The Art of the Snack Solo

The discerning way to use up leftovers

SOME of the best meals are eaten standing up.

I don’t mean that hot dog you ate, stomping at the fair; or that pie you wolfed down on the terrace (delicious though it was). I certainly don’t mean anything you ate walking down the street - a despicable habit.

I mean the meals you ate standing in your own kitchen, in the warm - the meals that started as something modest but snowballed into a feast. The meals that followed their own peculiar logic, the meals that in a sense ate you - and you only went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee.

That’s how it usually starts for me, anyway.

I’m peckish. It’s perhaps 12:15pm, clearly too early for lunch (I like to lunch on the later side) but within a respectable smackerel zone. I find myself wandering to the kitchen to make coffee, for a little energy bump. But as I’m waiting the kettle, I find myself nibbling on a few walnuts I keep in a jar on the shelf - a peril of open shelving.

I might take a spoon to the peanut butter. I might squeeze honey direct onto that spoonful. And then I remember there’s some goat’s cheese in the fridge. And while inspecting that luminous grotto, I remember: yes. There were a few slices of Iberico ham in here too. Out comes the cheese. Out comes the ham. Down too comes the little jar of pecans on the shelf and here is perfect little amuse-bouche. Am I going to drizzle a little extra virgin on there? I am. Delicious. Ah but what’s that peeping out of the fruit bowl?

And now I am into my stride. A fig is plucked. The cornichons emerge. The cheeses multiply. Little packets of oatcakes are opened. Maple syrup is experimentally poured. Sometimes I take felicitous care of these mouthfuls: delicate little pinches of sea salt, careful slithers of parmesan. Sometimes it’s all done with more gusto. I’m popping cherry tomatoes off the vine. I am yanking limbs from last night’s chicken, basting it with mayonnaise and sriracha and chasing it with grapefruit juice don’t tell anyone straight from the carton. An olive enters a Hula-Hoop. A Rosita is mouth-mixed. The appetites have taken control.

Now. The thing that distinguishes this sort of odyssey from mere lunch is its improvisatory nature. It cannot be planned. You must channel the spirit of the aesthete Des Esseintes, playing his spirits-organ in JK Huysman’s À Rebours (discussed at some length in my Bijou post), an amazing solo instrument comprised of innumerable spirits and liqueurs arrayed in tiny cups: “Des Esseintes would drink a drop here, another there, playing intense symphonies to himself, and providing his palate with sensations analogous to those which music dispenses to the ear.”

Only remember: you are not composing anything so formal as a meal; or even the sonata of a sandwich. You are Keith Jarrett in Cologne, 1975, with a few snatches of melody in your head and an ocean of feeling in your stomach, seeing where the mood takes you. Of course, it takes a lifetime of learning to perform a really accomplished snack solo. Jarrett used to sleep under the piano as a youth, the better to appreciate his instrument. But take heart: you’ve already had a lifetime of practise, eating. You’ve been doing it every day, I would hope! So, much as the pianist finds herself reverting to the good old ii-V-I… or the doubled-octave in the left hand… so there are certain combinations, certain structures that the snack soloist falls back on.

The first thing she needs is a base. A fresh baguette it obviously terrific. Crackers are more expedient: the Scottish oatcake, the Swedish rye cracker, the Carr’s water biscuit, I’m partial to those corn thin too sometimes. These are excellent items to have on hand.

Then there are the great spreadables. Cream cheese, peanut butter, paté, humous, the recherché likes of nduja or dulce de leche - because don’t imagine that this cannot be done with pudding too. In fact, I don’t think there are many better desserts than a Lotus biscoff, schmeared with the spreadable kind of goats cheese and topped with a Luxardo maraschino cherry dans son sirop. I improvised this one Thursday and have rarely looked back.

Nuts are obviously tremendous too - walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, pecans, hell, I’ve even got into brazils lately. These have the added bonus of bridging the savoury and the sweet too, because of course, the skilled snack soloist can modulate effortlessly through starter, main course, pudding, perhaps even back to cheese again, without the need for the formal course markers. Oh and there are few improvisations, savoury or sweet, that are not improved by a sprinkle or sea salt, a grind of pepper and either butter or olive oil or BOTH.

But here’s the thing. One you know the rules you can start to subvert them. You can move the barlines with a dusting of sumac; you can modulate from C# minor to C major by means of a breakfast radish. Do you know what I did the other day? I used a slice of Comté as the base, I spread it with cold goat’s butter and nduja and encrusted this with hazelnuts. Fucking hell! A cold slice of mortadella wraps a parcel of nuts and pickles. Wherefore may not a cold cut be a flatbread, a trifle a dip, a cheddar a chocolate bar? Why must the liquid raptures of cognac be confined to the glass? “…All this to love and rapture’s due; / Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?”

I was about to say that formal cooking of ingredients is verboten, though the freelance kitchen gadets - the microwave, the toaster, the air-fryer, the blow torch, these may be used. Hey, toys are fun. But then again I don’t want to apply rules. If cold jalfrezi scooped up in a milk bun with popadoms and pickled onions is more your jam - I’m happy for you. If you find yourself drinking neat maple syrup and swilling out with calvados - I won’t judge. The thing to remember is to keep your senses open to little splashes of colour and taste. See where they lead.

The Snack Solo tends to work best when there are copious leftovers - post barbecue, say, or in the aftermath of a takeaway. But Christmas is clearly where the real work can be done. There are sausage rolls in that fridge for goodness sake, there is a carcass just chilling, there’s some Nutella and salted cashews and an open bottle of Sauternes. In the evening, the Snack Solo will take full flight. A minor cheese meandering will modulate quite happily through roast redux and into the brandy butter and then come back around again to the originating cheese. Part of me wonders if a whole meal couldn’t be constructed in this way, a genial group improvisation around the kitchen island, a riot of Chantilly and marshmallows.

Something to aspire to, perhaps.

Anyway, Merry Christmas.