"Those flying saucer things...they're tasteless."

“Some things were off-ration though,” Grandma explains, “so they were not very nice things – like those flying saucer * things. I think I still see those.”

“Ohhh, yeah,” I say in recognition.

“They’re tasteless.”

“I’ve never, ever had one before,” I say, “because they look horrible. They don’t look like sweets.”

I think of the lurid, papery discs. The dryness of that word – discs – fits them so well. I can only imagine what they’re like in the mouth. I think they’d cleave to my tongue like Velcro.

© Keep It Sweet

“Well, we liked them because they looked so nice,” Grandma says and we both laugh.

Reflecting on this now (following a class discussion on how, in its heyday, the artificiality of Arctic Roll lent to its mystique) I think the very thing that’s frightened me off flying saucers – that they look inedible – was precisely what made them exciting to children raised on vegetable stew rather than desensitised to artificiality via daily exposure to fluorescent orange crisps.

The distain with which Grandma described the flying saucers as “tasteless,” as if this were a moral failing on their part, and my own reaction to flying saucers, got me thinking about a couple of things.

1) For a while I've felt that people's opinions about individual flavours is less interesting than their preference for strong or weak flavours. For example, a lot of my favourite tastes are potent: Marmite, blue cheese, dark chocolate, but I have a friend who is, by her own admission, obsessed with “plain” flavours: bread with unsalted butter, Gouda, white potatoes. I wonder if some of this is cultural. Said friend is German and tells me there’s a German word for bland food that has a positive connotation. I can’t think of an English equivalent. “Is everything okay with your food?” “Yes, waiter, this sauce is mouth-wateringly insipid.” I suppose “mild” comes close, but it’s never the mildness in itself that’s appealing. For example, no one gets excited about a korma because it’s mild (although they may order it because they dislike spicy food), but rather they like it because it’s sweet.

2) Food thought of as not-food is almost always done pejoratively. I dislike the idea of flying saucers because I think they’d be like paper (not too strange an idea considering they’re made out of a substance – “rice paper” – that admits as much). A fantastic example of this appears in Toast in a chapter entitled “Milk Skin” (93):

"Skin. Even the word sends shivers down my spine. This is the stuff that you peel off your chest when you have sunburn; it’s the flat left hanging when you cut yourself that catches on everything; it’s the transparent sheath left behind by an emerging snake. Skin is the word I link automatically with grazed shins or something mummified. So what is it doing floating on my cocoa?"

Having said that, this device is often used unconventionally in Toast (unconventionality is something I’ve come to expect from Nigel Slater). For example, Slater describes Heinz Sponge Pudding as smelling of “sweet cardboard” (51) while also saying he loves it. Nevertheless, this passage makes clear that Heinz Sponge Pudding, although enjoyable, is not the pinnacle of culinary possibility: Slater details how the pudding is prepared by boiling it in its tin. In fact, it is the convenience desserts which Slater enjoyed that are usually described pejoratively with reference to non-food: Butterscotch Angel Delight is “magic in the way it managed to taste of both sugar and soap at the same time” (30-1).

The Milk Skin passage aligns with Mary Douglas’ assertion that dirt is “matter out of place” (44). The skin is disgusting because it doesn’t belong on cocoa. So, what’s going on the in passages in which “matter out of place” is somehow appealing? My theory is that the disorientating effect of this echoes and enhances the disorientating experience of the narrative as a whole, and the way in which Slater flouts definitions and boundaries in his presentation of his sexual experiences and identity, as if he refuses to assign things a place for them to be out of.

* Flying saucers were only available in Britain from the beginning of the 1950’s, and rationing ended in the UK in 1954. This may account for why Grandma remembers them as being “off ration.”

Bibliography

“1954: Housewives celebrate end of rationing.” BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/4/newsid_3818000/3818563.stm. Accessed 3^rd March 2018.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. Routledge, 2013.

Oulton, Randal. "Flying Saucers." CooksInfo.com, 19 Dec. 2009; revised 07 July 2010, http://www.cooksinfo.com/flying-saucers. Accessed 3^rd March 2018.

Slater, Nigel. Toast. Harper Perennial, 2004.