Food that changed my mind: in the second of an occasional series we explore foods we misunderstood, misrepresented or mansplained away. Today David looks back on his early traumatic experience with pickled beetroot, and how it took a real mean head chef to change his mind.
I was seven years old when my parents let me go to the fish and chip shop in Mount Maunganui on my own for the first time. It was a Friday night in January. In my pocket I had a scrap of paper with orders and instructions from my three siblings, my brother’s girlfriend, and my mum and dad. I had a crisp twenty dollar note and two twenty cent pieces; the former to pay for the meal, the latter to play Space Invaders while I waited for the food to be cooked.
I was excited for two distinct reasons: firstly, the thrill and pride of being sent into the world alone to obtain food for the family, and secondly, the anticipation of being allowed to order a beef burger. Up until this moment beef burgers from the fish and chip shop were strictly verboten.
For reasons only he could explain (and alas he is no longer able to provide) my father had very strong feelings about what one should purchase from a fish and chip shop. Permissible items included: fish and, wait for it… you’re going to like this, chips. Everything else written up on the blackboard behind the counter was viewed with a fierce suspicion, forged in the febrile and, I suspect, fairly racist atmosphere of 1950s Point Chev. (Hamburgers, being both a little bit German and a little bit American, represented two of the fabled bogeymen for children born into wartime Auckland).
With my mother’s money in my pocket and the responsibility of feeding the family on my shoulders, even my father conceded that on this occasion I could order whatever I wanted.
I successfully negotiated the two blocks and one road crossing to get to the shop. From the shop door I could see Omanu surf club and hear the roar of the waves. I was feeling confident, fearless. I sauntered up to the counter.
The owner of the shop was a huge man, bald, both muscular and fat, covered in a glistening cocktail of sweat and grease.
I read from the scrap of paper– six pieces of fish, four scoops of chips, two pāua fritters (pāua counted as fish), two scallops (ditto), and one hamburger please. No beetroot please.
The man loomed over me from behind the counter. He sized me up, took my measure.
“Burger’s for you?”
“Yes.”
“Beetroot’s good for ya. You’ll have beetroot.”
And with that he took my money, threw the change in my direction, and went back to the friers and the grill.
I collected the vast package of newspaper-wrapped fish and chips and the one brown, resolutely not greaseproof, paper bag and slunk out the door only managing a despondent ‘thanks’ to my new sworn enemy.
Once home, my worst fears were confirmed: the top of bun was stained a luminous pink, the sour-smelling coleslaw was pink, the patty was pink, the beetroot itself was unapologetically, luridly, deeply red. My first fish and chip shop burger was, as I said quietly to myself as I sat at the table watching my family happily tearing into their deliciously beige, untainted meals, completely fucked.
I took that burger personally. I couldn’t look at a beetroot for years. Pickled or fresh. I couldn’t smell it. I couldn’t think about it. It was the Red Devil, the Great Defiler, the Destroyer of Burgers.
It took a Dutch head chef, in a London kitchen, many years later to cure me of my hatred. He forced me to eat a grilled beetroot salad, tossed in a sharp, crumbly French goat’s cheese, dressed with a first-press, new-season olive oil. If I didn’t try it, I couldn’t cook it, and if I couldn’t cook it, I could fuck off home without pay.
So I tried it. Then I tried some more. It was earthy, and sweet, and deeply savoury. Pretty soon I’d eaten the whole plate.
Today, I think about that lanky, bastard of a Dutchman every time I look at a beetroot, one of the most delicious and heart-stoppingly beautiful vegetables in existence, and I give a little muttered ‘thanks’.
Photo by Emma-Jane Hobden on Unsplash
