Dangerous hors d'oeuvres

Look here, one of the things we expected a new touchy-feely administration to do pronto was to get rid of all those sad young people begging in public. It's embarrassing and guilt-inducing and not a little threatening, not to mention a terrible waste. It is all very well giving the Bank of England the keys to its own door and fiddling about with the half-hour of Question Time, but frankly that doesn't exactly interface with life as it is lived by most of us. So, Tony, I don't care if you get them proper jobs, phoney jobs or send them all on a gold rush, but please stop them bothering me. We, and I use the 'we' in the collective rather than personally inclusive sense, elected you to do something about canape waiters.

You must have noticed the situation has got worse. Years ago canape waiters would stand to attention against the wall with a tray of chipolatas or pineapple and cheese on sticks and wait to be approached like those old soldiers who sold shoelaces and matches outside railway stations with polished and frayed gravitas. You'd say, `Excuse me, I must go and get an anchovy stick off that old chap. I think he was with my father's regiment in the Rangoon salient.'

Today, however, you will be talking to the hideous wife of a man you hate about venereal disease sweeping the pony club, and an aggressive young thruster in a shirt that's more fashionable and expensive than yours will shove a perspex tray shaped like a funerary barge from the Theban Book of the Dead, containing three tortured prawns and some Indonesian asparagus woven into a rustic corn dolly, into your chest and just stand there.

If you try and ignore him and continue, `So now Petronella and Arkle are both on antibiotics, are they?' he'll start huffing and eye-rolling and finally, with barely restrained irritation, will shout, `Korean spatchcocked pygmy lobster in tangy marshmallow dressing, sir?'

`No thank you.' `You're sure?' `Yes, quite.' `Oh go on.'

It's getting out of hand. Cocktail parties have become Moroccan bazaars with gapyear urchins following you around bullying you into just the one Lake Baku oyster poached in slow gin on a bed of wilted crab-apple. I think waiters are now employed on piece rate. They probably have graphs in the kitchen of hors d'oeuvres salesmen of the week and do American group incentive chanting before service, where they all stand in a circle and shout 'yo' and hold hands and the PR says, 'I want you to go out there and give it the max - remember an uneaten chicken nugget is a failed chicken nugget.'

People who say that the farming year no longer has seasons, that seed-time and harvest mean nothing when you can get tangerines and strawberries all year round, obviously never get asked out. We are approaching the height of the canape harvest. The rich glut of ripe, warm hors d'oeuvres in their husks of filo pastry are being brought into the capital by happy peasants singing the traditional Spice Girl medleys. They come from greenhouse Portacabin kitchens in the orchard of England, industrial estates in Wembley and Streatham.

There are those of you who are under the misapprehension that canapes are food. They are not. The definition of food is something that is prepared and consumed with the purpose of giving sustenance and/or pleasure. Patently canapes fail on both counts. Nobody actually knows what they are for or why, when three or more people are gathered in a room with a stucco ceiling, beige and duck-egg blue paintwork and a pianist, a tray of canapes will also be present. There has been some interesting research done in this area recently and the consensus of academic opinion seems to point to their being small votive offerings, propitiatory sacrifices possibly of druidical or Norse origin. It is thought that they started as a morsel of vanquished enemy passed round on battlefields, quite literally titbits. And still today, if you watch captains of industry and society hostesses at cocktail parties, you see that there is a darkly cannibalistic froideur about the way they grin and pop ear-, noseand digit-like morsels into their mouths.

I don't eat canapes. It is not particularly from moral reasons. I mean I don't mind you eating them, I'd just rather not. If you must know, I think they are cruel. I've actually seen how they are bred and it is disgusting - in long, unhygienic, commercial warehouses in shabby suburbs surrounded by barbed wire. The poor shivering canapes are brought in by lorry, often lying in their own juices. They might have been on the road all night. They are herded onto conveyor belts, and poorly paid and untrained workers, usually women, sometimes single mothers, pull them to bits and stuff them into little pastry coffins and then bake them in ovens. The smell of burning is awful and the noise is incessant: swearing, tubercular coughing and Capital Gold. It's true exploitation. They go for a couple of pence at the market, but by the time they hit the In and Out and Bond Street they are worth a couple of quid.

We should warn our children about canapes. Just say no. I don't mind if Flora and Hector experiment with class A drugs but I'll be very disappointed if I catch them with a duck's liver and raspberry tartlet. If you do drugs you can grow up to be a successful novelist; if you do canapes you end up a publisher.

Finally, a doctor writes that there are unusual health hazards attached to eating a canape (I'm not making this up). In America (where else?) there is a recurring problem with men who have inadvertently eaten the stick along with the sausage. The shard makes its way through the digestive system and, just as it is about to break the finishing tape, as it were, it turns sideways and impales the delicate and sensitive sphincter. I'm told on unimpeachable authority that the shocking stab of pain is unlike anything else. You have been warned.

A.A. Gill writes for the Sunday Times. His cookery book, The Ivy, is published in November (without canapes).

Copyright Spectator Jun 28, 1997
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