Читать книгу Toast - Nigel Slater - Страница 27

There was a brief time when I was the coolest kid at school. My brother had bought Rubber Soul and I listened to it, lights low, when he was out for the evening with his girlfriend who had long blonde hair and eyes so heavy with mascara she looked like a panda. I learned every word by heart. Only about two kids at school had even heard of it, and I knew every single word. Not even my brother, who knew everything, knew all the words. He thought ‘Michelle’ was crap. I thought it was brilliant. Little did I know my brother was far too busy shagging old panda eyes in the back of his Hillman Imp to learn the words to Rubber Soul.

It was about this time my father bought a grapefruit knife. It was heavily serrated with a blade that curved like a children’s slide. Just think, we were so sophisticated, so glamorous, so cool we actually had a special knife to cut our grapefruits. I didn’t know anyone else who even had grapefruits.

The first time we ate grilled grapefruit was something of a performance. We had all heard about them, though none of us knew anyone who had actually had one, so we had to guess how they were done. My father shook a thick layer of granulated sugar over the halved fruit, of course they were all yellow in those days, and got the grill hot.

Getting the grill hot was a bit like ‘getting the car out’, that peculiar ritual of revving the car up in the garage about half an hour before we went anywhere. ‘No, I’ll finish packing, you get the car out,’ my mother would say. Nowadays, they would take less trouble over starting up a space shuttle. The grill hot, or at least as hot as it ever got, we all stood and watched the sugar melting, most of which slid off the top, down the sides and started to burn in the bottom of the grill pan.

In the panic to find the oven gloves, my father tried to pull the grapefruits out with his bare hands, his eyes watering from the molten sugar. He had even bought special grapefruit spoons with serrated edges. We pulled the loose segments out of their shells, crunching through the half-melted, half-granular sugar. It was very hot and very cold, very sweet and very sour all at once. ‘Is this how they’re supposed to be,’ said someone, not entirely kindly, and we all went rather quiet. But I just thought how utterly cool I was to have eaten grilled grapefruit. I boasted about it to everyone at school the next day in much the same way as someone might boast about getting their first shag.