How to extract a secret recipe — by stealth (London)

On my first visit to the Isle of Man (IoM), Pete’s mother offered us some sloe gin, which is gin steeped in sloe* berries over a period of time (something like 3–6 months, if not longer, with the bottle turned upside down regularly).  She said she was given some sloe gin soon after her arrival on the IoM, and when she asked how she could get hold of some sloe berries for her to make some sloe gin of her own, she was told by the locals, “Tell us how much you want, and we’ll go and pick them for you, but we won’t tell you where to find them.”  This was my first exposure to the self-preservation strategy of not giving away too much.

A French student told me her mother said the same thing to her:  that one should/must always have at least one trump card at one’s disposal.

I have very few culinary aces up my own sleeve.  One of them, kimchee/kimchi — Korean pickled vegetables (can be meat, too) — is frightfully expensive in the shops and an exotic item in the British (even modern British) diet, so I make it on a regular basis as a treat for my students.  (I often say that I have to bribe my students to come to class!  Cf. blog entry Spoonerism: Crooks and nannies: https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2011/07/spoonerism-crooks-and-nannies.html)

I’d mentored a Korean chap in the mid-90s when he was in London for a year with his Korean Housing Board colleagues to study the UK’s housing policies.  One of these colleagues, acknowledged among his peers as an expert in kimchee-making, taught me how to make it, and since then, I’ve established a reputation for myself in making authentic-tasting kimchee.

A new student’s parents run a Chinese restaurant, with the father doing the cooking himself.  When I told them I can make kimchee, their eyes lit up, because they eat a lot of pickled vegetables — Tianjin and Shandong style, though.  I said I’d make a batch for them — I have often said of my kimchee: “I will make a batch for you anytime you want some, but I will not divulge the ingredients.”  They immediately asked me not to go to all the trouble of making it at my place and lugging it right across London to theirs, offering to get all the ingredients for me to make it in their kitchen.  

It was thus that my secret recipe had to be divulged.  Clever trick, that!

(London 2013)

*  sloe |slō|

noun

another term for blackthorn.

• the small bluish-black fruit of the blackthorn, with a sharp sour taste.