The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Sausages, Chips and Peas with Yeats and the Boys Every Thursday Night

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W. B. Yeats with a plate of sausages, chips and peas (image courtesy of ChatGPT)

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

from 'The Stolen Child' by  W. B. Yeats

Every Thursday night we have sausages and chips. And by every Thursday night I mean every Thursday night. It started out as a bit of an accident, after I happened to make sausages and chips for a couple of weeks running on the same night, and now it’s been institutionalised as what we have on Thursday nights. The type of sausages varied at the start between pork, Lincolnshire or Cumberland, but now we’ve settled on Cumberland as our favourite. The Cumberland sausages caramelise better in the oven than the others, and also the flavour of the spice mix inside them is not too much for the children, and not too bland as it was with the pork sausage. I like Lincolnshire sausages but my issue with them was that they never really turned a lovely golden brown colour. I buy a six pack of Tesco Finest Cumberland sausages every week, and cook them all on a Thursday evening, at 200 degrees Celsius in a fan oven for about an hour, on baking paper, which means they don’t stick which they do with foil or no kind of layer on the tin at all. 

As for the potatoes, I buy Maris Pipers (or King Edwards) and cut them into quite large cubes, each one a little but bigger than a die, chuck them onto an oven tray, drizzle with sunflower oil – which I find means they can last for longer in the oven without burning – as opposed to veg oil, which while it still works hasn’t yielded the results of sunflower oil. I season liberally with sea salt and ground black pepper and bung in the oven, for pretty much exactly the same amount of time as the sausages. At one point, about 30 minutes in, I take the spuds and sausages out, and turn them all over: the spuds I turn with a fish slice, scraping them off the tin, and the sausages I turn with the help of a desert spoon and the scorched tips of my fingers. I then put them back in until they’re ready, i.e. the potatoes are crispy looking, and the sausages are cooked to the point of burning. Is there anything worse than an undercooked sausage? I like a deep colour on the outside of the sausages and find the fat they release in cooking lends them a lovely sheen when transferred to the plate to serve. 

In the intervening time, I will generally have tried to do all manner of household chores I’d been putting off such as loading/unloading the washing machine, sweeping, wiping surfaces, doing the dishes and putting them away, setting the table. I’ll ask the boys whether they want peas or beans with their dinner, and their answer changes week to week, but I’d say that peas, petit pois to be exact – cooked from frozen in a bowl of water in the microwave for about three minutes – win out.

Now, this is not fancy food, I know, and it requires little skill, apart from dicing potatoes and putting sausages on a tray which, last time I checked, aren’t really skills. However, knowing when  something is cooked and when it is not, I’d say, is a skill. Too often, I think, people generally undercook food and I find that leaving something in the oven, such as sausages or chips or apple crumble just 10-15 minutes longer can elevate a dish from okay to something much better than okay, generating better texture, colour and most importantly flavour. I’m not trying to say that putting sausages in the oven for an extra ten minutes turns me into Francis Mallman – a pioneer of charring food for extra flavour – or that the way I dice the potatoes encompasses the idea of ‘the gesture’ as espoused by Alan Passard, however maybe there’s a little bit of both of their ideas in here.

At any rate, what results is essentially a dish of meat and two veg which all of us sit around the table, which I lay with place mats, cutlery, drinks  and condiments in the shape of English mustard for me and mayonnaise – Heinz or Tesco own brand if you must know – I just think they've got more flavour than Hellman's – and some ketchup, which again is for me. I treat myself to a can of Diet Coke, Rory has an apple juice and Gus has water. It’s a simple meal, easily prepared, easily cooked – thanks to the oven – and well eaten by all of us, even if Gus does try to escape from the table at times, and the space under his seat is a Jackson Pollock of peas by the end.

We try to sit together as much as possible at the table, but it’s not always easy and on other week nights invariably they sit at the island with either me or his mother rushing about. Thursday nights though, like Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, are non-negotiable, we all sit down and eat together. As my wife works late on Thursday nights, it’s always just me and the boys, so I sit at the head of the table flanked by a son on each side. As soon as I say the dinner is ready they’re both up at the table like a shot, and when they don’t arrive it doesn’t take them long to twig on that they’re missing out. While this meal is basic, and cheap, it brings us together, father and sons, and we sit and chat, nonsense usually, and that’s usually instigated by me, or there are other times, when we’ve all been so consumed in our eating that any one of us could look up to realise we haven’t spoken in minutes. 

To say that it’s the happiest point of my week would be about right, apart from, perhaps, when Gus interrupts it by needing his potty, or Rory mysteriously falls off his chair which he has a habit of doing. There are moments like that, moments of peace, contentment, safety, security, as a father which can only be summoned up by sitting down together and eating. When we sit there on Thursday nights together, I feel like we could well be tapping into some primitive sense of the hunter-gatherer feeding his young, or something like that, even though outwardly it’s just dinner, meat and two veg bought from Tesco and thrown into the oven. And I sit there eating with them, and I wonder to myself as ever where the time goes: week on week they  grow, they eat at the table with me and they grow, and it’s the happiest of times sitting there looking at our reflections in the blackened glass door, blackened by December’s long nights, but there’s also a bitterness to it, of the time passing, the sweetness of peas and sharpness of mustard.

When I think of Yeats poem, then – 'Come away, O human child!/ For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand' – there is a feeling of wanting to hold those moments in your hand, to protect the children from growing up, but knowing that’s not possible as much as you can try. Like many parents, I worry: I worry about social media, artificial intelligence, war, the economy, missing the bin collection, the car, the house, the bills, have I filled in their school reading log, etc. But the weeping in Yeats’ poem taps into something beyond all of that, something that Wendell Berry describes as ‘forethought of grief’. To be alive in the world comes with a price, but as Derek Mahon writes in his poem 'Everything is Going to Be Alright', ‘there is no need to go into that’.

There is no need to go into that, for now at least, and at least not on Thursday nights, sitting at the table with my boys, drinking my black sugary drink, and eating sausage, chips and peas, with mustard and mayonnaise and ketchup.