The magazine I edit has begun looking for a new food columnist. Six issues a year, 1500-2000 words, an emphasis on fish and game essential, a highly literate and quite unnecessarily wealthy readership who will totally get your clever references to Epicurus and Thackery’s poem about bouillabaisse and The Meaning of Life (Python edition). If you read (and aspire to write on the same level as) M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David, Jim Harrison and John Thorne, Julia Child and Brillat-Savarin, even Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, this might be a good opportunity to stretch your literary legs and tax-deduct your suppers.
PM me for details. But you must know fish and game and wild foods. Vegans and supermarket grazers need not apply.
I’m afraid I come from very humble backgrounds, culinarily speaking. My birth certificate proudly displays my father’s occupation as “Assistant Turkey Unit Breeder”. For those not in the know, the Turkey Unit Breeder is the person who ‘milks’ the stags and then arranges for the resultant juices to be inseminated into a previously contented hen. The Assistant Turkey Unit Breeder’s job is even less glamorous. His job is to hold down the turkey.
Many of my formative years were spent surrounded by the sights, sounds and smells (oh God, the smells) of a poultry farm, although let’s be honest what we politely call a ‘farm’ is really a factory with some pretty poor working conditions for its most productive members of the staff: low pay, cramped living quarters, zero days off and of course if you underperform you end up having your neck wrung (Not that I mind that last one. I’m tempted to have that implemented in my own office). Combine that with a home cooked menu that consisted of precisely three choices on a set rotation (surprisingly sans-turkey) and it was perhaps inevitable that as an adult I would try to be adventurous with what I eat at every opportunity.
And fish are a prime target. The main reason is because I have a completely rational fear of fishing. My granddad told me a story when I was very young about how a friend of his had lost an eye fishing (rod back, hook out into eyeball, cast off…) and now the very sight of a fishing rod makes me deeply uncomfortable. Naturally, I blame this whole incident on the fish themselves, and take great delight in removing them from the planet one grilled fillet in blackened cajun spices at a time.
Good luck in the search. I won’t get ANY of the clever references you, err, refer to, and I’m pretty sure that you made up most of the writers you listed, but I suspect I will thoroughly enjoy reading the articles anyway. PM me with the name of the magazine.
