Mediterranean diet Mark II

Linda Hall

SOME years back, a friend who hadn’t been here long grumbled that she’d put on weight thanks to the Mediter‐ranean diet.

Hardly surprising, because eating Mediterranean Spain’s food doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re follow ‐ing its rules. In fact you’ll usually be eating, and doubtless enjoying it very much, a Spanglish diet, which is noto‐rious for adding kilos you’d rather lose.

As I found when living in the rural outskirts of Altea my neighbours – el‐derly people who knew nothing other than the Mediterranean diet ‐ ate what they produced.

That meant killing it too.

We lived in the bottom half of a rambling house, some of it new, some of it probably a couple of centuries old. Each Friday Marcela, our landlady who lived on the top half, would se ‐lect a rabbit from the corral and kill it in a process that I was careful not to witness but couldn’t avoid overhear ‐ing.

It was brutal but rapid and in no time at all, she’d skinned and gutted it, ready for the Sunday paella.

Pigeons, chickens, even turkeys at Christmas, met the same fate but who was I to shiver in disgust? Not when I bought the remains of dead animals that had lived in miserable conditions and were bred purely to satisfy the appetites of supermarket customers.

A couple of my neighbours were al‐so directly linked to the fish they ate and one day shortly after we’d moved in, Marcela’s cousin Teresa appeared with some mackerel so fresh that they shone.

Did I want any, Marcela asked me. As it happened, I didn’t as I’d bought fish that morning, which also hap ‐pened to be mackerel. Obviously there’d been a good catch the night before.

“Teresa often brings me some,” she said.

“I suppose she had some left over,” I remarked.

Marcela looked at me sternly. “Oh no. These aren’t leftovers. We share what we have.” lemon meringue pie and Arctic Roll ‐cake AND ice ‐ cream in one pudding. What more could you want? And as for snacks, what about jelly cubes eaten straight from the packet? Squashed fly biscuits (Garibaldi, weren’t they?). Or Wagon Wheels ‐ though should be re ‐named Trolley Castors thanks to shrink‐flation.

And there spoke someone who knew what the Mediterranean diet re‐ally meant.

After all that, who’d feel nostalgic for Quinoa salad?

And as for the height of sophistication in my youth: Vesta Chow Mein with crispy noodles! Or oeufs Mornay ‐ a ‘posh’ starter. A boiled egg cut in half and smothered in a dodgy ‘sauce’ that invariably tasted like salad cream with a bit of wilted mint sprinkled over it. Also avocado vinaigrette ‐ half a rock hard or ridiculously mushy avocado with bitter vinaigrette filling the hole. And, in the more upmarket restaurants, a couple of sad ‐ looking prawns floating around in the liquid.

Actually, Delia Smith was way ahead of her time and her recipes are still in ‐credibly reliable crowd pleasers. They’ll surely long outlive the dreadful recipes you regularly come across these days where the ‘chef’ believes you can chuck anything together and just camouflage the tasteless result with chilli. Yuk!

But frankly, I’ve never understood this ‘comeback’ thing. If something is good, it’s good. End of. Do you stop eat‐ing a certain food (like the humble quiche), drinking a certain drink, watch‐ing a certain movie or reading a certain book (a suspense or crime thriller, like me?) because somebody else tells you it’s outdated, and that’s the thing to do?

Do you throw away all your clothes or shoes every year when some magazine tells you: ‘They’re so last season!’? (Clue: it’s a business ‐ that’s their job.) There’s absolutely nothing wrong with trying new things and being experimen‐tal, but it’s good to have the classics locked away too. After all, it’s the clas‐sics that are your gold standard for comparing quality.

So, in brief, all I’m saying is: Give Quiche a Chance...

Nora Johnson’s 12 critically acclaimed psychological suspense crime thrillers (www.nora ‐ johnson.net) all available online including eBooks (€0.99; £0.99), Apple Books, audiobooks, paperbacks at Amazon etc. Profits to Cudeca cancer charity.