With the rapid devolution of fast food and the Darwinian drive of bastardised dishes around the globe, croissants and cappuccinos just aren’t what they used to be.
I just went out to have coffee. Normally I just go to the kitchen to have coffee, but today there are two Poles in the kitchen, and if I have to make coffee for me, then I’ve got to make it for them, too, which would involve the international mime of beverage-making, and searching under dust sheets for the fridge and biscuits. Poles, I’ve discovered, are quite fussy about biscuits, so I went out. I always associate going out for coffee in the morning with New York. It’s a ritual lots of American writers have: you take your Times and the Post and you do coffee. Some take their computers and sit in Starbucks and work. There’s a whole school of Starbucks journalism, movies and television, all frothy profundity and witty banter. A chance romantic meeting between two writers, one serious (her), the other sporty and not serious (him), in a coffee shop is the leitmotif of the Starbucks school.
So I went down the road and had a cappuccino. Like eggs Benedict and unhygienic sex, it’s one of those things that received wisdom says you never get at home. Everybody has a cappuccino thing, but whoever uses them twice? It takes hours, it coats the ceiling in watery milk, and finally you get cold coffee with scum. I rarely drink cappuccino. The waitress asked if I’d like a croissant (she was Polish, incidentally; Britain is now run entirely by Poles, and frankly they’re doing a far better job than any of the other people who have invaded us for the last 2000 years) and I said yes. I said yes because there is an old connection. We think of cappuccino as Italian and croissants as French, but actually they’re both Austrian. Precisely, they both originate with the siege of Vienna, which was the high water-mark of the Turkoman invasion of Europe, and the beginning of the slow withering of Ottoman expansion. The croissant was made to celebrate the defeat of Islam by a grateful Viennese baker; it still comes under the heading of Viennoiserie in France. The coffee was discovered in a Turkish camp and mixed with milk and named after the monks in white hoods. They have since gone around the world.
I expect a cappuccino and a croissant are the two things you can pretty much get in every country on the globe. Mine came and the coffee was a pneumatic effluvium, not unlike cavity wall insulation. It was striped like a zebra’s bandage with a thick layer of cocoa. Finding the actual coffee in it was a trepidatious business; at last a grey liquid seeped from below. It was mildly coffee-flavoured warm milk. But the croissant was the real surprise. A lump covered in almonds and a shake of icing sugar that mice could’ve skied on, it was a fat, corpulent thing, like a croissant python that had swallowed a doughnut. As I tried to pick it up, it fell apart under its own adipose cholesterolic weight, spilling its guts of a slidey mousse made of fat and ground almonds and sugar, like a six-year-old’s cake mix. Together the coffee and the cake were to their original inspirations what a pantomime dame is to Elle Macpherson. It isn’t that they were horrible. It’s that they had descended so far from their template.
I spent 10 minutes just watching them, half expecting that they might continue to metamorphose on the counter, slowly becoming a united sweet sludge. And I began to think about the worldwide eugenics of food. There is a set of international dishes that have shed their national origins and, like rats, pigeons, fleas and boy bands, become ubiquitous. Freed from the scrutiny of their families, they grow degenerate, spoilt, sloppy, lascivious, foul-mouthed, inconsistent, amoral, slovenly bits of mouthy comfort.
Take pizza. It started as a simple ascetic crisp stretch of dough, frugally flavoured with tomato and mozzarella, perhaps with the addition of a sliver of local ham, a sprig of rosemary. Away from Naples, into the fleshpots, it became a bloated painted whore. Anything can have a go on a deep-crust pizza, and anything does: pineapple, caviar, smoked salmon, cheddar. It’s been cosmetically enhanced and coarsened. And Caesar salad – a simple and clever piece of serendipity that married cos lettuce, egg, parmesan, garlic, anchovies and croutons – has grown into a soppy cold stew of chicken and bacon, smothered in mayonnaise, invariably without anchovy.
The list of things that grow wayward when they leave home is the longest lamented menu in the world. From dim sum to chicken tikka, there is a Darwinian natural selection in these fast food international dishes. Recreated without chefs, unencumbered by recipes, often with their constituent parts, their DNA, mass-produced by technicians with degrees in engineering, this is food that has become its own master, and to survive in the competitive stuff-throat world of cheap catering, it has to adapt to attract the humans who are needed to consume it as part of its natural life cycle.
We all think that when we pick up a menu we are the predators, we are the hunters, the grazers and browsers, but have you ever considered that you are in fact also the prey, that the hamburger needs you quite as much as you desire it? The memory of its taste, its coarse smell, the dribble of nameless juices, is what it uses to lure you in. Without millions of victims worldwide, the hamburger would go the way of the Cornish pasty, the posset, salmagundi, sops; the list of extinct dishes is quite as long as the list of wayward ones, a list of extinct dishes that couldn’t adapt to colonise new palates and markets.
I sat looking at my cappuccino and croissant and considered that in their instigation these two simple things represented a triumph, not just of the West against the invading hordes, but of taste and culture, craft and civilisation. The delicate lightness of the croissant with its wonderful chewy heart, the coffee the result of a combination of trade and discovery from Africa, Arabia and Europe, a synthesis of curiosities, each to start every new morning. In their inception, they were the best of us. In their mass production, their sweet, unctuous, stupid, slurred, caloried, careless flavours, their toothless textures, they appeal to the worst of us. There is, in the descent of fast global grub, a moral, and also a warning: who do you think is consuming who?