Read­ing the New Yorker the other day, I came across the fol­low­ing line (sub­scrip­tion required) from chef Heston Blu­menthal (renowned for using the lab tech­niques of food sci­ence for lux­ury cater­ing rather than mass pro­duc­tion). Blu­menthal was writ­ing about grow­ing up in the gast­ro­nomic wil­der­ness of 1970s Britain:

…a time when olive oil was avail­able in Bri­tain only at the chemist’s — for put­ting in your ears rather than in a pan.

The phrase soun­ded rather familiar…

Had I read it in the Guard­ian?

For most of the 20th cen­tury in Bri­tain, olive oil was some­thing you bought in the chem­ist and then stuffed in your ears with cot­ton wool. Guard­ian, 2002

Or was it the Inde­pend­ent?

Writ­ing at a time when the only olive oil you could get came from Boots and was inten­ded for soften­ing ear wax, [cook­ery writer Eliza­beth David] inveighed against post-war Brit­ish cuisine… Inde­pend­ent, 2000

There seemed to be an Eliza­beth David con­nec­tion. But it wasn’t the Sunday Her­ald…

In those days olive oil was hardly fash­ion­able. In Bri­tain it was unknown except as a medi­cine, sold in small phar­ma­ceut­ical bottles for treat­ing bunged-up ears. Sunday Her­ald, 1999

Or the Irish Times:

When I was a girl, olive oil was for put­ting in your ears and you got it from the chem­ist. Irish Times, 1999

The New Yorker itself wasn’t new to the idea…

Before Eliza­beth David … olive oil could be found only at the phar­macy. New Yorker, 1998

And still it seemed to pre-date this in the Lon­don Times:

Time was when olive oil in Bri­tain was only sold at chem­ists, and used for clean­ing children’s ears. The Times, 1995

There are many more examples, take this web­site Q & A, from a Brit­ish chef:

Q: Do you think food in the UK has changed for the bet­ter since the days of Duck with Orange and huge help­ings of Black Forest Gâteau?

A: The UK has improved tre­mend­ously since the late 70s and 80s, not so long ago we could only buy Olive oil from the chem­ist, mainly to stick in your ear…

You could at least blame Wiki­pe­dia. Its entry on Eliza­beth David was altered on 20 Janu­ary, 2006 to note that:

Many of the ingredi­ents were unknown when the books were first pub­lished, and David had to sug­gest look­ing for oil in phar­ma­cies where it was sold for treat­ing earache.

My point?

Our tech­no­lo­gical abil­ity to dis­cover the repe­ti­tion of these tropes serves to illus­trate the frailty of an indi­vidual writer’s memory, the feeble­ness of edit­or­ial con­trols and the over­whelm­ing value­less­ness of purely “lit­er­ary” writing.

That’s all.