Peas ‘n Carrots, Carrots ‘n Peas

In 1986 I had occasion to visit the U.K. The trip was to celebrate the founding of an organization to which I belonged. Those of us from the States and Canada stayed a few days in London at the beginning and end of the trip, but the main accommodation was at Wadham College, Oxford. The organizers had planned a series of day trips to the surrounding area and we had set meals in many of those places.

The season was the end of September/beginning of October. Let me say right off that it was a great trip with friends and fellow club members. It was well planned and well executed and went like clockwork.

Except…every meal featured peas-and-carrots. I hyphenate because we didn’t get peas in one pile and carrots in another – we got mixed peas and carrots. They all looked and tasted alike, too. I had visions of a vast peas-and-carrots factory somewhere pumping out bags and boxes and cartons of frozen peas and carrots.

I have clear memories of the four main meals: The black tie dinner at Wadham College, the Scottish banquet in Edinburgh, the medieval banquet at Warwick Castle, and the Welsh banquet in Cardiff.

The black tie dinner at Wadham didn’t have peas and carrots. It opened with smoked salmon and closed with profiteroles. It was nicely formal and quite good. The breakfasts were buffet style and featured those weird fried eggs found all over U.K. The Full English Breakfast is another blog entry in itself.

The Scottish banquet opened with an “appetizer” of haggis, tatties and neeps (potatoes and turnips, both mashed into tasteless pureés). For an amusing and fictitious account of haggis, go to www.electricscotland.com/haggis. Haggis is a really dish made of the innards (aka offal) of a sheep, cooked together with oatmeal and spices, stuffed into a sheep’s stomach and boiled. It is piped to the table by bagpipers and toasted with fine whisky. Before you tell me I misspelled it, “whisky” without an “e” always means Scotch. Whiskey with an “e” can be Irish, Bourbon, corn, rye, Canadian, or just about any flavorful distilled spirits made from grain. The haggis tastes like good dog food smells – not bad at all. After the haggis course, we had lamb and peas and carrots. Of course.

I really don’t remember the medieval banquet all that well. It had been modernized from real medieval recipes, which all feature honey, and made to suit twentieth century tastes. I do know that it featured lamb and peas and carrots, because we all remarked on it. There were “minstrels” and other entertainment, all sort of touristy and not all that medieval.

The Welsh dinner featured lamb, as did the others. Accompanied, of course, by peas and carrots. We were treated to harp music during a dinner that could have taken place any time between 1946 and the present. The second-best part of the meal was the waitress, who piled my large son’s place high with – wait for it – peas and carrots. She explained that she had brothers and home and knew how much they ate. It’s a good thing he liked peas and carrots. The best part of the meal was the mixed berry pie at the end. The crust was so flaky it was hard to get out of the pans. The filling was hot and just sweet enough and so flavorful I’ve been trying to duplicate it ever since. No luck.

Just about the only dinners that we ate as a group that did not include peas and carrots were the black tie dinner at Wadham College and the Chinese meal in London.

I am very fond of the Brit Com As Time Goes By. I have noticed that they eat a lot of peas and carrots, too. Large peas and large carrots cut into discs.

It was more than a decade before I voluntarily ate peas and carrots again. Even then I have made sure to have petit pois and baby carrots and have flavored them with various herbs, a touch of onion, and butter. I don’t think I could face those giant peas and big, aggressively orange carrots ever again.

(c) 2008 Katherine DeWitt