Ian MacMillan: When the gravy drain hit the buffers

LET’S call it The Gravy Conundrum. Actually, that sounds like a thriller, starring Mac McMillan the Yorkshire Private Eye fighting baddies who are trying to control the Stock Market (ho ho!), so let’s call it Humiliation in the Café. That’ll do for now.

I love gravy. I like the way that gravy can be so many things to so many people; it can be something you splosh over your Yorkshires on a Sunday or it can be something you pour very carefully over certain parts of your dinner any day of the week. It can be as thick as sludge or as thin as mist. It can have bits of all sorts floating in it or it can be crystalline and pure. If only they’d start a Nobel Prize for Gravy or a reality show called Dancing on Gravy I’d be auditioning for the judging panels straight away!

So here I am with my wife in a café. I’ve had the Beef and Ale Pie and it came in its own little pot with a detachable crust which I detached before I began to munch. The crust was fine, the beef was tasty and you could just detect a hint of the ale. But the gravy was fantastic: it was just on the cusp of runny and thick, it had a sharp after-taste that lingered in the mouth and it had that wonderful quality that we gravy buffs call meat-concealment which means that every so often when you think you’ve eaten all the beef, another morsel pops up out of the gravy like a float bobbing to the surface of a still fishing pond.

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So I finished the pie but there was lots of gravy left in the pot. I didn’t want to leave it so I did that daft thing I sometimes do with gravy: I tried to pick it up with my fork. I realise that this is like trying to drink soup with a colander but there was no other way. Tantalising micro-amounts clung to the fork and I slurped them greedily. The more I slurped, however, the more gravy there seemed to be in the pot; I just didn’t seem to be reducing the amount.

My wife suggested that I ask for a spoon but the waitress was blonde and sophisticated and kind of cool and I would have felt daft saying “’Scuse me love, could I have a spoon for me gravy? A big ’un, please. A ladle if you’ve got one”, so I carried on shovelling away with the fork. Of course I considered using my knife but, hey, there are limits; and I didn’t want to cut my mouth.

Then I had an idea: my wife had had orange juice and there was a straw in her empty glass. I tried to appear casual. “Pass us your straw” I said. “You’re not…” she said, horrified, the three dots at the end of her words hanging in the air like the spots of gravy on my chin.

I was and I did. I stuck the straw in the gravy and I slurped. Bliss. Sheer bliss. I was as happy as a baby at the breast, even though the gravy did taste slightly of orange juice. My slurping became louder as I hoovered up every last drop. At that moment the waitress appeared beside me. As I said, she was cool and sophisticated. “Everything all right for you, sir?” she asked. You really shouldn’t try to speak with a straw full of gravy in your mouth. As I said: Humiliation in the Café…

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