The Marmite legacy

With Britain’s governing party going through a major ruction at the top, Ministers and members demanding the immediate departure of the Prime Minister and his replacement by Gordon Brown; with body bags coming back from Afghanistan; with British soldiers assaulted and killed every day in southern Iraq; with black teenagers engaging in murderous gang-fights and shoot-outs in South London, what has been the greatest controversy this year in one of the leading dailies of the UK, The Independent? Hold your breath: the correct way to eat Marmite on toast!

Mad dogs and Englishmen, goes the Noel Coward song. And yet is the debate a sign of this madness or is it a healthy trait in the national psyche, this concern with the detail of a breakfast dedication?

Marmite is a black sludge sold in very characteristic dark brown jars of various sizes, from thumb-length for individual relish to 10 inches in a pendant-like Oval for regimental servings. It’s made of yeast extract and sells millions of tons a year!

My aunts, Shehra and Amy Masi, having got addicted to the stuff in pre-Independence days, continued to buy it from Mumbai smugglers in the lean Nehruvian and Morarji Desai years and then had it despatched or fetched home by their various nieces and nephews who went abroad. If they were alive today, they would be able to nip down to the local grocers and buy this now permissible import. Perhaps they even make it in India?

At any rate, the controversy began when a question was asked in The Independent. Pages full of correspondence followed. The editors proclaimed that the post-bags and e-mails were overwhelming the letters page and the reading and sifting of them had to be outsourced to Malaysia.

I like my Marmite, not on toast, but on white buttered bread. I lightly butter the bread and then, with the tip of a table knife, extract an eighth of a teaspoon of Marmite and spread it on the bread. If the bread is very absorbent, the Marmite gets into its pores.

If there’s too much butter on the slice, it gets mixed in with it and becomes a streaked yellow and black sludge. In this case, the knife can’t be reused either on the pat of butter or in the Marmite jar as either substance would take on the undesirable fringe colouring of the other and who wants one’s butter tainted with black flecks or one’s Marmite with hints of creamy corruption at the edge of the jar?

No. One has to wash and scrape the knife before replenishing the quantity of butter or Marmite for one’s slice.
Spreading Marmite on toast without butter is also perilous. It disappears into the pores. This can be disastrous as the essence of Marmite is sparing and exact use. Too little and it tastes only of toast; too much and it gets bitter.

I didn’t send my observations on Marmite habits in to The Indie (I saved them to inflict on you!), but I rehearse them here to give you a flavour of what the British newspaper-reading public were pre-occupied with while Basra burned. There were some who advocated mixing the butter and Marmite in a bowl before spreading it on toast.

I have even known people advocate adding it to half-boiled eggs along with, or instead of the salt, pepper and butter that one may normally use.

My best hint for Marmite is that when a teaspoon or two of the sludge are mixed with boiling water in a mug, with some lime and pepper squeezed into the resulting soup, it makes the perfect quick cure for a hangover. This isn’t just an old Parsi-man’s tale — its’ quite scientific as I believe hangovers are caused by a lack of water and of vitamins B and C, all of which are then supplemented by the brew. And when I have a hangover, I even relish the taste!

Perhaps this sort of raging controversy over breakfast trivia can only take place in Britain. I can’t imagine Indians writing in to a national newspaper to contradict each other on the correct use of chappatis left over from the previous night’s meal.

In our house they would be reheated, spread with pure ghee and jam and served for breakfast. The worst controversy that ever, mildly, raged in our family over such practices was when my uncle Jhangu Fua ate his fried eggs spread with chilli powder. I was used to eating them with jam.

When I did this in Britain it was remarked on with deep distaste, and I suppose I ought to be thankful that no one wrote to the papers complaining about this disgusting subcontinental habit.
 
(The columnist is a scriptwriter based in London.)