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All in Food
Bright buttercup yellow, it catches the eye, even through the shop window. A woman digs into the generous, fluffy mound of butter and scoops a piece onto the scale. With the help of two notched wooden paddles, she forms it into a perfectly rectangular pat while a studious, delighted audience watches. The butter is then carefully folded and wrapped in a sheet of white paper, like a gift.
In a warehouse building on The Shore in Leith there is a natural wine bar called Haze. Its name is appropriate, both for the unfiltered wines it sells and the haar—sea fog—that rumbles inland on warm days. To get to Haze, you have to cross the threshold of an old merchant’s warehouse, now called Brown’s of Leith, and when your eyes adjust to the mood lighting there’s a pleasant surprise of stainless steel and softly melting church candles inside. Not a lick of beige. Within, there’s pét-nat by the glass, good coffee, ice cream sandos, and the fancy tinned fish people from the New Town go crazy for.
The pork scratching’s journey from humble Sunday roast side to mass-market snack belies its enduring popularity as a curious cornerstone of the British pub experience. The pork scratching as we know it exists in its own genre outside the range of normal foodstuffs, but is thought to have emerged as a home-spun delicacy in the West Midlands during the 1800s.
Defining a waitress should be easy—the job isn’t hard, or so I’m told. A waitress is a woman who works at a restaurant, and whose job it is to serve customers at their tables. When I consult the definition, I am provided with short sentences as working examples: “She works as a waitress”; “they asked the waitress for the bill”; “she plays the part of the sexy, blonde waitress.”
A waitress is a plate carrier, a server, simple enough. But what’s harder to define is the way I am treated in the role.
