Pick the spot and boss the new picnic
All of Max Halley’s sentences end with either a massive, joyful exclamation mark, or a boom of laughter.
The London-based sandwicher is the proprietor of cult restaurant Max’s Sandwich Shop – and has now decided to take on the state of the picnic, with his new cookbook Max’s Picnic Book, co-authored with Ben Benton.
Don’t get him wrong, Halley absolutely loves a picnic, but he reckons the time has come: it “needs a hand. It’s become this sort of Sound Of Music, Mary Berry’s birthday party, chintzy thing covered in rose-tinted goo, when lunch on a train is a picnic! Lunch in the motorway service station car park is a picnic! Lunch at your desk is a picnic!” he rages jovially. “And these are all opportunities for deliciousness that we too often let pass us by!”
The book itself is a little incongruous, surrealist and goofy at first – it features a meat trifle, a picnic dedicated to the sausage, one picnic menu is ‘hosted’ by Mary Berry and Hunter S. Thompson, and another by Ringo Starr and Debbie McGee. But as you start reading and Halley’s radiant enthusiasm seizes you, it begins to make a whole lot more sense – and more importantly, makes you question the very notion of traditional picnicking.
The problem, Halley says, is when it gets to the food portion of the picnic. “We often accept substandard things just because it’s a picnic.”
We need instead to look at picnics differently. “We need to think about how good a friend of ours the thermos flask really is, and why aren’t we putting tinned beef, consommé and supermarket tortellini into a thermos flask and having that at our desk for lunch? I mean, that’s picnicking like a boss.”
A picnic, he adds, isn’t about “bunting and jumpers for goalposts and homemade ginger beer. It’s about eating something delicious in any place that is not your dinner table.
“We’re told that to do a picnic properly, you have to have all your stuff in a wicker basket. And yet, [we know] they’re not fit for purpose. A tote bag is way better for carrying stuff; all your bottles aren’t going to fall over; it doesn’t jangle in quite as annoying a manner; and a tote bag never ripped anyone’s jumper!” Halley continues passionately. “[The picnic’s] been sort of co-opted and become something it isn’t.”
Completely by accident, Halley appears to have written the book at just about the best time ever to write a book about picnics – the pandemic has made it practically mandatory, and pretty much the only way to socialise (restrictions allowing).
The book is a nudge to make those moments sat on park benches a little more exciting.
“I really do think cooking is one of life’s great providers of joy,” he says, and hands down, a Max Halley picnic is a picnic you want to be at.
