The first time I’d heard of “hash cake” was in 1980 when my flatmate (featured in the blog entry Wrong-footed) came back from a weekend up in Scotland and told me about their exploits: eating, drinking, smoking (hash[ish]), then going for a horse ride after a dessert of hash cake (cake made with hash[ish] in it). He said riding while high on hash was an amazing experience.
Fast forward to three years later when I was working at the TV documentary film company on The Heart of The Dragon series on China. One of our researchers was Lisa Pontecorvo, whose father Gillo Pontecorvo made Battle of Algiers (1966), among other films. (I read in the papers two or three years ago that she was killed in a bicycle accident.)
One day, Lisa joined us in the staff room over the lunch hour. The rest of us were eating a fish and chips takeaway, but Lisa had brought her own homemade lunch: a sandwich made with brown wholemeal bread, and a salad. Lisa cycled, was a vegetarian, and didn’t smoke. So I nearly fell off my chair when, once we’d finished our lunch, she produced a plastic bag with brown lumps in it, and asked, “Anyone for my hash cake?” I couldn’t believe my ears: lunch time on a weekday, and Lisa, the clean-living person, was offering us some of her hash cake?!? It turned out her homemade chocolate cake had gone a bit wrong, hence her calling it “hash cake”.
(London 1980, 1983)
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