It's The Best Bit...

“It’s the best bit” – that’s what they used to say, your parents. Well, my parents at least, and my wife’s. “What are you leaving that for?” they’d say, “it’s the best bit.”

What’s the best bit? Apparently it’s the slippery, sloppy wrap of fat on the chop, which is a gagging-horror-show for us Jack Spratt types. Or it’s the skin on the fish. What better way to round off the last of those delicious soft flakes of fresh cod or haddock than with a barely digestible mouthful of bitter, tough and scaly fish skin. Fish skin, from which – lest we forget – our ancestors used to fashion condoms. Still hungry?

“Eat up, it’s the best bit.” Give it a rest pop. My wife, Sandra’s take on this is that what they really meant was, “Eat up, it’ll fill you up.” But this wasn’t intended to ensure that there was more ice cream for the rest of the family, as that was too rare a treat, because times, you see, were tough. Roast on Sunday, cold on Monday, hash on Tuesday, mince on Wednesday, it goes something like that. I know it was only in the Sixties when I used to watch my mother feed the last, sorry remains of Sunday’s joint through the hand mincer in preparation for a pie which was less a shepherd’s a more a production of Farmer Gristle.

When the joint had finally been sucked dry and stripped of its last scraps of flesh, the bones were boiled up for soup. Sometimes a bony chunk of a cheap cut of lamb was added to the broth. Standing proud from the bowl like a cadaverous shipwreck, the old man would pick it up at the last and gnaw away at every sliver, while encouraging us all to do the same as the soup dripped down his chin. You know, when I tell younger relatives about this sort of thing it’s sometimes hard for me to believe that I was part of what seems now like a historical novel.

You know that meal you used to have as a kid that you really, really liked? God, wouldn’t it be nice to have that again? What about this weekend? One word of advice: Don’t. It won’t be any good. Worse than that, it will be rotten and you’ll rue the day. Have something else. Anything. Or nothing at all. Why am I so sure? Recently, Sandra had a yearning for the oxtail stew of her youth, the one her nan used to cook, so we bought an oxtail from the butcher. Not an attractive item. If you had to picture something that spent its time hanging round an arse, this would be pretty close to perfect. You have to spend A Very Long Time cutting up the oxtail, then it stews for about 3 weeks in water and other stuff, then you have to fish it out and strip the hot meat from the scalding bony bits and there are an awful lot of bony bits and not much meat and it’s painful, smelly and difficult work. Then, you put it all back in the pot and boil it for another 3 weeks and then what happens is that at last it’s ready, but the person who really wanted it suddenly changes her mind because the whole house now stinks like, and I quote, “My nan’s old kitchen.”

Nor does it get any better. Revisiting teenage treats or the things I used to eat when I got my first flat is simply not worth it. All of that tinned produce. Ravioli, spaghetti in sauce-a-la-nasty, Heinz salad in a tin (yes, that’s tinned salad) or those boil-in-the-can “steak” pies and puddings which no doubt contain similar ingredients to those described by my father-in-law, Rex, as going into sausages – lips and arseholes. If you do choose to take your stomach back on a hike through time, then be prepared for almost certain crushing disappointment and associated retching and heaving.

Some things, you see, just didn’t stack up in the first place and now that we’re older and, some say, wiser we can see they’re not worthy of a return visit. Now, if only Spandau Ballet had heeded this warning the planet (and me in particular) wouldn’t have had to suffer the horror of their return.