My friend was cooking me dinner. "Damn," she said, "I've forgotten the lemongrass!"
"Is it important?" I asked.
"It's not absolutely necessary but it's much better with lemongrass."
There are plenty of grocers nearby, most of which have fine arrays of both normal vegetables and wonderful exotic ones. They have to cater for several different communities and one of the wonders of multi-cultural London is that we all benefit from this. There was a chance that lemongrass would be for sale at one of these, even though it was 8pm on a Saturday night.
"I could go and see if I can find some lemongrass," I told her.
"That would be great."
"Er.... what does lemongrass look like exactly?"
"What? ..... Oh I see you're joking, you know what lemongrass is."
"Yeah, yeah, of course I know what lemongrass is..... Ha ha. I was joking. Ha ha. I am funny."
Of course I didn't really know what lemongrass looked like. I had a vague idea what it might be. I thought it looked more like grass than it looked like a lemon. Surely I could just go and ask if they had any lemongrass and they would know if they did or didn't. So if it turned out that I couldn't recognise it then all wouldn't be lost.
"Get fresh lemongrass though. It's better than dried," I was instructed, ".... but obviously if you can only get dried lemongrass then that will be OK. It's just not as good."
No possible room for confusion then.
The first shop I went to had all its fruit and vegetables in boxes on racks at the front. There were all kinds of weird and wonderful things there and helpfully their names and prices were written on bits of card stuck in the boxes. But tragically when it got to the herbs and little roots and grassy things this system broke down. There were neither prices or descriptions. And the grocer men were all inside and not on hand to help me.
What if I correctly picked lemongrass and it turned out to cost £500 a blade.
I suppose I could always say I hadn't been able to find any.
I picked up a little bundle of stuff that looked a bit like grass and which I thought might be lemongrass.
I was in a quandary: should I just buy this hoping it was lemongrass or should I ask the man inside if it was lemongrass first? If I asked then there was a chance that the grocer would laugh at me for my ignorance. "Lemongrass? No, that's Pineapple grass you idiot. Don't you even know what lemongrass looks like? Surely everyone knows that."
My masculinity would be challenged and this could be avoided by me just confidentally buying the grassy stuff and hoping for the best. The problem with this is if I took it home and it wasn't lemongrass then my friend would think I was an even bigger idiot. "What have you done? I asked for lemongrass, this is kumquatgrass. I thought you said you knew what lemongrass was. Surely everyone knows that."
I decided I had less to lose and more to gain by asking the man in the shop, who I was less keen to impress or sleep with.
I showed him the grass (I'd already sniffed it. It wasn't very lemony). "Is this lemongrass?" I asked quietly, not wanting any more people than necessary to find out that I didn't know what lemongrass looks like. He looked at it uncertain. He clearly didn't know either. Which meant there was at least one other person in the world who couldn't identify lemongrass (and also, if it wasn't lemongrass, he also couldn't identify whatever it actually was). And it was his job to sell groceries. What an idiot. I pitied him.
He shouted across to a man at the other counter and waved the little grassy bundle over. They communicated in one of the languages from the Indian sub-continent. I couldn't identify this either. It's a good job I turned down that offer to be on the quiz-show, "Can you identify these slightly exotic things?"
After a couple of exchanges he turned to me and smiled and said, "Chives".
Of course it was chives. Even a baby would know that. The advantage was now his. It didn't even matter that he hadn't known either. He knew that I should have known it was chives and not lemongrass. I was too flustered to even ask, "Do you do lemongrass? Dried would be less good, but still acceptable."
I just went on with my search, which proved to be grass-less. I was considering buying a lemon and picking some grass off of a verge somewhere and trying to meld them together, when my phone rang and my friend told me to hurry home as the food was ready.
"But I haven't found any lemongrass," I told her.
"It doesn't matter. It's too late now anyway."
I went back and ate the dinner, still none the wiser as to what lemongrass looks like. The food was delicious. I could only imagine how superb it would have been with the inclusion of some lemongrass or just some lemon and grass squeezed together.
