Eat My Globe: One Year to Go Everywhere and Eat Everything - Softcover

Majumdar, Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 071952024X ISBN 13: 9780719520242

Publisher: John Murray Publishers Ltd

Synopsis

Book by Simon Majumdar

About this title

About the Author:

Simon Majumdar splits his time between London and Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, who he met while doing the travel research for this book.  He and his computer-whiz brother write the award-winning blog www.doshermanos.co.uk, which has earned him thousands of readers a day and a spot on the London Evening Standard’s list of London’s most influential people.  He is a judge for Next Iron Chef America.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1

"I HATE MY JOB"

Who ha s not, at some point, uttered the words, "I hate my job"? I had on numerous times and, although at the time I might have been having the day from hell, it was nothing compared to the real privations of people around the globe. In fact, I had loved my job. I worked in book publishing and got to travel to far-fl ung places where I could usually score a decent meal on my expense account. I led a life that some other people would consider charmed or, at least, enviable.

A few years before, the Great Salami and I had decided to buy a flat together on the edge of London's fashionable Hoxton, just north of the fi nancial district. The burgeoning bar and food scene fed our cravings for decent cocktails and offered a pleasing variety of restaurants. Between us, we ate out about seven times a week. Neither of us was ever going to be mistaken for cool at any point, so our perambulations around the achingly trendy neighborhood often drew contemptuous stares from the young folk as we headed off for dinner or a martini. We were tempted to have T-shirts made that said on the front: "We May Not Be Hip Enough To Drink Here, But We Are Rich Enough To Live Here," and on the back in larger letters: "Fuck Off Back To Clapham." Like giving the finger to the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. But that was a small price to pay for being able to walk to work at my office in well-to-do Islington. In fact, as I mentioned, I enjoyed my job so much, I would practically run to work. I could not wait to get there, switch on my computer, and see what e-mails had flooded in from customers around the globe.

Of course, I had to have my breakfast first. Porridge. Now, porridge gets a bad rap from so many people who think back to the misshapen lumps of oaty mush they may have been forced to eat as children. For me, there is no other way to start the day. If I don't have a great deal of time, then a microwave will suffice, but if I am on a more leisurely schedule, I take the opportunity to slow cook my coarse ground oatmeal on the stove, in a combination of milk and water until it is rich and creamy. Then, I stir in a spoonful of thick, organic peanut butter before topping it off with a pile of berries, which will burst in the residual heat to release their juices, or slices of a blackening banana. If I am feeling particularly indulgent, I will treat myself to a large dollop of Greek yogurt, which will slowly amalgamate into the dish as I eat it. Try it; it will change your life.

So, there I was living a life that could hardly be described as uncomfortable, with a smart flat, a highly paid job, and well within my tolerance levels of never living more than fifteen minutes from the nearest source of Madagascan vanilla extract. Yet, one day, I sat at my desk and wrote forty-two e-mails to friends, all of which read, simply, "I HATE MY JOB."

Looking back, I see this was due to a combination of things. Certainly my job had changed, having gone from being an exciting, challenging opportunity to grow a business to a dreary procession of spreadsheets and arguments over budgets. But it ran much deeper than that. A couple of years before, I had turned forty. Now, lots of people turn forty without any great fanfare, but the occurrence hit me in the face like a slap with a wet haddock, an undyed, lightly smoked one of course, not one of those yellow monstrosities they sell on supermarket fish counters, but a haddock, nevertheless.

At a quiet supper, a few days after the event, a friend said to me, "Congratulations, you are now officially middle-aged."

As the words came out of her mouth, I could practically feel my prostate swelling inside me, and see the remaining years of my life filled with nighttime visits to the bathroom with only a pathetic little dribble to show for it.

There are any number of signs that you are hurtling towards the middle years. You become entirely invisible to attractive young women; that's a given. It takes three times as much effort to prevent getting on the talking scale in the morning and hear it sneer at you, "One at a time, please."

But, worst of all, you lose all ability to move urinal cakes around the bowl. Men may deny it, but we all do it. Once, I could move them around at a pace that would have given Michael Schumacher pause. Now, after a few begrudging millimeters, they refuse to budge anymore, taunting me with their fluorescent unmovingness. Bastards.

It became increasingly obvious that I had more sand in the bottom of my egg timer than the top. A sobering thought.

That same year, my mother died. It happened quickly from that most pernicious of diseases, leukemia, and I was not there to see it, a fact that haunts me. Most people you meet will tell you that they love their mother, and that she is an incredible person. I am no different. Gwen Majumdar really was an incredible person, the biggest influence in my life and certainly the inspiration for my obsession with food.

Gwen John was one of three nursing sisters from South Wales. She first met my father in the mid 1950s when he came from India to complete his surgical exams at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, Wales, which was a training center for many doctors from around the former empire. Despite the restrictions of the day, many liaisons happened between the exotic young men with dark skin from the former colonies and the hot-tempered young Welsh women with fiery red hair.

My father, Pratip, known as Pat, asked my mother out under the pretense of wanting to take pictures with a new camera in the local park. It is a ruse I used a few times myself in my teenage years, with considerably less success, probably because I didn't own a camera. Despite the fact she was, at first, going to send her identical twin sister, Ann, she went along. Yours truly and three other siblings are the result. To her credit, she never once looked at us in times of profound disappointment and said, "If only I had sent Ann."

Theirs was a fairly chaste courtship. These were more innocent days and my father, or Baba as he is known to his children, used to tell to our great glee and to my mum's great embarrassment that, on their wedding night in a small hotel in the Lake District, he asked the management if he could have a hot water bottle. Despite this, the marriage lasted for forty-odd years and my mum went from being Gwen John to Gwen Majumdar. A wonderful combination of names that I have had to explain to people over and over again. It was not uncommon for the Indian doctors and the Welsh nurses to marry and I suspect that the children of Mfannwy Bannerji and Blodwyn Patel have equally interesting stories to tell.

Soon after they were married, and not long after the Great Salami was born, they moved to India, where this young woman, who had never strayed too far from the Valleys, found herself in a high-caste Brahmin household in Calcutta with servants and drivers to wait on her, and with precious little to fill her time. Fortunately, households such as these also had cooks, and my mother spent her days peering in the kitchen and watching the various wives in the family work with the cooks to supply the constant dishes of food that Bengali men, possibly the most demanding people on earth, required.

Mother returned to the United Kingdom with my father in the early 1960s with an ability to cook Bengali food that she used to good effect feeding her brood. I grew up on the thin but deeply delicious Bengali dahl made with red lentils, stews of fish flavored with mustard oil and, best of all, a simple chicken dish with yogurt and a few spices that is one of the great tastes of my life, and to which I dedicate this book. Add to this the baking prowess that came with my mother's Welsh upbringing, and the smells from the kitchen made for a unique combination.

Her death shook me to the core and I miss her every day, not only for her intense loyalty to her family but for her fiery temper, which was often hilarious and aimed at the most quixotic of targets. Television personalities were a particular favorite and she developed an unexplained loathing of a certain female newscaster whom she denounced as "all fur coat and no knickers." Local dignitaries too got short shrift. For a time, she was a local magistrate and had soon acquired the well-earned nickname of "the Hanging Judge" for her conservative views, which would have meant transportation to the colonies, if we had still had any, for the most minor of crimes. Other magistrates were seen as too soft or lenient, which to her obviously meant they were Communists; ironic really, since my father's family had been leading members of the Communist Party of India, a fact that fazed my mother not one jot.

Most hated of all, however, was my father's secretary, for whom she dreamed up exquisite punishments for whatever imagined transgression crossed her mind. Usually, this meant buying expensive but appalling Christmas presents. I can still recall the delight in her voice as she announced, in the Welsh accent she never lost, that she had bought the victim a large bottle of "Elizabeth Taylor's Passion. It's really disgusting."

My mother was not, it has to be said, someone you would ever wish to cross. Ever.

Most of all, however, I miss her for her food, for the stupendous smells of cooking and groaning tables that used to greet me on my return from school and, in later years, fleeting visits to my hometown, Rotherham, near Sheffield, from London. She had no concept of the word ample, and both the larder and the fridge were constantly filled to bursting with the fruits of her labors: pies and Welsh cakes, chutneys and pickled onions, curries and stews. It is little surprise that the fondest memories of friends who were lucky enough to visit are about the sheer volume of food she put in front of them and the clucks of disapproval if they turned down fourth helpings, and bemusement if they did not want to try all eight flavors of ice cream in the large family freezer.

So, there I was, forty and fe...

About this edition

• Publisher: John Murray Publishers Ltd
• ISBN 10: 071952024X
• ISBN 13: 9780719520242
• Binding: Paperback