Sometimes the best food we eat isn’t the fanciest or the most expensive. Most of the time our most memorable meals are influenced by their context: the places they are eaten or the people they are eaten with.
The best cup of coffee I have ever had was on a cliffside in Italy, from a corridor café that sold coffee and crisps and nothing else. An espresso made from regular store-bought ground coffee, brewed on a stovetop and served by a jovial, leathery-looking Italian man who was probably too old to do anything else. But he sold good coffee cheaply, overlooking a sparkling sea.
Recently, it was a pork pie topped with apple. Not my first pork pie but probably my most memorable. It was eaten on the top of Binsey with my wife and child. That morning, we’d bought some lunch in Cockermouth (some mediocre pasties from a bakery). Knowing we would be climbing Binsey (the smallest wainwright, but our first carrying a baby), I bought a couple of pork pies topped with apple for our summit snack. I kept the pork pies wrapped in their brown paper in my jacket pocket until we reached the summit. The climb had been easy and a straight up grassy path littered with bracken, sheep and signs to keep dogs on leads. When we reached the trig point, bracing against the wind, we dived into the windbreaks built of piled stones. I opened the brown paper, unwrapping the pork pies with their sticky apple tops. Biting into them revealed the light pink solid pork of the filling. With the apple, the pork pies had no need for the jelly synonymous with pork pies and something that originally put me off them. We shared out our pies, giving crumbs of pork to both our dog and baby. To the north, we could just about see the Scottish border and all around us we could see hills, lakes and the views that make the English countryside rugged and beautiful.
This was by far the cheapest meal we ate on our holiday, but because it was eaten with a sublime view and the people I love, it was definitely the most memorable.
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