. I parked my car near a friend’s house and walked into the town centre.  You don’t want to park too near the scene of the action, or your car may suffer. The shop fronts all had stout wooden bars fixed across them at about waist height. The Ba’ starts at the Merkat Cross (market cross), on the green space in front of St Magnus Cathedral.  The green is raised above the level of the road at about waist height, and as one o’clock approached, people started to gather all around. One man climbed up a tree with his camera. I found myself a good place on the edge of the drop with a lamp-post to hang on to.

Just before one o’clock there was a ripple of excitement among the crowd and the two teams approached. To my left, from the south end of town, the Uppies team came marching towards the Merkat Cross. They looked like a rather large rugby team, tough and determined men dressed in a motley collection of rugby shirts, t-shirts with and without logos of various irrelevant kinds, and heavy boots fixed to their feet with a binding of duck tape. The ends of their jeans were also bound tightly round their ankles with duck tape. Then the Doonies arrived from the north end. There were twice as many of them as the first group – apparently there is no rule about how many men per team. They were dressed the same way, but looked even more ferocious. There also appeared to be no age limit. They included everything from wild hairy men in their twenties to bald and white-haired men who appeared to be about sixty. They looked quite terrifying as they scowled their way towards the opposing team and surrounded them completely, squashing them in hard, everyone facing the Cross waiting for the Ba’ to be thrown in.

The cathedral clock chimed one, and the Ba’, a round football-sized effort stuffed with sawdust, was thrown into the scrum from the Merkat Cross. I hoped no-one got it on their head. I knew how heavy the thing was, as I had helped to pack the museum’s collection of ba’s when they had to go into storage temporarily.

I watched with interest as the action began. It looked like a giant rugby scrum, with a circle of about seventy men pushing like mad into the centre. How any of them could tell where the ba’ was, I do not know. It turned out later that most of the time they didn’t. Some of the ones in the middle had one hand up above their heads for some reason. One tall black-haired young man in a red shirt seemed to be in charge of one of the teams, and was shouting incomprehensible instructions to them. I couldn’t tell which team it was, or who was directing the other side. Apparently both teams had planning meetings beforehand and had agreed on their tactics. From time to time, several men came running round the outside of the scrum from somewhere and joined in from the outside, pushing with mighty efforts. I was later told that the people in the middle of the scrum got so squashed and breathless that they had to move out to the outside from time to time. The spectators, meanwhile, were standing quite close to the players, leaving just a clear space about ten feet wide around the outside of the scrum. Cameras whirred and clicked.

The struggling mass of men didn’t move for about ten minutes. Then all of a sudden there was a lot of shouting from the spectators as well as the players, the crowd parted, and the mass moved across the street and plastered itself against the windows of the shops on the opposite side, or rather, against the crash barrier erected for that purpose. It stayed there for quite some time, while something went on within the interior of the scrum that I couldn’t see. Steam began to rise from the overheated players. A boot was thrown up into the air over the spectators. Then there was another howl and the scrum rolled over to my side of the street. Spectators scattered as it came closer and I lost my perch on the wall, but I could see that the players were climbing up onto the wall to get at things from above.  A player knelt on the grass close to me, clutching his anatomy. Someone gave him a drink of water and he returned to the game. The whole thing hadn’t moved more than twenty yards down the street in half an hour.

I was starting to get cold and nobody seemed to be going anywhere, so I nipped up a side street to a café for a hot chocolate and a visit to the loo. I asked the café staff how long the event was likely to last.  They told me it had lasted until eight o’clock at night on Christmas Day i.e. seven hours. The duration was not fixed, it just lasted until one team had got the ba’ into their goal. The shortest recorded Ba’ was the Men’s Christmas Day Ba’ in 1952, which was over in 4 minutes.  The Uppies’ goal was Mackinson’s Corner, at the junction of New Scapa Road and Main Street where the old town gates were originally situated, but the Doonies had to get it into the harbour, actually into the water.  When I went back outside, progress had been made. The Doonies had forced the scrum to the corner of a street leading towards the harbour, and over the next quarter of an hour managed to push the thing halfway down the street. Then somehow it got into a walled car park and stuck there. There were spectators and players climbing the walls, and I could see things were starting to get rough. The locals all say that scores get settled during the ba’. Players seemed to come and go, dropping out for a pee or a drink as needed and then joining in again.

At about two o’clock I left them to it and went home. It appears that I made the right decision. According to the local newspaper, the scrum remained in that car park for three hours.  Water was passed to the players as they pushed and shoved and several players had to be pulled out for first aid before rejoining the scrum. However, around five o’clock the outnumbered but fiendishly cunning Uppies staged a series of dummy runs in which they pretended to get the ba’ out of the scrum and run away with it, totally confusing the players and the spectators, who scattered in various directions. Meanwhile a small group of Uppies quietly walked the ba’ most of the way to their own goal before they were spotted. This is apparently known as a “smuggle”. The Doonies did their best to make a come-back, but the Uppies banged the ba’ off the wall at Mackinson’s Corner a few minutes later, thus winning the game. There then followed twenty minutes discussion over which member of the Uppies team deserved to be declared the personal winner and get to take the ba’ home. The honour was finally awarded to a thirty-nine-year-old airport firefighter who had been playing since he was six years old. According to the paper, the triumphant Uppies then went to the pub, and later to the hero’s home and spent the night in celebration, leaving the streets littered with a scattering of drinks cans and bottles, a couple of boots and a belt, and what looked like a torn t-shirt lying in the road.  

This year, alas, there was no Ba’ because of the covid pandemic. After nine years residence in Orkney, it seemed weird to walk around Kirkwall in the run-up to Christmas and see no boards over the windows. Hopefully, it’ll be back next year.

Reader, do you like Christmas pudding? Or do you find that a lump of suet and breadcrumbs smothered in sauce feels a bit heavy after a roast bird stuffed with more breadcrumbs? If you do go for the entire traditional menu, do you make the pudding yourself or do you buy one of the excellent ready-made ones on offer these days?

During my childhood in Cape Town, my family celebrated Christmas in the traditional Victorian English way, even though the seasons were reversed, Christmas fell at midsummer, and a salad on the beach would have been more appropriate than roast turkey and Christmas pudding. I was a child before many of our modern conveniences came onto the market, and the process of preparing the ritual meal took a lot of time and effort. Yet somehow in retrospect it seems a lot more satisfying than making lists of things to buy and put in the freezer months in advance of the Big Day. Perhaps it was because the whole family worked together to do it.

The turkey came from one of my father’s work colleagues, who kept poultry. Usually it arrived dead and plucked, though not gutted, but one year my father had to take it outside and do the dreadful deed himself, away from his (possibly) tender-hearted children. The insides were always interesting, as my mother, a zoologist, took the opportunity to give us an anatomy lesson along with the cookery lesson. They were made into soup, except the liver, which went into the stuffing. One year the turkey was full of little half-formed eggs, which also went to enrich the stuffing. There was no plastic wrapping to dispose of, only feathers.

I particularly remember helping my mother to make Christmas puddings using Mrs Beeton’s recipe. She always made extra ones as presents for friends and family.  It seems a bit daft in retrospect to make English puddings in Africa and then post them to England, where my grandparents lived. It was quite a lot of work. We had to prepare all the pounds of currants, raisins and sultanas ourselves, picking off stalks, de-stoning raisins, and washing the fruit, because in those days dried fruit didn’t come ready-prepared. We had to blanch the almonds in boiling water and rub off the brown skins and then split them into flakes. My brother and I liked helping our mother do these jobs because it meant we got to eat quite a lot of the fruit and nuts as we went, especially the almonds. What I didn’t like was helping to make the breadcrumbs. Stale bread had to be rubbed through a wire sieve, because those were the days before electric grinders and choppers. This was boring and took hours, and I was always scraping my knuckles painfully against the wire sieve.

When the mass of fruit and batter was finally ready to be mixed, all the family had to take a ritual stir with a wooden spoon – again, no electric food mixer – and make a wish, which had to be kept secret or it wouldn’t come true. We all knew that we were not supposed to believe in magic wishes, just as we knew that Father Christmas was really our own father filling our stockings, but somehow it didn’t matter. It was part of the special family happiness of Christmas. 

This year, due to the covid pandemic, I shall not be celebrating Christmas in the same house as my family for the first time in seventy years, but the happiness of those childhood Christmases remains with me always.

The small islands of Colonsay and Oronsay lie close together in the Inner Hebrides. On both of them shell middens have been found, great heaps largely consisting of shells left by the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived there just after the end of the last ice age. The majority of the shells were limpets. Limpets pop up all over the Western and Northern isles, not just on Mesolithic sites, but on sites of all ages, such as the middens at the Iron Age site at Munkerhoose on Papa Westray.

The general opinion seems to be that limpets are tough and rubbery and best used for fishing bait, after being soaked in water for a long time. Humans mostly ate them in the historical past as famine food, so probably the same applied in the prehistoric past.  According to the archaeologist Professor Paul Mellars, limpets don’t taste very good but have greater nutritional value than winkles and whelks and are easier to get out of their shells. They are therefore an efficient energy source.

However, there are people who take a more enthusiastic view. I have just come across a recipe in a book of traditional Scottish cooking for limpet ‘stovies'. The limpets are removed from their shells and added to potatoes for slow cooking in a very little liquid in a sealed pot. It originates from the island of Colonsay. (“The Scots Kitchen, its traditions and recipes”, F. Marian McNeill, edited and introduced by Catherine Brown 2010, pages 142-3).

There is a footnote on page 142 of this cookbook quoting André Simon, a French-born wine merchant, gourmet and writer, to the effect that limpets can be as good as or better than oysters in many dishes. If you Google limpet recipes, you get a lot of them, especially from Spain and Portugal. They call them ‘lapas’. Grilled with garlic butter seems to be the most popular, although fried or boiled or added to rice also feature. A village on the island of Madeira even has a limpet festival in mid-July: the limpets are grilled with garlic butter and lemon. Most of these recipes cook them in their shells. It is admitted that they are a little chewy. They are accompanied by beer or white wine – a long way from famine food.

Some caution is required with all shellfish as they are liable to contamination by various things, so don’t just rush out with a hammer and start knocking them off the rocks. But perhaps we could persuade our local sources of winkles and oysters to get us a few limpets for a change?