Getting off their land.

This weekend, this bank holiday Monday in fact, I had a rather enjoyable time arsing about in the English countryside. I peered at old churches, and was generally amused by the architectural diversity of tiny places with absurd little names. Long Melford, Kersey, Sudbury, Caught Frotting, that kind of thing. Seeing pretty things and telling people why they are not, in fact, interesting is diverting enough, but after a while I became nigh obsessed with an intriguing phenomenon: ethnic restaurants with incredibly unthreatening names.The more you stray from hot running internet, delving into places where rodgering the stable boy is mass entertainment, the more it feels like you’re having lunch in the nineteen eighties. The Indian places are all called the Garden of India, or the Jewel of Bengal. The Asian places are strictly plastic-Chinese and probably called the Golden Something. It’s just a bit odd. There was an Austrian restaurant on the high street of Bishop’s Sodhammer that looked like it had been dumped from the set of Ashes to ashes, but I guess that’s progress of a sort.Now ok, Cambridge is pretty white, pretty bourgeois, pretty stayed at times, but the only places you can get any kind of decent meal and still pay rent at the end of the month are mid-to-high standard ethnic. And they are not entirely styled to soothe the prejudices of blue-rinse racists.In fact, I think it’s slid out the other side. Cook For You (an Asian takeaway I’m rather fond of ) has had a mention here before for its befuddling name. Is it an act of reclamation – a parody of the broken-English Chinaman stereotype? Is it broken English? Is it poised and ironic, the joke lying in the literalism and the difference to an expected restaurant name? I have no fucking clue. They’ve not been run out of town yet though.I’m not suggesting that the denizens of Burnt Fisting like to round off the village fete with a maypole dance and a light lynching, but there’s an aura of internalised prejudice to the old style branding. It’s apologetic, slightly self effacing, almost playing to caricature. Not exactly living in fear, but the sense I get is of an assumed need to make something new and external (howbeit in demand) appear safe and acclimatised. There were, for instance, no non-English words on the signs of any non-English eatery I walked past.I don’t know what the alternative is, and I’m too lazy to research the cultural norm for restaurant names in their cuisine’s cultures of origin, so this is hardly groundbreaking social commentary. Maybe that promising little Inuit place that just opened in Chipping Sphincter really would be called The Golden Igloo. But maybe it would be called something like Bob’s Bistro and Bob would feel a little happier if people just fucking tried to pronounce his name once in a while, and stopped staggering in half cut and making blubber jokes. Sorry - I'm having difficulty tidying my thoughts on the matter into anything more concise than a faint feeling that seeing one more place called the Garden of Cliché will make me piss pure hatred on the spot.Something I’m more able to discuss with authority, and far less likely to soil myself over, is the last interesting thing I cooked myself. Not the bad soiling, at any rate. Briefly - because this is indulgent and spurious enough already - a vegetarian main course of pan-European mixed heritage:Pound five or six cloves of garlic to a liquid-y paste, along with salt, pepper, and a lot of oregano (at least a tablespoon). Beat in oil, almost as though making aioli, and smear it all over thick aubergine slices for an hour or so. Bake or grill them until mostly tender, and finish under the grill, topped with a slice of halloumi. I opted for thick circular slices, three to a portion, with the Nigel Slater anchovy potatoes on the side. There was probably hummus too. There usually is.