From Cornish pasties to Slovenian potica, food is a language that everyone understands

Food is an international language: an Esperanto that we all speak pretty fluently, for in the end everyone has to eat. But dialect words are also involved, and sometimes these are a little harder to translate. Last month, in Slovenia, where I was running a writing workshop, I found myself having to explain not only the meaning of the word pasty, but also the various reasons why the appearance of such a thing in a story might be an indicator of social class or even of character. “The author could have had Keith eat a sandwich,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt. “But he went for a pasty instead because he wants to reveal Keith’s masculine needs to the reader. Basically, Keith is the kind of man who feels himself to be woefully deprived unless he has a hot lunch.” (I know. Eat your heart out, FR Leavis.)

All cultures have portable dishes: in this sense, the pasty comes with an in-built universality, one my students grasped immediately (or at least they did once Google provided us with a picture). Then again, made properly, the Cornish pasty is also highly specific. Its recipe, as we know, is not to be messed with, and here’s where things got trickier. Keith, the bloke in the book we were talking about, is an old-school, pedantic type, which may be another reason why his usual lunch appeals to him; he gets to pass judgment on it as well as eat it.

But I was wary of getting in too deep, ingredients-wise, fearing any teacherly authority I’d so far managed to accrue may disappear in as long as it took me to say “potatoes, but not carrots” (let us not even mention swede). In the end, I limited myself to pointing out that Keith keeps a hand-held vacuum cleaner in his car, the better to deal with any pasty-induced crumb emergencies. At this, everyone laughed because male car-crumb neuroticism is the same the world over.

Away from the classroom, some post-Brexit minds in Ljubljana have turned quizzically to British gravy. I was smilingly asked about it more than once – questions that led to a kind of existential crisis on my part (gravy is essential to my happiness, and yet, somehow, it is both hard to explain and a little shaming). People also wanted to know why we in the UK make so free and easy with the word pudding, using it to describe both a course, and more specific dishes; alarmingly, everyone had heard of spotted dick, a dish I strongly suspect is becoming international shorthand for our self-elected parochialism. But though I may have wobbled in the face of my hosts’ European sophistication and wondrous English, in truth, I relished all these enquiries. Food, as I have reason to remember every time I travel alone to a far-off place, makes conversations with strangers not just possible, but easy; via discussions of baking and the making of stew, other thornier aspects of life (politics, mainly) may be tackled, even if only obliquely.

In any case, I had plenty of questions of my own. When the fish you’ve ordered for dinner in a medieval town called Škofja Loka tastes so fantastically earthy, you want to know where it came from (answer: from a river seven miles down the road). When a bowl of ice-cream arrives, and it tastes of tarragon, you want to know if this is unusual (answer: no, tarragon is almost always used only in sweet dishes in Slovenia). People like to be asked about food, and the stories they tell about it, full of pride and wistfulness, is the kind of patriotism anyone can get behind.

Strange, too, to register how quickly longing is induced – for foods you’d never heard of a week ago. In Ljubljana, I ate two things I really liked. The first was a bowl of jota, a bean-rich soup that comes with fat slices of smoked sausage. The second was potica, a rolled pastry that may be filled with walnuts, poppy seeds, curd cheese or (yes) tarragon. Both were delicious, and pleasingly novel to me; I love to try new things. But back in London, international capital of exotic foods, I can find no Slovenian (and very few Balkan) restaurants, and potica cannot even be bought online. Result: I miss them both already.