A Pasty, Please...

     Who knew that "a tisket, a tasket" were simply made up words with no meaning (other than to rhyme with "basket"); and here I thought that only the Beatles brought such non-words into our vocabulary.*  But walking into a restaurant or bakery in Cornwall can seem much the same to foreign eyes: cheese & pickle sandwiches, sticky toffee pudding (think molasses flavor), hake, and salt & pepper squid rings (we never found a place that had the tentacles in their calamari, although chef and owner Aaron Janes at the Harbour Fish & Grill uses those squid tentacles to help flavor the sauce for what turned out to be a delicious bouillabaisse, simmering carrots, tomatoes, fennel and a host of other seafood).  Make no mistake, the food was delicious to a tee but for the most part the descriptive language in Cornish menus are universal and understood by all in England (except us on occasion).  One example was a restaurant advertising "smashed" peas instead of the usual "mushy" peas, a change I readily understood; but to the local folk I was with, the menu item may as well have been written in Chinese, each of them smudging their faces in disgust and honestly replying, "I've never heard of that" or "don't know what that is."  

     The Cornish pasty is a regular item on most menus, although it too has had a rough history (and you're forgiven if you mistake a Devon pasty for a Cornish one...what??).  The pasty, said Wikipedia: ...resemble turnovers from many other cuisines and cultures, including the bridie in Scotland, empanada in Spanish-speaking countries, pirog in Eastern Europe, samosa in India, curry puff in South East Asia, and shaobing in China. 

A traditional Sunday roast meal

One local told me that I should try one now since much had changed (I had told him that many years ago I wasn't that impressed with the pastry).  Turns out, earlier pasties used scrap beef near the bone which didn't have much flavor but was far less expensive than regular cuts of beef; then Mad Cow hit and the government cracked down.  Beef these days is apparently both tasty and rare since chicken and fish predominate restaurant menus (my wife noted that for the first time, she witnessed pulled pork appearing on lunch menus although good luck trying to find anything such as baby backed ribs).  That said, beef and pork (and turkey) are everywhere at a Sunday Roast, itself a sort of national tradition.  For about $15 you can have plates and plates of vegetables (parsnips included), Yorkshire puddings (a sort of muffin croissant), and enough meat and and potatoes to tempt any vegetarian diet (not me, although the alternative is generally a "nut" loaf which is indeed chock full of nuts but not exactly something you'd mistake for a Beyond burger).  One nice thing about many of the restaurants there is that when a gratuity is automatically added on to your bill (generally 10-12%), it is distributed equally among the entire staff: dishwashers, chefs, wait staff and bartenders (the same applies if you simply leave a gratuity on your bill or on the table).  Most of the waiters and waitresses we spoke to were receiving the minimum pay of £10-11 per hour and were both surprised and gracious when we handed them an extra £5 or so after paying our lunch bill (as of April 2022, the minimum wage in the UK was £9.50 an hour). 

Typical phosphogypsum holding pond in Florida; photo credit: The Counter***

      That said, most of the food we had was delicious, the traditional tomato soup variations of old now giving way to leeks and peas, root vegetables and mushrooms (the mushroom soup we had one day was bursting with flavor, a perfect accompaniment to the individual baguette that was fresh from the bakery).  The pan-fried fish is often hake or plaice, the battered fish cod for the most part.  Prawns are also a staple.  To my eyes, a few items on the coastal menus had indeed changed since my last visit, lamb and beef dishes now taking second place (if they appeared at all) to chicken and seafood, perhaps reflecting the coastal atmosphere rather than the change in dining tastes; chips (those fries of all thicknesses and cuts) were as everyday as a cuppa (the term for a cup of tea) although even there the varieties of teas were now many, something I hadn't witnessed in previous years.  We also found that mussels were plentiful and felt a bit more at ease being on the Atlantic side of the waters since Cornwall is no different from Florida in that when heavy rains come, sewage plants and sometimes old mine tailings holding ponds will overflow into rivers and then out into the ocean; some decades ago this happened to the River Fal near Falmouth, the river turning bright orange as the overflow from mining waste made its way to the sea, the settled sediment affecting the bottom feeding sealife** (in Florida, this overflow of phosphate holding ponds threaten the aquafers nearby, a problem being watched but rarely addressed).

Wild mushroom soup with a crusty baguette

      Grocery stores were little different, the shelf-stable long life milk (their term for milk packaged in aseptic packaging) sold about as well as fresh dairy milk, the scotch whiskeys far more affordable than the imported bourbons (with Brexit, duty free for foreign visitors traveling within the UK is long gone), the biscuits (which we call cookies) and the scones (which we call biscuits) lined entire shelves (the British seem to love their sweets as much as we do).  Still, the stores appeared much more compact due to their space limitations.  Produce offered by green grocers (local market sellers catering to street traffic) looked as fresh as those in the larger markets, a good thing considering that our grocery stores here discard some 3.5 million tons of food annually, likely due to our mish-mash of "best by" or "sell by" labels (on a side note, each year Costco donates 20 times that amount of "about to expire" food and deli items to charity groups such as Feed America).  

     And when it comes to checking out, we found that more people had brought their own bags (as many shoppers do throughout Europe) since a single plastic bag will cost you about 30 cents in the store, or a reusable one being available for about a dollar.  Perhaps they had read that piece in National Geographic about our plastic usage, part of which said: Half of all plastics ever manufactured have been made in the last 15 years.  Production increased exponentially, from 2.3 million tons in 1950 to 448 million tons by 2015.  Production is expected to double by 2050...Every year, about 8 million tons of plastic waste escapes into the oceans from coastal nations.  That’s the equivalent of setting five garbage bags full of trash on every foot of coastline around the world...Plastics often contain additives making them stronger, more flexible, and durable.  But many of these additives can extend the life of products if they become litter, with some estimates ranging to at least 400 years to break down.  Or perhaps it was the even more depressing piece from the NY Times (highlights are mine): Every year, tens of millions of tons of plastic enter Earth’s oceans.  Scientists initially assumed that the material was destined to float in garbage patches and gyres, but surface surveys have accounted for only about one percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic.  A recent model found that 99.8 percent of plastic that entered the ocean since 1950 had sunk below the first few hundred feet of the ocean.  Scientists have found 10,000 times more microplastics on the seafloor than in contaminated surface waters.  Yikes, but bravo to the stores making you pay if you're going to insist on a plastic bag...but on the other hand, lots of people in the UK do use plastic bags and one of the giant chain stores wanted to see just what happened to those bags when they were sent away to recycling centers (as in the US, many grocery stores in Europe provide recycling bins for your soft plastic bags and wraps).  The results were actually quite fascinating to watch, reported Bloomberg (on a side note, does anyone remember when we didn't line every single trash bin --from bathroom to kitchen-- with yet another plastic bag?  We simply emptied the trash and then washed out the bin when it got dirty.  Anyone?)  The bigger question, asked National Geographic, what's all that microplastic doing to us...and the planet?

     Okay, okay, I'm drifting a bit from talking about Cornwall.  I mean, who knew that those limpets that stick to ocean rocks actually move off the rock to feed each night, only to reattach themselves to same spot as morning approaches?  Or that scallops have eyes, as in 200 of them, wrote Ed Yong in his book, An Immense World (the abductor muscle we eat opens and closes the shell but that really isn't the "scallop" itself).  Said a review of Yong's book in The Guardian: Humans, like all creatures, are trapped in sensory bubbles unique to each individual --what the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll referred to as our Umwelt-- which means we “can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness”, as Yong puts it.  Our eyesight is pretty good, but it’s nowhere near as panoramic as that of a mallard, which “sees the world simultaneously moving toward it and away from it” when flying.  Nor can we perceive ultraviolet colours, as most animals can, or sniff out the topography of underwater mountains and valleys, like some seabirds seem capable of doing.

       All that said --the gulls, the plastic, the cars driving on the left--  I was reminded of the words of author Lynne Tillman from her book, Mothercare: I once wrote: "Experience teaches not to trust experience," and that's true, certainly someone else's should be suspect...Most critically, there will be the matter of point of view, the magistrate of narratives.  Whether fiction or nonfiction, any story or account represents the storyteller's. This is a partial picture, told from my vantage point, and possibly to my advantage, though I hope to write against that tendency.  My object: To tell you a story that may be helpful, informative, consoling, or upsetting.  I want to say about this situation: It is impossible to get it completely right.  And despite the hundreds of eyes on scallops or the limpets moving, I must admit that I never thought of any of that when yet another bowl of mussels in a leek & garlic sauce arrived in front of me.  Perhaps I didn't want to know.  All I knew was that my senses were enjoying where I was and what was in front of me.  The fragrances, the tastes, the unfamiliarity, the newly found sense of newness itself...how could one not enjoy what was happening?  Just to step outside and see the beautiful views and feel the wind and he sun, as if all that was happening in the rest of the world didn't matter because for me, this was happening now...and it, this moment, would never happen again.  This was being carved into my memory, etching a tune, adding to the sonata that made my heart sing.  This was the Cornwall I was experiencing now...

*In this case, I refer to their lyrics from Sun King: Quando para mucho mi amore de felice corazón; mundo paparazzi mi amore chicka ferdy parasol; cuesto obrigado tanta mucho que canite carousel.  Said Wikipedia about the song: In 1969, Lennon was interviewed about these lyrics and said, "We just started joking, you know, singing 'cuando para mucho.'  So we just made up... Paul knew a few Spanish words from school, you know.  So we just strung any Spanish words that sounded vaguely like something.  And of course we got 'chicka ferdy' in.  That's a Liverpool expression.  Just like sort – it doesn't mean anything to me but (childish taunting) 'na-na, na-na-na!'"

**Bottom feeders, from crabs to clams, often carry whatever chemical runoff may remain in years- or decades-old sediment once it is stirred up, be it by dredging or by natural storms.  This recently happened when the FDA issued this warning (as told by Bloomberg): The US Food and Drug Administration recently tested seafood sold in stores, and concluded that seafood may be at increased risk for high chemical concentrations.  The agency warned consumers to avoid one item in particular: canned clams from China.  “Eating a single serving of these clams is like drinking months and months worth of contaminated water,” says David Andrews, senior scientist at Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit that tracks PFAS.  Some of the clams the FDA tested had about 20,000 parts per trillion of PFOA, one of the most common types of PFAS.  Eating those clams would be about equivalent to drinking three months worth of water containing PFOA just above the maximum contaminant level allowed by some states, Andrews says...the chemicals, also known as PFAS, have been linked to health risks, among them cancer and high cholesterol.

***Okay, I've tried to limit the truly depressing stuff to down here at the bottom where you're probably done with reading and more likely to skip.  But just in case, this report on the phosphate holding ponds and tailing ponds in general (pig and cow waste ponds face similar non-rules) came from the site, Mining (the bold-faced highlights are mine...just in case you're still reading): A global inquiry into mining waste storage systems of more than 700 resources companies, launched in April 2019 after the collapse of a dam in Brazil that killed hundreds, showed that about a tenth of the structures have had stability issues.  The research, led by the Church of England (CoE) and fund managers, reveals that at least 166 of 1,635 dams holding mining waste --tailings-- have had safety issues in the past.  Currently there are no set of universal rules defining exactly what a tailings dam is, how to build one and how to care for it after it is decommissioned.