Fishcakes

I have decided to have a go at making Thai fish cakes. I had them when I was last in Thailand and something about them has remained with me ever since. In a good way, I mean, not like an eggy burp or a pint of milk that leaks into the back seat of the car.

I had them at a lovely riverside restaurant, where I made the western diner’s classic faux pas of piling a plate with food before retreating into a protective scrumage, from which nothing escaped save for a few porky grunting sounds of sheer pleasure. My Thai companions were most disconcerted. They had whispered conversations in Thai that I imagine went something like this:

“What is he doing? Is he afraid we will steal the fishcakes from under his nose?”

“Apparently this is how they eat in Britain. He told me that most restaurants there have a set price buffet, and until he learns the subtle yet important difference between ‘Eat As Much As You Like,’ and ‘Eat As Much As You Can,’ this is how things will be.”

Suspect table manners aside, everyone agreed that the fishcakes really were heavenly. Upon my return to England I purchased a wonderful book on Thai cooking, which bears an uncanny similarity to one that I borrowed from the walking apprentice a few years back and naturally returned. It has since stood on the kitchen worktop in an expectant yet ultimately idle manner, along with the baffling Italian coffee machine and something which may or may not produce crêpes. My money is on the latter, seeing as I have only the barest notion of what a crêpe might be and even less idea of what ingredients to use. To be perfectly honest I thought crêpes were a kind of heavy shoe.

My kitchen is full of gadgets that I hardly use. It’s not that I don’t cook, you understand, because I most assuredly do. I cook everything from Indian to Thai to Italian, though I can’t really attest to what these dishes might be called exactly. More like ambassadors than individuals, I simply know them as the Thai, the Indian and the Italian. I am not yet on first name terms with my own cooking.

So I cook, but I avoid using gadgets whenever possible. In my lexicon of kitchen terms, the phrase ‘Labour Saving’ has come to mean ‘Finger Slicing,’ while ‘Quick and Easy’ has become ‘Hot and Burny.’ It has always been the case with me. I haven’t really been on top of my game in the kitchen since I got a Bird’s Eye Crispy Pancake stuck to the roof of my mouth in 1982. I foolishly heated it up in the microwave, which apart from turning a crispy pancake into a floppy pancake, super-heated the cheese filling to about the same temperature as the core of the earth. I ran screaming into the street, a waxy mass of melting skin and cheese oozing down my chin. I didn’t cause that level of confusion and alarm again until I contracted a strange case of bellowing hiccups on a night flight from Toronto; people thought the engines were exploding.

More recently I managed to lavishly decorate myself and my kitchen with boiling soup. This occurred after I poured home-made soup into the blender to thicken it up a little. I poured in way too much. In fact I poured the chunky red liquid – the boiling hot, chunky red liquid - to the very top of the blender, an act of such towering stupidity that merely writing it down seems wrong. I remember looking at this dangerously loaded jug of still gently-bubbling red liquid, and thinking vaguely of melting cheese, before I flicked the switch.

It doesn’t take a genuis to work out what happened next. What happened next of course was that a throaty blast of power from the spinning blades sent a fountain of boiling soup exploding from the jug. The lid hit the ceiling. Soup showered the walls and surfaces of the kitchen. I was lucky to escape serious burns, but not so lucky to have a sympathetic female around the place to dab my scalded face with cold water and offer to clean the place up for me. Instead I had to do it all myself. I splashed cold water over my face and hands until the burning sensation subsided a little – I looked like someone who had been wandering around in the sun for many days – and then spent the best part of an hour cleaning up.

What followed is something that frankly troubles me still. If I live to be a hundred – and I wouldn’t count on anything near that figure myself – I will never understand what possessed me to replace the lid on the blender and switch it on again.

Maybe I was expecting a different outcome this time. Maybe I was convinced that lightening would not strike twice in the same place. Who knows – really, who can tell with these things? Predictably the same thing happened over again. A jet of hot soup rocketed to the ceiling and burst like a firework over the walls and surfaces, not to mention my clothes and face. I stared at the devastation with a kind of dumb inertia, hardly able to comprehend what I had done. After a while – it was possibly whole minutes – I heaved a deeply unhappy sigh and went to submerge my face in a bath of cold water.

I now feel a sense of great trepidation. Making Thai fishcakes will involve using the blender again, something I haven’t done since the Great Soup Disaster of 2006. On the other hand, they were particularly good fishcakes, certainly worth taking a risk for. I shall just have to remember to stand well back from the blender.

Later I will sit down at the table with a nice glass of chilled wine, a plate of indecently desireable Thai fishcakes, and eat as much as I can.

As much as I like, I mean.