Eggs have been on my mind for a while now. I have been reading and re-reading about the teenager who broke an egg on the Australian senator’s forehead. The young man’s reaction to the senator’s rabid remarks about migrants got me thinking about the humble egg’s many uses. And chief among them (apart from the Australia example, of course) is the role that it plays in picnics.
A picnic in an Enid Blyton book was never complete without a hard-boiled egg, which her young characters nibbled on, usually contentedly. Just the thought of an English countryside and a group of children about to be caught in an adventure gave the hard-boiled egg a delicious makeover.
Under the sun
I suppose it’s really the outdoor ambience that does this to food. And the fact that a picnic has no rules, except that it has to be outdoors, and that there has to be food. A book called The Picnic: A History reminds us that unlike most meals, a picnic is not defined by time. “Breakfast, lunch and dinner are routine because people must eat, but a picnic is a reward of leisure that gets people out of work and out of the home,” writes the author, Walter Levy.
The history of the word ‘picnic’ is interesting. Around the 1500s and 1600s, Levy writes, it was just an outdoor meal or party without a name. In 1694, the French named an indoor meal a ‘pique-nique’. “The English were aware of the custom of a pique-nique dinner but did not publically engage in them until 1802, by which time they Anglicised the spelling as picnic. Four years later the picnic dinner turned topsy-turvy, from indoors to outdoors,” he writes.
Some of the vivid picnic stories that I recall figure in Gerald Durrell’s memoirs. In one book, Mother is planning a picnic to mark Larry’s return.
“As usual, the quantity of food she prepared for the day would have been sufficient to victual Napoleon’s army during its retreat from Moscow. There were curry-puffs and Cornish pasties, raised ham pies and a large game pie, three roast chickens, two large loaves of home-made bread, a treacle tart, brandy snaps and some meringues; to say nothing of three kinds of home-made chutney and jams, as well as biscuits, a fruit cake, and a sponge. When this was all assembled on the kitchen table, she called us in to have a look.
‘Do you think there’ll be enough?’ she asked, worriedly.
‘I thought we were only going to Lulworth for the afternoon?’ said Leslie. ‘I didn’t realise we were emigrating.’”
This reminds me of the great picnics that we organised when our friends’ kids were small. The hamper included everything from cold cuts, cheese and chutney sandwiches and crispy kachoris to stuffed bedmis with a hot potato sabzi, gun powder-dusted idlis, radbhaballabhis (stuffed Bengali puris) and rosemary chicken with pasta.
Clearly, a picnic is finally all about food. And that I suppose is what is at the bottom of this Gertrude Stein composition:
We will picnic.
Oh yes.
We are very happy.
Very happy.
And content.
And content.
The writer likes reading and writing about food as much as he does cooking and eating it. Well, almost.