A snout that tastes like a good snout should – or a masked trout replica?

30 October, 2010 – I decided to smoke. It’s said to be sensual pleasure, surely within the realm of taste. Chefs smoke. It’s bad for their palate, they know, yet they’re romantic professionals making a living from their keen taste buds.

When I first had the idea for The Unpalatable Truth I did a cursory internet search for “improve my palate”. From the results I learnt little, except that I would not be taking an algorithmically-friendly route. I’d be wayward, off the beaten path, exploring under my own steam, unaided by an engine of search optimization.

The top-ranked tip? Stop smoking. The best way to improve my palate was not an option according the wisdom of crowds generated by Google. Unless I were to start smoking just to quit later … Batty, maybe, though perhaps no more so than the perverse logic I cook up as a matter of course to justify decisions to myself.

***

I’ve been feeling that I have been overindulging: over doing it, over thinking, over-writing overwrought posts. Kicking in is the urge to conserve, to row back. For all my rodomontade and ‘give me excess of it’, the inevitable has happened. It always happens when I resolve to focus on pleasure and not the consequences. Cranking up the sybaritic indulgence I have lost – and want to regain – that fabled and derided ‘healthy balance’.

These missives have been taking over my life. That was the idea, I wanted this to happen. All pervading, my thoughts infused with food and flavour. I go to the library to study; I read about pummelos instead. On my bike I focus on how best to put a thought into words, not on the articulated lorry about to cut me up.

Circling in my head are eleven inchoate ideas wanting to be brought in to land. For now they must circle, loop around, becoming ever more convoluted.

I am thrilled that I am not – yet – running on empty. For too long I have struck a pose to myself of being in the mould of the director in Fellini’s 8 ½ who declares, “I have nothing to say: but I want to say it anyway”. I am pleased, relieved, that having got down to writing, I have the opposite problem, not too few ideas but too many.

Those semi-ideas are too emotionally charged; the static will spark a storm. But I can’t land them in language, an operation I know will be imprecise and botched. They will have to be grounded, earthed, and it will be bumpy, but it is not something that should be rushed.

To pause the over-thinking I thought I would try and cook by association, see where my ideas led me, see if I could get some rest bite.

***

Since the grapefruit I’d been thinking and reading about astringency – about tannins and puckerish tastes, and by association and alliteration of Titania, and thyme, wild thyme, tying in with time and the clocks going back tonight. This seemed as good a reason as any for deciding what to cook for dinner.

Tannins would be a good lesson. Their puckerish delights, I had read, soon become tiresome with excess, fulsome in the correct sense of the word. At root I don’t think you can actually have too much of a good thing; through tannins I would experience too much of a good thing.

Also, in the spirit of spurning excess, better I thought to get my tannins from something other than red wine; better to encounter smokiness from something other than Laphroaig.

A numb-spot on my palate is tea. As I have never got tea, I alighted on the idea that it could provide the tannins, and as I have absolutely no intention of actually smoking, tea-smoked trout seemed the way to go.

I had to break one of my rules and follow a recipe. This was OK. I was playing with fire, after all, and I tried to compensate by not weighing a quantity.

I scored some large leaf Lapsang Souchoug. From everything I had heard about its pungency it sounded like it could be my cup of tea. Opening the packet I recoiled from an overpowering and tarry wave. As ordered, I made a bowl out of tin foil and put it in a deep frying pan. I packed the tea plus light muscado sugar into the foil. Across the pan I balanced a wire rack.

I’d have a salad from the east to go with the tea from further east. I nicked a little carraway, sliced cornichons, gobbling more than I put in the sour cream. Ribboned red cabbage, mauve and pearly two-tone brassica, swirling like a hallucinogenic ink painting, a tie-dyed t-shirt, before it hit the cream and together concocted a ludicrous pink.

The thyme I left out. It didn’t seem necessary and rather than throw it in unreflexively, keeping it out felt like a small victory in my meek effort to rein in the puns. I’d only bought it for the idiosyncratic reference, and that’s no way to cook.

A shimmering, pale sliver of trout fillet, almost white-peach in colour, laid on a triangular piece of parchment, then placed on top of the wire rack. Not having a baking dish with lid – never mind with a ‘tight-fitting lid’ – I improvised. I parcelled up the delicate piece of fish with Bakofoil – ‘Strength You Can Trust’. Good to know that one of us in the kitchen had brought his A-game because I was lightheaded with confusion. Armed with the Bakofoil, I entered the fug of war.

Patio doors thrown open to the October night. Hob lit under the pan. Extraction fan on. Spotify silenced. Concentration on.

Smoke soon started billowing out. After a few minutes of pacing and inhaling there was a sizzling, and a few minutes later I peeled the foil back. Fish singed and seemingly done.

The salad was splendid. Sloppy sour cream and the bite of raw cabbage; the vinegary crunch of gherkin, the caraway nutty, liquorice. A slice of my beloved rye bread, this time a moist organic rye with coriander seed. No toasting necessary.

But where had the smoky, tarry punch gone? Silly to expect it from a fragile piece of fish, but expectation is an important part of the experience of food and I had been swizzed. This was a vapid imitation of what I had expected, a masked smoked trout replica.

Where was the puckerishness, where was the fullness? Perhaps the tannins were there, just pleasantly present. Perhaps the sugar off-set the astringency so that the tannins were kept below the saturated, fatiguing levels. In other words, perhaps the fish was a success and I didn’t appreciate it.