I asked my local greengrocer for a couple of blood oranges last weekend. They were to go with an orange cake I’d baked for some left-wing friends who were coming over — a nice left-wing cake, I thought. No flour or butter in it (both right-wing ingredients, historically), just ground almonds, eggs, sugar and oranges. A cake eaten in parts of Spain which were implacably opposed to the Falangists, and also enjoyed in Morocco which is, de facto, a left-wing place because it’s in Africa. Or that’s what I thought at first. Then I noticed a line in the recipe that said I had to examine the cracked eggs with a magnifying glass to make sure there were none of those tiny red bits of embryonic chicks which you sometimes get with eggs. That’s a bit scrupulous, I thought, but didn’t get why it was so scrupulous.
Turns out it was a Sephardic Jewish recipe for Passover and my left-wing friends wouldn’t touch it — this cake was directly implicated in the oppression of Palestinians, occupying their lands, building large walls across the country, machine-gunning Turkish peace flotillas etc, shouldn’t be consumed and shouldn’t be given tenure in British universities. I might as well have made a Linzer Sachertorte, Hitler’s favourite — except I had no apricot jam. And then there was the problem with the blood oranges. ‘They’re out of season,’ the greengrocer said. ‘Also, you’re not allowed to call them blood oranges any more. You have to call them blush oranges.’ I wondered about this, thinking maybe it was a racist thing — as in yo, blud oranges, ras-claart motherf***er — a perceived slight at people from an African-Caribbean background. But that wasn’t it.
Apparently the vigilant EU has decided that you can’t call them blood oranges because there’s no real blood in them and people might be confused, believing that they’d bought an orange/black pudding hybrid and ending up disappointed. I assume they’ll get around to breadfruit soon, there being no bread in them. And maybe Conference pears. ‘I expected these pears to wear cheap suits with plastic nametags and gather together in a modern hotel to discuss marketing strategies, but they just sat there in the bowl, mute, green and stupid. And with disquietingly abrasive skins.’
I wonder if the EU should get around to renaming coconuts, too, because they’re causing problems. Perhaps we should simply ban them altogether, to avoid dispute. A Bristol City Council member, Shirley Brown, has just been found guilty of racial harassment for having called a council colleague a ‘coconut’. She was given a conditional discharge by the court and told to pay legal costs of about £620. Those are the costs as decided by the court; my guess is they are a massive underestimate of the real cost to the public, because this ludicrous farrago has been dragging on for 18 months.
Ms Brown is a Liberal Democrat councillor and, as it happens, black. During a debate about the need to cut the budget for a bunch of fatuous anti-slavery ethnic minority council programmes, Shirley called her Conservative Asian opponent, Ms Jay Jethwa, a ‘coconut’. By which she meant that Ms Jethwa was black on the outside and white on the inside — i.e., while she may appear to be a member of an ethnic minority she nonetheless espouses the views of the corrupt imperialist white hegemony. The corresponding term in the US is, I believe, an ‘Oreo’, after the popular biscuit snack in which a soft white fondant centre is sandwiched between two crisp brown layers of chocolate biscuit. A bit like a Gypsy Cream, then — for those of you who can remember Gypsy Creams. But you can’t buy Gypsy Creams any more because of the supposed racial slight in the name towards people from Britain’s vibrantly sensitive travelling community. ‘We don’t eat coconut-based confectionery, it’s not part of our culture!’ You can, however, buy Romany Creams, instead. Except only online, from South Africa. But I digress again.
Ms Brown, you may think, deserved all she got from the court and maybe deserves more besides. She sounds perfectly obnoxious, not to mention a bit thick, and one hopes that she will lose her council seat at the next local election, but I cannot understand why she was prosecuted at our expense, nor that what she said could be counted as racist, per se. Her attack upon the sensible Ms Jethwa was directed not at her race, but at her values, as she perceived them. I suppose you could argue that because Shirley Brown expected a different political position from Ms Jethwa on account of her being Asian then that carried within it a racist assumption. But that is surely stretching the law to a silly extreme.
I can remember being on the panel of some media event about ‘diversity’ when the incalculably smug, dwarfish, Channel 4 newsreader Krishnan Guru-Murthy described a black member of the panel as being a ‘useful idiot’ for not espousing the views you might have expected him to espouse on account of him being black. Should we prosecute Krishnan too? I don’t see any difference at all. I can see why you might want to spit on Krishnan’s shoes and break his glasses, but not waste taxpayer’s money taking him to court. Are we not mature enough, as a multiracial democracy, to be a little more measured in our response to such puny slings and arrows? Is the prosecution of Ms Brown what was intended by our lawmakers when they drew up the amendments to the 1986 Public Order Act, amendments which compel us all to love and respect one another, never say anything denigrating about Islam and never eat biscuits which might offend the people camped out on that common land at the bottom of the road and which they’re busy concreting over before the planning authorities get involved? Free the Bristol One, even though she’s an objectionable idiot.
A nice right-wing cake for summer
Put two large ripe oranges, uncut, into a pan of boiling water and simmer for three hours. Take out and leave to cool overnight.
Next morning cut the oranges up into small chunks, rind, pith and all, and get your wife to remove the pips with a knife. Blend 260g of caster sugar with seven eggs and two or three drops of vanilla essence. One by one add the chunks of orange to this mixture and continue blending. Then add 280g of ground almonds and blend like you have never blended before, for ages.
Butter a 20cm spring-sided cake tin, pour in the batter, scatter lots of caster sugar over the top and bake for an hour or so in a preheated oven at 180°C, until the top is golden brown and an inserted knife comes out clean. Take out, leave to cool, drench the top with icing sugar, serve with whipped cream and a salad of blood oranges.
Offer ends in:
