Spam has a reputation so durable it can survive a frying pan, a joke, a war and a supermarket aisle without so much as loosening its tie. Photograph Kent Ng Pexels

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Sweet and savoury hallucinations people mock, fear, hide, inherit, sneer at and eat anyway

by Arun Kapil

Some foods never enter the kitchen alone. They come with a rumour, a warning, a smirk, a mutter about bad breath, bad manners, hard times, foreign habits or doubtful company. Garlic has a reputation. Tinned fish has a reputation. Spam has one so durable it can survive a frying pan, a joke, a war and a supermarket aisle without so much as loosening its tie. Durian fruit – that sulphurous, custardy little anarchist – arrives trailed by folklore and mild civic alarm. Octopus still makes people behave as if supper has grown a brain and come looking for trouble. Even soup can look faintly suspect if it is too thin, too peasant, too beige, too much like something your grandparents ate with grim competence rather than flourish.

I grew up in a house that had very little patience for that sort of thing. Mum, having already ignored the more timid advice on offer to a woman in 1960’s Britain by marrying an Indian man, was hardly likely to stop at the kitchen door. Curiosity was part of our furniture. There were recipe clippings scored from house magazines, Pritt-sticked dutifully into scrapbooks. There was television cookery watched with pen and paper to hand. There was that wonderful, slightly unslept domestic optimism that believes the next thing you cook might be the one that changes the week. Looking back, it seems obvious enough that I would end up in food. At the time it just felt like life: flavour, appetite, repetition, mess. Love.

Not for us the mystery of garlic, or pasta, or spices, or ginger, or onions used in quantity rather than as some apologetic afterthought. There were trips to the local Asian shops in the 1970’s where the air itself seemed to have weight: mustiness, spice, sacks of rice, strange green knobbly vegetables, chatter, bargaining, judgement, laughter. Sometimes, from out the back, the unmistakable sounds of poultry meeting their allowed end. Men and women stood shoulder to shoulder, greeting one another, arguing over freshness and price in a language I heard only there and at home, nowhere else with quite the same charge. It was ordinary and thrilling at once. Then we would come home and look forward, with no sense of contradiction whatsoever, to Spam fritters and baked beans: crisp salty batter cracking open to reveal that soft, faintly sweet, deeply curious meat. From a tin. Of course from a tin.

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That split between what is entirely ordinary at home and faintly suspect everywhere else, is where a lot of food reputations begin. Egg curry, to us, was a treat. To mention it in the playground was to invite that particular look children reserve for news from households not fully aligned with the national script. Tinned clementines in evaporated milk were special. Not ironic special. Proper special. A sweet little luxury from the cupboard and the fridge. You did not question its status. You ate it and understood that a treat does not need the approval of Paris to count as one. That, I think, is what people often miss when they talk about good food and bad food as though they were discussing moral character rather than dinner. Fertile soil and good husbandry aside, food picks up its reputation long before it reaches the mouth: class, fashion, smell, war, migration, television, social media, playgrounds, work breaks, aspiration, embarrassment and the fear of getting it wrong in front of the wrong people.

I am not especially interested in redeeming these foods. They don’t need me in a cape. Afterall, some of them are strange. Some are funny. Some are frankly absurd. Some smell alarming. Some really do come in packaging that suggests a damp Tuesday in 1974. Some are magnificent. Some are ridiculous. What interests me is reputation itself: how food gets one, who hands it out and why appetite tends to barrel cheerfully past it whenever it gets half a chance.

There are foods that do not merely get eaten; they announce themselves. Garlic on the breath. Tinned fish in the office. Ghee hitting heat with ginger, garlic and a base of spices that says, in one perfumed wallop, that something worthwhile is underway. To me, that smell is home. To somebody else it might be too much, too strong, too lingering, too real. But that is precisely the point. Certain foods are treated with suspicion not because they are bad, but because they refuse discretion. They leave evidence. They cling to the room. They follow you into your clothes, your hair, the next morning’s kitchen. They do not vanish politely after use. Good. Some of the best things in life do not.

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I have never quite warmed to the way food gets turned over and tuned up, especially on television or TikTok, into a freak show or a parlour game rather than a source of pleasure. There is a whole trade now in public squeamishness, people pulling faces for the camera as though recoil were a mark of discernment and innocent enthusiasm a bit ‘infra dig’. It is one thing not to fancy something. Nobody is obliged to drop to their knees before fermented shark or a bowl of tripe. But the performance of disdain is weird to me. It asks very little of a person. It misses the point. No appetite, no palate, no curiosity, no memory. Just a decent set of molars and the confidence to look appalled. Personally, I would rather eat with the enthusiast every time.

That is why the dodgy pantry interests me more than the clean white plate. The cupboard keeps truer records of a people than the tasting menu ever will. Growing up, there were foods at home that others might have regarded as weird, exotic, even old-fashioned, but which carried the emotional certainty of lit windows. Spam fritters, for one. There was no embarrassment in them. The batter was crisp and salty, the interior soft and strangely sweet, the neatly sliced slabs sat beside baked beans with the modest swagger known only to foods that have never once cared what anyone in a review or online thread might think. It was a curious meat, yes, but curiosity is not the enemy of appetite. Quite the opposite. Most of the good stuff starts there.

I am not especially interested in redeeming these foods. They don’t need me in a cape.

The same goes for tinned clementines in evaporated milk, a dessert which, written down, sounds like the sort of thing one might find in a church hall cookbook beside a traybake with ambitions. But there it was, chilled, shining, vibrant orange coated in sweet comfort, rich in the way only now defunct cupboard desserts can be, carrying that distinct postwar gift for turning shelf-stable practicality into pleasure. A lot of supposedly disreputable foods have this quality. They were not born in glamour, but in adaptation. They come from houses where waste was sin, ingenuity second nature and sweetness something coaxed out of whatever happened to be to hand. That is not a lesser sort of magic. It is often the real thing.

Angel Delight, a shining light in any bright synthetic pantheon: packet powder whisked into being, then decanted with full domestic seriousness into glass coupes as though Escoffier himself might be dropping by after the news. Butterscotch was the one. Strawberry felt like a rumour in pink, but butterscotch – all creamy bluff and caramel suggestion – was magnificent to me, especially with a last triumphant sprinkling of Hundreds and Thousands over the top. I knew nothing then of lab lists or additives. I knew only that a treat had arrived and that I intended to meet it spoon first.

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Bread and dripping belonged to that same half-vanished domestic register: one of those foods that sounded faintly punitive when described out loud and yet, in practice, made perfect sense. Mum had been given it as a child, cold dripping from the fridge spread over fresh bakery bread, and we, upon hearing this, reacted as though she had survived on axle grease and resolve. Yet age has a way of embarrassing such certainties. What once sounded like hardship now reads, at least in certain corners, like nutritional wisdom with a farm-shop accent: animal fat, good bread, no additives, no nonsense. The old rogue has not changed. Only the company it keeps. And that, too, is part of reputation: not the thing itself, but who is seen to need it, inherit it, recoil from it or suddenly rediscover it with a better apron and a nicer surname.

Then there was the occasional Fray Bentos pie in its ring-pull frisbee tin, squat little monument to hope. I can’t pretend it was subtle. Nobody ever wrote a sonnet to the pastry lid of a Fray Bentos and, if they did, it was probably after a drink or two. But neither am I tempted to mock it. Nor tinned treacle sponge, clinking in a boiling pot with sweet anticipation, opened to a hiss of pressure release, its acerbic baking-powder bite drowned happily in ready-made, Tetra packed custard. A delight unknown to some, loved by most.

These things belonged to a category beyond taste alone. They were part convenience, part promise, part domestic insurance policy. They sat in the cupboard waiting for plans to change, money to tighten, energy to fail or weather to turn. There is a quiet brilliance to anything that can wait patiently on a shelf and still, when called upon, make a proper meal of itself. Frankly, I sometimes think I should aspire to that sort of stoic reliability.

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And then there were Wimpey burger bars, which to a child seemed to possess the full ceremonial dignity of dining out. The pictures on the menu did half the work before a bite had even been taken. Hunger gathered in that slightly greasy atmosphere. Mum would place the paper serviette neatly on our laps as if preparing us for a rather important occasion and for that half hour or so it was. People speak as though nostalgia is always a distortion, but sometimes it is simply accurate about scale. A Wimpey was not great cuisine. It was a treat. Which is a different sort of greatness altogether.

That same logic hovered behind fried jam sandwiches. “If you’re really hungry, you can eat bread and jam,” Mum would say, which had the firm Protestant clarity of a small household law and the near certainty of becalming our moaning. But if the sandwich was fried, then we were in favour. If bread and jam was one thing, fried bread and jam was another entirely: a celebration by pan and fire. There is a social history hidden in such distinctions. A little extra butter, a little heat, a little time taken – that is often how affection announces itself in kitchens that do not deal in elaborate speeches. Technique matters, yes. Attention to detail. Provenance too. But so does the small domestic miracle of making the ordinary feel like luck. In the end, that may be one of cooking’s finest tricks.

The chip butty belongs to the same broad church of glorious plain-speaking carbohydrate faith, though no household ever seems entirely agreed on the proper terms of worship. Naked, with red sauce or with brown: each faction regards the others with a kind of amused suspicion, as though condiments were a referendum on moral character. But that is the charm of such foods. They are not merely eaten; they are argued over, defended, inherited. Their very lack of elegance becomes part of their authority. They do not ask to be admired from a distance. They ask only that you be hungry enough to understand them.

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And then there are the ingredients and shortcuts that survive not because they are strictly necessary any longer, but because they carry memory in a form the hand can still reach for. Gravy browning was like that. Once I learned how to make a proper gravy, I could not, if I am honest, entirely understand the point of it on technical grounds. But kitchen cupboards are not laboratories. They are museums of inherited logic. Nana would use it through wartime habits and ration-book intelligence and there it remained, long after its practical urgency had passed, because memory has a way of preserving certain items beyond reason. What looks old-fashioned from the outside can be something much richer from within: habit, continuity, a little domestic ghost still doing its rounds. Edible family archives in other words – and rather beautiful ones at that.

Smash – bullets of dehydrated potato – too, deserves more respect than it usually gets. It tasted unmistakably of itself and it had that dangerous, impatient heat that could take the roof of your mouth off before you had properly settled into your seat. Simply add boiling water. But I loved it. It meant caravan holidays, tiny tables, family closeness, the faint chaos of being away somewhere and eating happily without ceremony. Later, in student digs, it carried another sort of comfort: not glamour exactly, but continuity. A cheap, peculiar, potato-flavoured reminder that home was still conceptually available. And for all the easy jokes made at its expense, it belongs to that useful class of foods that survive mockery because they understand something essential about hunger, speed and comfort. Some live on such things because they must. Others remember them because they were fed with them tenderly. Often, of course, the two conditions are closer than we care to admit. Smash is not just a relic. In the right hands, it is still a shortcut with possibilities.

Soup, I will confess, has never fully won me over. And here I am living in Ireland, where soup and sandwiches go together like Guinness and oysters. I have met noble soups, no doubt. I bear garbure no ill will, nor any of its cousins: those great peasant vats of cabbage, lentils, root vegetables, stale bread, old bones and weather. The world is full of bowls that have sustained farmhands, miners, shepherds, dockers and grandfathers with alarming efficiency and very little publicity. But personally, I have never mastered soup as a social act. I invariably end up burning some region of my mouth and refashioning whatever I’m wearing with a kind of casual, Pollock-esque abandon. Even so, I have a soft spot for those much-mocked thin soups and workaday broths that carry, in their watery bodies, the stern comfort of endurance. Garbure, broth, cock-a-leekie, cawl, caldo, mulligatawny – whatever the local dialect calls a pot that stretches. They have been applauded for their frugality and loved for exactly the same reason. A stretched pot is a generous one.

Pub foods on the other hand have their own peculiar hierarchy of esteem and disgust. Take the pickled egg: a thing some people discuss as though it were an administrative failure in a jar, and others – rightly – recognise as genius. My brothers have always loved them, especially after a pint, when the vinegar lands like a sharp slap around the chops, waking the palate up for the next sup, while the egg itself settles in the stomach and slows the drink’s quiet advance. They used to sit behind the bar when I was younger, easily ordered, entirely unpretentious, doing their small but noble work. A proper pub snack, in other words, whether or not the more squeamish drinker wishes to admit it. And, enjoyed long before the ubiquitous packages of puffed-up pig’s skin – though I have, on many occasions devoured many a pack of Scratchings with much relish.

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One of the more useful lessons food ever taught me came not in my home kitchen but at somebody else’s table. I was in my early teens, at the house of a schoolfriend whose family seemed, to my eyes, to occupy an entirely different register of life: large house, easy confidence, Scandinavian father, three-course supper. Then a plate was set before me bearing a single immense thing I took to be a thistle head, melted butter and lemon wedge alongside. I waited for the rest of the meal to arrive, assuming this could not possibly be it. Around me, others were already getting on with theirs. I felt that familiar flicker of embarrassment, almost shame: not at the food itself, but at the possibility that I was about to reveal I did not know how to eat it. Then my friend’s Dad leant over warmly, tore off a leaf, dipped it, bit the fleshy pale end and said, simply, “artichoke”. That was that. I cracked on. Butter down the shirt, naturally.

I have never forgotten that moment. It taught me something better than polish. Fear dresses itself up in all sorts of fancy clothes where food is concerned. There is the fear of smelling wrong, ordering wrong, pronouncing wrong, not knowing which bit to eat, not recognising what counts as obvious to others. People often mistake that whole performance for sophistication when really it is just nerves with a napkin on its lap. What dissolved it, in that moment, was not status but kindness. A single gesture. Eat this bit. It’s lovely. On we go. That, to me, is proper food culture: not showing off, just opening the door and making room.

Then there are the foods people treat less as supper than as a test of character. Ants, for instance. I first tried them with my friend Ben – the bug boy – in Copenhagen, which is exactly the sort of sentence that makes one sound either adventurous or insufferable depending on the company. Fugu belongs in this category too, floating through the global imagination not merely as fish but as paperwork, risk and the possibility of a memorable administrative error. Durian is another. Half the people discussing it seem more interested in describing its smell than actually eating it. Such foods acquire reputations because they allow people to perform bravery, cosmopolitanism or revulsion, sometimes all three at once. The flavour can become almost secondary to the story told about having survived it. Which is a pity, really, because food has enough to do without moonlighting as a personality test.

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Octopus, though, I love without qualification. Simply boiled, charred, a squeeze of lemon, perhaps a little salt, and there it is: tender flesh, smoky edges, a hint of sea. Yet octopus has long inspired theatrical recoil in those who like their dinner free of suction and intelligence. This was hardly helped when one of their number, Paul, began predicting the results of the 2010 World Cup and briefly became a cephalopod oracle. Still, I would rather trust the pan than the public relations. Hot coals and a squeeze of lemon have settled bigger arguments.

Reputations, of course, do not stand still. Some foods fall from grace. Others undergo a laundering so complete you would scarcely know them. Tinned tuna is the obvious example from my own life. I have loved it all the way from the briny, workaday John West of an ordinary cupboard to the lauded Ortiz tins, all red and yellow and joy, arranged like jewellery brightening the humblest of presses. The fish has not changed nearly so much as its costume. What was once an everyday lunch, a practical supper, a thing you opened without comment, has become in certain quarters a style signal: all conservas, crisp wine and beautifully designed melancholy. Fine. Let it wear the good suit if it likes. I still know where it came from and I am delighted it made it to the nice end of town.

Turmeric has had an even stranger journey. Few ingredients have had a more curious makeover. There it was all along in Dad’s spice cupboard of our Scunthorpe home: earthy, staining, useful, ordinary in the best sense. Doing its quiet work in households that did not need to announce its virtues because they were too busy getting on and cooking with it. Then suddenly it became a haloed object of wellness theatre, whipped into lattes and sold back to the world as if someone had just discovered fire. The ingredient itself is blameless. It never asked for this. It certainly never needed rescuing. But it is a perfect example of how reputation shifts with fashion. Yesterday’s ordinary spice becomes today’s miracle. Yesterday’s poor food becomes today’s artisanal flex. Yesterday’s embarrassment becomes tomorrow’s imported sophistication with a very tidy label. Lobsters, oysters, parsnips – and so the list rolls on. Food is full of these glow-ups and reversals. Part of the fun is watching the old rogues slip back in wearing better shoes.

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And perhaps that is the point. Foods do not merely nourish; they collect stories, arguments, class signals and household loyalties. They become shorthand for thrift, smell, shame, migration, daring, bad taste, old taste, no taste, too much taste. They get laughed at for being different, then praised for being authentic. They get scolded for being old-fashioned, then revived by someone with a smart apron and a very persuasive backstory. They get called foreign until the day they become fashionable, and common until the day scarcity makes them chic.

Through all of this, appetite keeps its own quieter counsel. It remembers the smell of ghee frying ginger and garlic. It remembers the crisp shell of a Spam fritter, the weird luxury of tinned clementines in evaporated milk, of Angel Delight, the sting of vinegar from a pub-jarred egg. The synthetic comfort of Smash on a holiday table, the impossible dignity of a Wimpey, the butter running down your wrist from an artichoke leaf, the certainty that fried jam sandwiches meant, for one evening at least, you were in favour.

The foods with bad names have a habit of outliving the banter. They stay in tins, on shelves, spitting in frying pans, locked in memory, packed into lunchboxes, wired into late-night cravings and stored in kitchens where somebody still knows exactly what they are for. And that’s as it should be. The world would be poorer without its rogues: the pongy, the humble, the old-school, the tinned, the thrifty, the overlooked, the faintly raffish, the gloriously uncool.

They remind us that appetite is not a morality play. It is life. It is people making something delicious out of what they have, what they remember, what they can afford, what they crave, what they are brave enough to try and what they love too much to leave behind. So open the cupboard. Put the pan on. Fry the sandwich. Char the octopus. Spoon out the clementines in all their bright, syrupy, faintly metallic joy. Be generous with the garlic. Let the kitchen smell of something. Let it smell of life. Reputation is one thing. Supper is another. And supper, on its best nights – planned or gloriously chaotic – still wins. Red or brown sauce with that..?

Masale bolte hain

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…and this month, for my April recipe

Ghee-fried Hake & Curry Leaf Tadka

Charred baby leek, crisp paneer, blood orange, watercress salad, ‘panch phoran’ mustard vinaigrette

This is Spring with a bit of mischief locked in. The sort of plate that looks clean enough for company but eats like something far more raffish. It is half market-garden, half back-alley swagger. Which is to say, ideal.

Get your pan hot first. Trim a bunch of baby leeks, wash them well and either griddle or char them in a dry hot pan with a little oil until they soften and pick up blackened blisters here and there. They should look a little dishevelled, not salon-finished. Set them aside. Cut paneer into thickish slabs or rough cubes, pat dry, then fry in a slick of oil until crisp and gold on both sides. Season lightly and let them sit while you deal with the rest. Take a couple of blood oranges, cut away the peel and pith, then slice into rounds or into segments catching whatever juices escape – this is liquid gold for the dressing. Toss a handful or two of watercress into a bowl.

Now for the vinaigrette, where the plate gets its little punk flourish. Take a teaspoon of panch phoran, add to a bowl with a good spoon of Dijon mustard, a splash of white wine vinegar, the reserved blood orange juice, a pinch of salt and enough olive oil to loosen it into a sharp, spoonable dressing. It should taste punchy, bright and just slightly unruly. Toss the watercress lightly with some of it, then arrange the leeks, paneer and blood orange over the top. Spoon over a little more dressing. Don’t drown it. This is a salad, not a paddling pool.

For the hake, season the fillets with sea salt, then dust them lightly in flour, a grating of nutmeg and a shake of cayenne. Heat a generous knob of ghee in a frying pan, add a teaspoon of cumin seeds and a handful of fresh curry leaves, when the leaves crackle and the cumin smells nutty, lay in the fish. Fry until the skin side is deeply golden and crisp, then turn carefully and finish the other side for just a moment. You want that lovely contrast: crust outside, delicate pearly flakes within. Serve the hake straight away with the leek, paneer and blood orange salad on the side, spoon any curry leaf, cumin and ghee left in the pan over and around the fish like you mean it.

This is not a timid little Spring number. It has crunch, scorch, sweetness, pepper, acid and spice in all the right places. The leeks go silky, the paneer bites back, the orange flashes through everything, and the hake arrives wearing its ghee and cumin like a tailored jacket. Eat it when the light is still hanging about the kitchen and you want something that feels both fresh and faintly dangerous.

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Arun Kapil, Food Editor of Ars Notoria, and punk food poet, founded and owns a spice company, Green Saffron Spices. He works sustainably direct with partner farms mainly to the west and north of India and some in the south. He works directly from source. He owns total chain of custody, depleting links in the chain, bringing direct line of sight to fields of cultivation. Arun and his partner Olive began by selling one or two sachets a week of bespoke blends with accompanying recipes at a farmers market stall in Mahon Point, Cork. They now sell spices and seasonings to globally based blue chips, onward food processors and are just in the throes of re-launching their brand, based on Modern India meal solutions, sauces, spice blends, naan, condiments and basmati. They started the business boot-strapping from the bottom up, managed with a good deal of jugaard. He considers himself to be a masaalchi and at best a khansama supported by a strong network of Irish, Indian and British agri-experts and businessmen.