SCOTTISH CUISINE has taken some stick over the years but I have always maintained that underneath that fatty, sugary, booze-drenched pastry surface, there has been a memorable menu of desirable dishes fighting to get out.
Now, however, foodie fashion has caught up with us and it’s claimed that some food, like some kinds of love, is lovelier second time around.
Rice chilled overnight contains fewer calories and is perfectly safe when cooked correctly. As cheese ages, its lactose content decreases, making it easier to digest. Some people even believe that re-cooking vegetables can decrease the risk of bloating. Cooked then cooled spuds have more resistant starch, increasing fibre intake.
It’s all good, as the famous processed chip advert chirrups.
But this, of course, is a great Scottish tradition. Food is built to last in this neck of the woods, from porridge kept in drawers and sliced at will to the indisputable fact that second day soup/stew/mince and tatties always tastes better than anything that comes fresh from the pan. So good they ate it twice, in fact.
The only difficulty with this Chez Broon is, of course, that there is usually nothing left over, hence the inescapable reverse link in our house between waste (little) and waist (large). The only thing that gets pit oot regularly is cat food because the cat is much pickier than we are. Which, when you look at (and smell) cat food, is hardly surprising.
It comes to something when the only thing past its sell-by date in your kitchen is, in the quote from that aptly titled TV show of yesteryear, The Good Old Days: “This time chiefly, yourselves.”
MORE YEARS ago than I care to remember, I jollied off to Edinburgh to interview, relatively early in his career, the Fife-born painter Jack Vettriano. I rocked up, rather late because of the hellish Embro traffic, to his extremely bijou and bohemian flat opposite the back of Edinburgh Castle and spent a delightful hour chatting to the man about his background, his work and the current exhibition he was then staging at the Scottish Gallery in the capital’s Dundas Street.
Very nice he was to me, too, and perfectly charming. After I left, I took myself off down to said gallery to have a look at the show and its contents, which were causing no end of a stir.
This was the exhibition that really put Vettriano on the map in the popular consciousness. I wandered in, wandered round and enjoyed the experience of looking at something that at the time seemed very different to what else was going in the Scottish art world. My attention was particularly arrested by a large and colourful canvas called Waltzers. After gazing wistfully at it for some time, I looked at the price tag and decided ruefully that my love would have to remain purely platonic.
So it was with mixed feelings that, last week, I saw that Waltzers, the original canvas I spotted in that gallery all those years ago, was going up for auction and was expected to fetch between £200,000 and £300,000.
The artist was nicely self-deprecating about it, given his run-in with the art establishment about the style and quality of his very popular output, reckoning it could have done with a bit more work but that it was still “a belter.” Obviously the auction house thought so too. Equally obviously, there is a reason I am a penniless hack rather than a hotshot investment analyst with an impressive portfolio of accruing assets. And it’s not all down to not knowing “a belter” when I see it because reader, I did.
Back in 1992, for then it was, I did not have six and a half grand sitting around waiting to be squandered on relatively untried artists, or anything else for that matter. Clearly, 23 years later, the accumulated value of art aside, I still don’t, despite being in continuous employment ever since. And I suspect a vast number of other people are currently sitting around, contemplating the metaphorical piggy bank of their future and asking themselves: “Where did it all go?” or even “Did I actually ever have it in the first place?”
So in the week when dire warnings are being issued by those fingerwaggers and holiers-than-thou about the over 50s kicking over the traces, doing a Viv Nicholson, falling over themselves to be duped by the unscrupulous and thus being forced to cast themselves on the mercies(!) of the state, let me reassure them.
We’re not that daft in the first place. But in any case, between you, you’ve made pretty certain that, for most of us, buying a Ferrari, or a Van Dyke – or even a Vettriano print – isn’t going to be much of a goer any time soon.