Those who are prone to melancholia, and are apt to feel that this nation is
merely a castle of damp sand – a castle being eroded with each wave of
time’s incoming tide – should probably look away now.
As many of you will have been painfully aware, in Britain, sales of marmalade
are in decline. While the attention of the nation has been focused on such
diversionary chimeras as Iraq, the Iowa caucus and Britney Spears’s
mentalness, marmalade has been going the way of the pikelet, piccalilli and
Gentleman’s Relish. It is becoming an anachronism in the brash new world of
the energy drink, the breakfast bar and Coca-Cola with vitamins in. It is
facing gradual extinction.
Galvanised by this slow-moving preserve tragedy, David Atkinson, of Premier
Foods – the manufacturer of Frank Cooper’s, Rose’s and Golden Shred – has
announced an important change: marmalade is to be renamed “orange jam”.
“We’re looking at ways of making marmalade more accessible,” Atkinson said.
“The challenge is to entice a new generation.”
At this point, I know that I will have lost several of The Times’s more
venerable readers to the defibrillator. While urging them to turn away from
the light – go back down the tunnel, to your loved ones! Return to the pain!
– I cannot, in all truth, wholly condemn his reasoning.
I will put this plainly: the children of the 21st century have no idea what
marmalade is. Marmalade to them is as, well, the Iowa caucus is to adults.
They’ve heard of it, yes, but they’re not quite sure what it is. I asked my
daughter Dora, 6, if she knew what marmalade was.
“Is it something you put on pancakes?” she asked.
Not really, I said. Do you know anything else about marmalade?
“No. That is it,” she said. So I told her about the sailors’ wives. How they
were worried that their husbands’ skin would go flaky and scaly during long
voyages, and fall off. And how, desperate to provide their husbands with
vitamin C for the long journeys, they made an ingenious manner of sweet glue
from bits of orange peel. And how they then put it into jars, whereupon it
signally failed ever to rot, even after 120 million years. I even postulated
on the possibility that we, the dwindling number of marmalade-eaters still
extant in this country, could well still be eating some of that first batch
from 1700.
“Dora,” I concluded, “would you like to try some marmalade?”
“No. I like Nutella,” she concluded, leaving the room to put a Barbie in each
of my shoes.
And really, who can blame her? Let’s face it: had those sailors’ wives been
able to preserve lovely ground almonds in delicious Green & Black’s
chocolate, then add some powdered vitamin C, marmalade would never have been
invented.
And it’s not even as though Nutella is the biggest problem in marmalade’s
world. In terms of “sweet things that you put on toast”, marmalade comes off
a poor fourth – after jam and chocolate spread – to honey, which, being both
natural and a bit spooky, is leagues ahead in terms of PR.
Honey’s got it all going on, girlfriend. It’s love liquid, made in some
mystical sex pod, by dancing bees. It’s such a potent life syrup that we –
human beings craving sweetness – drug the bees so that we can steal it. The
process involved in getting a simple honey sandwich is like the plot of Dune.
Honey is out there. It’s like Jim Morrison in a jar. Slow, golden and
magnificent, honey has phased lion colours – it’s boiling sunset on a knife.
Apart from set honey, that is, which looks a bit like lard.
Marmalade, meanwhile, just plods along, a bit like Aggie from How Clean
is Your House?Usefully using up old bits of orange peel, and being
sensible, and just keeping on, even when it’s 120 million years
past its sell-by date.
“Don’t mind me,” says the marmalade on your shelf. “Just wipe the sticky,
cruddy dust from my lid once every three years and I’ll be as snug as a bug
in a rug.” Marmalade has no idea how to inflame consumers – how to treat
them mean to keep them keen; how to mesmerise them. It thinks we will love
it for who it is. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.
Honey even has a sci-fi, 2.0 upgrade – the Manuka version, which apparently
has powerful antiseptic qualities. Personally, I wouldn’t buy a foodstuff on
the basis that it’s basically Lyons Treacle, but with TCP in it – but then I
also secretly believe that if you eat an apple after eating some cheese, the
apple then kind of eats the fat, so I’m clearly not in the running for Sexy
Lady Scientist 2008.
But, you know, in the face of marmalade’s terrible ill-fortune and eventual
obsolescence, I rather like the childlike brutality of renaming it “orange
jam”. By the same rationale, pâté is “meat jam”, cat food “cat’s jam”,
caviare “fish jam”, and poor old piccalilli would, I suppose, be “random
yellow pooey-stuff jam”. There are already legions of foodstuffs that have
been named with children in mind: “pigs in blankets”, “devils on horseback”,
“bangers and mash”, “spotted dick” – each one speaks, across the decades, of
an exasperated mother, a sullen child at the tea-table, and a sudden,
inspired lie.
“Yeah, it’s called “Toad in the Hole”. I know! How Edward Lear! Now eat it up
before I kill you.”
Of course, it may be noted that all the above names are ones that would most
readily appeal to boys. While many would say that this is because girls are
less fussy in their eating habits, I tend to think that it’s because picky
girls were clearly just left to drop down dead of starvation until The
Female Eunuch came out. Because of the patriarchy.
Freshwater fish? A load of old carp
A report in The Guardian last week predicted that, what with
“endangered species” this and “EU quotas” that, many in Britain will simply
give up sea fish. Instead, says the article, we will turn to carp. “There’s
great interest in the fish,” claims Jimmie Hepburn, who breeds carp in his
17 carp ponds in Devon. Well, not just carp. All freshwater fish. Trout,
roach, perch, pike, eel – they’ve been largely neglected for 200 years for a
reason, and the reason is that they taste like wet earth. Pike has an
initially meaty taste, but five minutes later you realise that you have a
faint tang of ditch in your mouth. Eels are filthy. And don’t even start me
on trout. Every time I see it in a supermarket, it looks like rows of
clod-sodden socks, inexplicably being sold singly at £3 a pop.
Hard to swallow
In Australia a woman is claiming that a nose stud she lost in the sea later
turned up inside a fish caught by her fiancé. Kristy Brittain, 25, says she
lost the stud in a fall while “kneeboarding” from a speedboat off Tasmania.
She was therefore astonished when, three days later, her fiancé was
filleting a just-caught fish and came across a hard, tack-like object. “I
was just standing next to them, talking, and at first I thought it was a
little nail or something,” Brittain said. “Then I realised it was the stud I
had lost in the ocean. How could it have ended up in the fish? I suppose it
would have sparkled, and they will eat pretty much anything. But when you
think how many fish there are in the sea, and to catch this one . . ."
On reading this, my friend went quiet for a minute, then shouted: “This BITCH
managed to get her LOST JEWELLERY returned to her in the STOMACH of a WILD
ANIMAL – IN LESS THAN A WEEK – AT ODDS OF BILLIONS TO ONE – WITH A FISH
BARBECUE THROWN IN – yet I live in a city of eight million people and I
STILL CAN’T FIND A BOYFRIEND.”
