Right now he should be receiving the Terry Pratchett book I got for him, and I would be thinking "well I'll have to be inventive next time, we've run out of these".
But, that never got to happen. The most shocking thing happened, I ran out of dad before I ran out of presents to give him.
So I decided that today, I would document his strange palate.
My dad was born on 4th July 1951. Post-WW2 England, rationing still in force. This point is probably important to bear in mind. Both parents worked as nurses.
When he was at school, they did some taste tests, and he was able to distinguish flavours better than anyone else there. Something he'd keep reminding us of many times.
Perhaps he was a supertaster.
At some point.
But when his own father died, he took up smoking, aged 14. This might also be why he's dead. Coronary thrombosis caused by thinning of the arteries, the coroner said. That's all we really know for sure. We could never get him to quit. Or even really convince him that stopping would actually be a really good idea.
Anyway. That really affects tastebuds. So the dad I ended up with... was a thin man who didn't really like the idea of liking food. Or, to some extent, other people liking food.
Perhaps... you know the way that if a person's eyes are too sensitive, too much light can be painful, so they wear sunglasses? Perhaps my father was attempting to deaden his tastebuds.
Anyway. Food my dad could not stand:
- Any food from the brassica family. Cabbages, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower. Mustard, swede, turnip. He used to claim that he was like a caterpillar, and could detect the poisons other people couldn't. He couldn't even stand the smell of them cooking. When detected, he'd make coughing, retching sounds, then be pissed off at whoever was doing the cooking.
- Other veggies he wasn't sure of. Asparagus, celery.
- Food make from milk. He'd drink his tea with a little milk, but would never knowingly eat things like cheese, yoghurt, or things containing them as ingredients. "I don't eat spoiled milk", he'd say.
- Fish or seafood
- Any restaurant or takeaway that wasn't a chippy. He was proper tin-foil hat paranoid about takeaway food, saying that you don't know what's in it, and they don't have to follow strict rules the way food you buy in supermarkets needs to. He would eat either "pie & chips" or "sausage & chips" from a chippy though. One time we got him to eat gammon and eggs in a Wetherspoons! My mother was over the moon.
- Gravy. Not even Bisto granules. At first I thought "maybe it's because he's scared someone will use the water after boiling cabbage" or "well, he did used to work for Sellotape, maybe it's too close to glue...", but overall... well, I guess he didn't like moist food.
- Garlic? This one is confusing. I'm sure my dad used to not hate garlic. I mean, I remember him munching his way through fresh warm garlic bread, and there is little in the world more garlicky than that. But all of a sudden just a few years ago, he started to really get mad at my mum for putting garlic into food. One time he said he hated that night's meal because there was too much garlic in it, when I'd watched her cook it and there was no garlic in there! I think he had mistaken some other ingredient for garlic, but I have no idea what.
- Flavoured crisps. He'd eat the ones that are "Salt & Shake" as long as you never added the salt.
- Condiments.
- Most fruit, except sour apples (see below).
Food my dad seemed to most tolerate:
- Whatever was closest to its sell-by date. Whenever you asked dad what he'd like to eat, he'd always ask "well, look at the sell-by date; what needs eating first?"
- Potatoes in their various forms. Boiled, mashed, roasted, baked. He was quite good at roasting potatoes, sometimes.
- Sunday roast dinner. He used to cook it. Well, more like "baked meat, roast potatoes, and over-boiled carrots and peas".
- Ham sandwiches (granary bread preferred, though he would eat white bread too). He'd sometimes even add either lettuce or cucumber! When I say "sandwich" in context of my dad, I actually mean "a doorstop slice of bread with stuff on top".
- Meat pies. Steak & kidney, chicken & mushroom, pork pies.
- Cornish pasties as long as they didn't contain any brassica veggies.
- Dessert. One per day, mind. If you had something with your afternoon tea, you can't have something after dinner.
Food my dad seemed to like:
- Tea. If my dad could just live on tea, and never had to eat, he'd have loved that. It was always a signal of welcome for him. Start the day? A cup of tea. "I think your brother's getting up, let's make a pot of tea". "Your mother's back from the shops. You open the garage, I'll put the kettle on". He'd also like tea after his evening meal. Not with, but after.
- Halls Mentho-lyptus. Though I guess the packs just say "HALLS" on them these days. He'd go through several packs of these per week. He usually liked original or extra-strong. Regular or sugar-free, it didn't matter. If he'd snuck out to smoke, he'd usually return sucking one of these. Maybe he thought they masked the scent so we wouldn't notice? Maybe he ate them to get rid of the flavour of tobacco? No idea. But the two seemed to go together.
- Beer. To me, it seemed like dad only ever drank socially. Sometimes work would give him bottles of beer as a present, but he'd just put them away and not drink them. He'd drink in the pub on Fridays, playing darts with his friends, or whatever. When I was young, he used to drink in the hospital social bar after playing cricket on a Saturday and I'd bug him for 10p and check out the arcade machines. He'd usually order "a pint of bitter", no more or less discerning than that.
- Banana sandwiches, made with unripe or just-ripe bananas, on buttered granary slices of bread.
- Supermarket chicken tikka masala, he seemed to enjoy after it was introduced to him fairly late in life... until one time he was having a discussion about him not eating food made from milk - with my brother. My brother said "but there's yoghurt in those curries mum gets!" and... he got so revolted! He ordered my mum to always check the ingredients and never get ones containing yoghurt again! My brother was actually intending him to see what a folly it was, but no, I think this was ideological for my dad.
- Really sour apples. He liked Granny Smiths but would like cooking apples more.
- Lemon curd, on toast.
- Mum's homemade rhubarb crumble, especially if it had turned out too sour for most other people to like.
- Broad beans (which is odd, I don't like them at all except when deep-fried and crunchy)
- Christmas cake, Mince pies, Christmas pudding.
- Birthday cake
