Ok, bear with me on this one…
Also, no I wasn’t it hospital.
I was at a high tea though. While the company was great, the food was ok. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t worth raving about either. The reason for this, it was a high tea on a river boat. I think there would have been about one hundred towers of food, with three tiers each. All of them had the same dishes.
The same sandwiches. The same sausage rolls. The same scones.
This is what made me think of hospital food.
In case you hadn’t guessed already, this one isn’t about the high tea itself. I have had better and none of the food was particularly worth raving about.
Instead, this is about the feeding of a lot of people at once, with limited options.
The reason I have compared this to hospital food, as opposed to a food festival or eat street or even eight street, is that these were all prepared before hand and then laid out at the start of the cruise. Hospital meals are prepared in advance and wheeled out to hundreds of patients. Public hospital meals, I have never been to a private hospital and can’t comment on the food there. Also in both situations, you can’t just up and opt for something else. While technically you can in hospital, most people don’t.
In both situations, the food tastes like it is designed to be the least offensive. In a hospital, you can easily add salt or pepper, but you can’t take it away. In the high tea, most of the food was a bit bland, some of it suffered from being eaten a while after it was cooked. There was no salt and pepper to add, but I doubt that would have improved anything. Like I said though, it wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t great. I have had some hospital meals in the same boat. In both situations, most of the people were doing what they could with what they had. You couldn’t complain that the guy next to you got anything any different to the other guy, but you could wonder at the other guy enjoying the boring meal as much as they are. I have received that look of curiosity, but never given it.
Ok, it occurs to me that there was one surprisingly good thing in the High Tea. The scone. How ever you want to pronounce it, this was actually pretty good. The outside was hard, and lead me to believe that the inside was going to be similar to the rock cakes my mum made once. You could have broken a window with them. It wasn’t, it was actually pretty light and fluffy. The exterior was also a surprise, pleasantly crunchy as opposed to plate smashingly hard. With the jam and cream on top they were really good.
To balance this out…
This one time in hospital I picked the seafood mornay off the menu. I loved seafood mornay, especially the way Aunty Margie made it. It was creamy and thick and coated everything in a beautiful, simple white sauce. The hospital one was a cube. A cube of mornay. It remained a cube when I poked it with a fork. It remained upright as I removed chunks of it to eat it (I never said I didn’t eat, and I doubt anyone reading this is surprised by that revelation). I am pretty sure it moved at one point, but I was in hospital for asthma so that could have been the lack of oxygen.
Anyway, the point of this ramble is to say thank you for trying. To all the people who make a hundred High Teas for a three our trip, to the handful of people trying to feed hundreds of people on shrinking budgets (I have not researched this, I am not sure if this is true…but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is). Thank you to all of you.
Thanks to Aunty Margie. Who made me a lot of food I loved.
And Mum who made my favourite biscuits.
And tomorrow is my Birthday.
Good night.
Bren's Food Adventures 