Gastronomy Taxonomy

Chicken with apples and pecan nuts
 in a stilton cheese and cream sauce,
'50% Swaffle' and '50% Gromff'

My son William reminded me that my old friend, Dave 'Wiz' Ward from Halifax, classified all food on his plate by the relative proportion of  'Swaffle' and 'Gromff.'   It was Dave's contention that a good meal required a balance of 'Swaffle' and 'Gromff'.  Theoretically, a cream soup is all 'Swaffle' and requires the addition of crunchy croutons to provide the missing 'Gromff''.  

The concept is quite subtle in that some consumable ingredients are inherently swaffley, some are inherently gromffy and some are transcendental, moving between these mutually exclusive states of gastronomic being in response to the application of the chef's skills. For example; milk is inherently swaffley, it can be made thicker by churning to create cream, butter or cheese but essentially its still swaffley. You could freeze it to make a milk-ice lolly but give it a suck and you are still talking 'Swaffle'. Similarly; celery is inherently gromffy.  I suppose you could cook it forever and make a fancy celery puree. Excessive cooking and maceration might make it less gromffy but I believe that with celery, however rendered, there will always remain a faint echo of 'Gromff' on the palate.  Potatoes on the other hand are fully transcendental on both plate and palate.  Mash, broken potato, boiled, baked, roast, waffled, chipped and crisped represent the full  potato spectra from 'Far Infra-Swaffle' to 'Far Ultra-Gromff'.  No wonder potatoes are considered 'waffley' versatile and a British staple food!