Of a cantankerous cat and Himalayan prawns

I know it can be irritating to get picky about food, but it’s just as irritating to get old, and I reckon being old gives me the right to be picky if I want.

On that subject, I’ve decided to take a page out of our cat Misty’s book. He’s not that old – not quite 14 – but he’s quite cantankerous enough for a cat four years older than that. It’s our fault, I know, for making him live in four countries, and abandoning him (with friends, you understand, but he still saw it as being abandoned) for six months prior to two of those moves. No wonder he’s a little short-tempered.

“You will, henceforth, cease this neglectful
behaviour and cater more fully to my wishes”

He’s decided in recent months that he no longer likes various types of food that, once, he’d devour with delight. So we’ve been anxiously testing a whole string of different types of food, in the hope of finding something to his taste. We finally narrowed it down to a range of little cans which he seemed to like, but now it’s become clear that there are only some of them he enjoys, while he continues to turn up his nose at the rest.

Left, Ocean Fish, good;
right, Tuna Mousse, unacceptable

So now I make a point of buying him ‘ocean fish’ rather ‘tuna mousse’ to ensure he’ll deign to eat what we serve him. Which he does with some apparent pleasure. “That’ll do nicely,” he seems to be saying. I was going to add, “thank you,” but, to be honest, he’s not the kind of cat that says “thanks” very readily.

Since he’s become so picky, I thought it was permissible for us to be a little fussy too. For instance, yesterday, we had an excellent meal from a Nepalese restaurant in the little town of Alboraya, outside Valencia, overlooking the kilometre after kilometre of farmers’ fields that run across the plain down to the beach and the sea. The restaurant has the less than strikingly original name of Kathmandu, which at least has the merit of making clear its national roots, that being Nepal’s capital.

Excellent food from Kathmandu in Alboraya

The food was outstandingly good. It seems the restaurant is heavily frequented by people from England, which is no surprise, since curry, especially curry with a bit of a bite to it, is far more popular with the English than with the Spanish. We were as pleased as any other English patron used to the curries back in Blighty. Or at least we were pleased with all the dishes bar one. The prawn curry was good enough, but far from outstanding. Nothing like as good as the chicken or vegetarian options (my granddaughter Aya, visiting us with her Dad, is vegetarian), which were excellent.

But then I got to thinking. Misty-like, we’re allowed to make arbitrary decision about what we like and what we don’t. And, in any case, this was a Nepalese restaurant. It’s hard to imagine that there’s much of a tradition of currying prawns in Nepal. At least, given the length of its coastline, it can’t really be expected to have much of such a tradition.

Prawn curry: perhaps not a Nepalese tradition

Got to make allowances.

And in all other respects, the meal was outstanding.

This experience got me thinking of one of my father’s anecdotes. He once worked in the Rome headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the United Nations specialist agency specialising in food production and farming, as you may have guessed from its name. One of the things it does is consider projects it can back to help develop food production in countries which most need such help.

At one point, one of my father’s colleagues, based in India, submitted a project to help develop the prawn fishing industry in the Bay of Bengal. Well, I saw prawn. It might have been shrimp. Or possibly some other marine crustacean. My memory’s a bit weak on that detail.

The response from the expert in Rome was that there were no prawns in in the Bay of Bengal. Unless he said there were no shrimps. Or possibly no members of some other marine crustacean species. 

In any case, whichever it was he said there were none of, the response came back quite promptly by telegram.

“Maybe, but the plate of them I’m enjoying at the moment is absolutely delicious.”

I don’t know whether the project ever got the go-ahead.