We’re visiting the in-laws and enjoying their hospitality immensely. Only my son finds it wanting, constantly demanding biscuits from his grandparents with the urgency you or I might flag down a paramedic in the middle of a cardiac event. “LIGA!” he shouts, referring to a delightfully bland brand of baby biscuits he adores, common here but not in England. We scold him for being uncouth, but have yet to make a dent in this practice, not least since his doting hosts indulge him every time.
You might have seen that recent map of Europe, which coloured dark blue those places you’d always receive food at someone’s house, and dark red those places where you never would. Southern Europe, from Spain across the Mediterranean and through to Turkey, was darkest blue, places where “receiving food at a person’s house” appears synonymous with “being force fed within seconds of arriving”. Scandinavia and the Netherlands were on the other extreme; hued in red so dark, you’d be better off eating an entire day’s worth of roughage before popping for a play date.
Most fascinating was the bifurcation of the UK and Ireland, with England and Wales in light red, denoting “unlikely to give food”, while Scotland and the entire island of Ireland light blue, asserting that hospitality there was altogether more food-based.
“Could there really be such a difference between our English cousins and us?” I thought, eating my third forced meal of the day during a trip to Ireland in which I have been fatted like a prize calf. Here, the base standard for hospitality is assembling a banquet within minutes of your arrival; cold ham and chicken, boiled eggs, breads, sliced beetroot, salad of all kinds, two types of coleslaw (normal and fancy) and often some sort of strange, cold, curried rice thing that comes with raisins for no reason. It is customary, indeed mandatory, for this to be presented with profuse apologies for the paucity of its offerings, despite the table in front of you being so overladen with food, it looks like the police have called a press conference to announce the haul from an illegal farmer’s market.
Everywhere the food map was posted, it was striking to read many perplexed comments from Scandinavian, Dutch and, yes, English people, defending the practice of withholding food to guests. What if hosts only have so much food, they said, or if the guest never asked?
In Ireland, the concept of asking for food in someone’s house is so outlandish as to be nigh-on unimaginable but, for the sake of science, I’ll make an attempt. Asking for food would be like asking to turn the heating on – roughly the social equivalent of setting fire to the clothes your host is wearing. Only among family or friends so firmly entangled in your social circle, that no one need ever learn of their disgrace once you leave, would such a thing be appropriate or even possible.
Perhaps it’s the Englishman in my son that makes him unafraid to make the implicit explicit, to be the squeaky wheel who gets the Liga. It puzzles me, yes, but I will attempt to respect this other culture, as he does ours. Those biscuits are from the Netherlands, after all. Were it not for them, Dutch children might never eat at all.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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