I LEARNED TO LIKE EGGS

The Liquorice Diaries: I

As per the name of this blog, I am a big believer in the idea that you can train yourself to like things. If you feel so inclined, that is. It’s worth saying at the outset that I do not think people should be expected to eat things they don’t want to. Not liking something can be due to myriad complex reasons and I remember being forced to eat baked beans far too well to wish such horrors on anyone. But, where there is a will, there is often a way and in that spirit, in this pray-to-god-better year of 2021, I am resolving to learn to like liquorice.

Personally, I hate having a food dislike more than I have ever disliked a food (again, apart from baked beans). I hate feeling shut out of pleasures that others enjoy and when I see people getting excited over a bag of shining, pliant liquorice I feel wistful envy.

A friend of mine once told me that if you want to like something, you just have to eat it three times. I have to say, I don’t buy this - learning to like eggs was literally the work of years, learning to like whiskey on the other hand, literally the work of an afternoon - but there is something she said, about exposing yourself to a taste that rings true. I think it’s a bit like riding a bike. You have a go, you fall off, you think ‘oh goodness, how unpleasant’ and then, assuming the damage was not too great, you leave it an appropriate amount of time and have another go and another go until, one day, you can ride.

I should give a bit of context before we start. I definitely am not as much of a liquorice-hater as I used to be. I like fennel now. I have been known to eat aniseed (albeit by accident; it wasn’t terrible) and even learned to like slightly liquorice-y drinks. On the scale of liquorice, if 1 is baulks at the very mention of the stuff, and 10 is full-on Nigella, stroking her black treasure chest, on holiday in Denmark, I think I am a solid 2.5. I am somewhere on the path but, in 2021, I’m striking out more boldly. Who knows where I’ll be by December? Today, fennel; tomorrow, downing sambuca shots then smoking sticks of liquorice root, just for the thrill of it.

The next question is how to strike out? The Internet has a lot of thoughts, as it always does. The Unconventional Route has a blog entitled ‘My Black Liquorice Experiment’ which broke down the process into steps. These include not overdoing it and going for full-on submersion too early; ‘respecting you enemy’ and considering what it is that liquorice lovers see in it, and ‘surrounding it with friends.’ To this latter end, I have acquired some chocolate-coated liquorice balls. I say ‘acquired’ - they were a gift from our downstairs neighbour. In fact, I’m pretty sure they were a fortuitous re-gift because I don’t quite believe that people buy liquorice for basically-strangers. It’s a bold move.

I’ve been using these little balls as interval training, just trying one every so often and trying to chew it long enough for the chewy, black centre to have its moment. So far, so OK. Not too bad for the first month of the year, but I need to up my efforts. So, consider this post my public commitment, written to hold myself to account.