Apparently, a group of 20 so called ‘industry specialists’ have gotten their heads together and believe the idea to enforce all restaurants to put the exact calorific and nutritional value of each dish on every menu is a jolly good one. As you might expect, I beg to differ….

Mandatory nutritional labelling on menus would be the death toll to fresh food restaurants. Not putting a finer point on it but I have on average 16 individual dishes on my menu most which change every lunchtime and evening dependent on local produce.  Said produce, such as a whole lemon sole, don’t actually come in identical weights. Secondly, I cook to order and, shockingly, there are occasions when I put down my micrometer and add ingredients by eye.  Ok, so I could trim each lobster down to the same weight – sorry madam, I had to cut the last two fifths off as it was oversized -and yes, I suppose if a customer requested additional tartare sauce we could ring the food police so the offending person gets struck off the NHS for inciting obesity.

If I was required by law to quote calorific values with the threat of prosecution if it were incorrect, there are only two options open to me.  Continue to produce individual meals but with a nutritionalist and testing unit next to me to monitor each dish, then inform each individual customer of the nutritional content in return for a signed decloration of acceptance,  or, buy it all in vac packed portioned controlled mass produced packets with a longer ambient shelf life than my own and use it’s wraper as the menu. 

Even the Americans have taken this on board and have limited it to chain restaurants.  The likes of the burger giants, tavern steak houses and supermarket canteens, all of which have multiple outlets sourcing their food from one central mass food producer.  The sorts of places that we’re advised not to eat in too often and yet the government now want to turn every restaurant into. If I was a cynic, I’d wonder if this isn’t just a ploy to get us to all die young thereby ending the pension problem and the euthanasia issue with one well aimed frozen vegi nugget, whilst outwardly appearing to actually care about our health.

Surely, as customers we don’t need this.  If you have a dietary requirement, tell the waiting staff to tell the chef!  He/she, having made the dish, should be able to tell you not only what is in it, but might just be able to adapt to suit.  If they can’t, don’t eat there.  Where does it stop?  Do you really want your pint of beer to have a calorific label on it or your cream liqueur to admit the number of stabilisers contained within it?  At the end of the day we all know the chocolate cream gateaux is probably going to be more fattening then the fresh fruit salad – and if it isn’t, I for one wouldn’t want to know the amount of  chemical sweeteners I’d be shovelling down my throat!!!  

So, if you are still with me after reading the tirade, I suspect you might be interested in who the ‘industry specialists’ are.  Well, every single one of them are huge catering outlets all of which have central processing units.  Hmmm, I wonder, could they possibly be biased?

We’ve four different gins behind the bar so let’s start with the infamous Gordon’s.  Apart from being linked to an alleged adulterer, it’s probably the best known of the lot and certainly one of the oldest, made by a chap by the name of Alexander Gordon in 1769.  Distilled no less than 3 times, it’s made with a secret recipe of botanical herbs and the bottle cap bears the symbol of a boar’s head.  Apparently, whilst out hunting, one of the original Gordon clan saved the King of Scotland from a wild boar and in reward the king gave permission to use the head as the family symbol.  Jolly generous too, considering the Scots! 

Now, Tanqueray, first made in 1830 by the son of a vicar, is distilled even more times, four to be exact. Along with the ever present secret recipe gimmick beloved by all drinks manufactures, it also sports a crest; this time two battle axes and a pineapple – yep, you heard.  Obviously, the pineapple is the universal symbol of hospitality (no, really apparently it is!!) and the axes come from the family’s adventures with Richard the Loin Heart.   Tanqueray is also associated with famous seducers – it was allegedly the gin of choice at Rat Pack parties and at the White House were it was used in the first Martini made to celebrate the end of prohibition.  For some reason, I always think of James Bond when I drink Tanqueray – no idea why as I’m sure if there was a connection the marketing bods would have jumped on it…. 

Beefeater is the less assuming of the lot, it doesn’t enter the distillation race and is fairly straight laced in it’s claim to fame, namely being the only gin available on the maiden voyage of the QE2 to New York (it doesn’t mention anything about coming back!).  There’s no mystery to it’s bottle other than being named after the guards at the Tower of London and it’s even open about it’s ingredients – botanicals as everyone else seem to call them – bitter almonds, coriander seeds, orange peel, juniper…. The list goes on.  They don’t seem to give quantities though, so a tad difficult to replicate in the kitchen sink.

We’re back to secret recipes again with the last gin – Hendricks – the relatively new kid on the block – although it does give cucumber and rose petals, (Bulgarian to be precise) as some of it’s more usual ingredients.  A small batched gin, it’s made in a Carter Head Still, one of only 4 in the world (don’t tell me, the others are owned by Gordon’s, Beefeater……) which is looked after by a team of full time coppersmiths no less.  Apparently, the drink of the season was a tea time martini made with Hendricks, rose petal jam, lemon and mint served in a teacup martini glass (a ceramic tea cup stuck on a glass martini stem).  It doesn’t have a crest or a symbol but…. The bottle is based on an old apothecary’s jar to make you feel it will cure all ills. 

So, there you have it.  Only you can decide.  Should you transport yourself to the QE2, rub shoulders with the Rat Pack, sip it in a teacup or have it handy in your hipflask should you happen upon a wild pig.  Let your imagination run wild and before you know it you’ll have a favourite gin without even tasting a drop.  Surely that’s taking responsible drinking just a tad too far…..

Glancing over the shelves of my cookery library – I say shelves advisedly.  I have well over 300 cookery books plus an entire filing system of recipes cut from magazines.  Some call it a hobby, others mutter about obsession that has structural implications on the house.  Anyway, I happened across an adopted grandmother’s (another hobby of mine is collecting random people and adopting them as relatives…) set of 1960’s Cordon Bleu books. 

Now apart from the bizarre adverts and the odd advice column to encourage husbands how to boil and egg (both of which deserve a chapter all to themselves!) it got me thinking.  Many of the recipes contained rang little bells in my head in much the same way that current trendy Italian and Spanish ‘childhood’ food books must remind natives of happy al fesco meals en famile.  Admittedly, I don’t remember sitting eating Chicken a la king on a big table in the garden surrounded by siblings and a grandpa called Don something, but I do remember desserts inexplicably called Charlotte and Steaks called Diane. 

Deciding that 72 copies of the Cordon Bleu monthly just wasn’t enough, I ventured onto Amazon to see what other culinary gems where to be had.  Now, I’m not sure exactly why or even how people sell books at 1p (£2.75 for P&P but even so!) but thank the lord they do, as several days later books by the likes of Robert Carrier, The Family Circle and a Daily Telegraph book by someone called the Bon Viveur, drop onto the potwash table that poses as our letterbox.   

The Telegraph book was a revelation and if it wasn’t out of print, Tesco’s would be putting an injunction on it.  This delightful little tome wasn’t really a cookbook at all but a diatribe of how to select produce (and indeed grow it yourself which is bang on trend 60 years later), how to harang merchants who won’t let you handle their goods, a ‘you should value yourself more’ psychobabble section, how to brew the perfect cup of coffee without any ‘new fangled’ machinery, a glossary of terms and finally, a bit on cooking itself. 

The very best part was the passion in which it was written.  Take Delia, add a lot more than a soupcon of  Margaret Thatcher and a pinch of John Humphries and you might be partly there.  I finally went back to the introduction in the hope of finding a clue to the author this Bon Viveur of the late 50’s….

It was thus I found myself back in my kitchen making a ‘beche’  from scratch with dried bay leaves from our garden, fresh milk, black peppercorns thickened in the age old way with homemade butter, local flour and a lot of arm aching beating to avoid lumps  It was amazing.  I hate béchamel with a vengeance but this book, with it’s authoritarian instruction and it’s total self belief, had not only inspired me to make it but actual appreciate it’s lightness, buttery more-ishness and bayleafyness in a way I’d not tasted it before. 

Just a simple white sauce but it just forced me to pull the facial expression usually reserved for a really good pint.  Ok, so  I spoiled the moment and added some 1000 year old comte I happened to have lying in wait for such a moment and it ended up on the menu as a very proper old fashioned cauliflower cheese.   I did however steal some to feed the children the following day and for once actually felt like I’d reached omnipresent earth mother status. 

Oh and the author?  If Fanny had been looking down I’m sure she would have expected nothing less!

Take the old black forest gateaux for example.  It was a dark sumptuous sponge laced with kirsch marinated cherries, thick fresh cream and real chocolate until Sarah Lee got hold of it and turned it into the plastic frozen glace fake chocolate face flannel that we all know and hate.  But wait… that was before the deconstructed version…  Now, should you take your sanity into your own hands and dare to order there’s every likelihood you’ll end up with a pool of deconstructed chocolate (eg melted) with a deconstructed marinated cherry (eg a fresh one and an unopened bottle of kirsch – useful should you be short at home), a pile of flour, cocoa powder and a quails egg (cooked of course– we don’t want you suing for salmonella or something nasty again now do we?).

For Christ sake it’s a cake – the clue is in the title Black Forest Gateaux – honest look it up , it means CAKE!   And that’s another thing – some of them have even  deconstructed the name to BFG.  Sorry, but in my household that stands for Big Friendly Giant which when teamed with Black Forest Gateaux gives me nightmares similar to that of my first hearing of Peter and the Wolf.

Ok, so many of you out there will say I’m just jealous being a small unknown little pub restaurant chef with only a few gongs to my name, oh and a girl to boot (Once the face of one of our customers fell when after several meals she finally met me – Oh, I thought you were a proper man chef!), but I’m going to stick by my pans on this one.  There’s nothing wrong with extreme experimental cooking; of course you’re never going to eat it everyday and it’s great for special occasions, but why does it have to be a deconstruction?  Why not just take the responsibly for creating a new dish, admittedly based on flavour combinations that are well proven, rather than trying to say it’s something you clearly don’t want it to be recognised as being anyway?  Is it that as customers we are so out of our depth that if we don’t see some scrap of wording we recognise we just won’t try it.  Sort of a sneaky way of getting us to try out a dish and so educate our taste buds to new unexplored flavours… er sorry no, these are old tried and tasted flavour combinations….  So in fact a sneaky way of getting us to try eating new presentations and revelling in the artistry.  Not unlike munching on a prawn cocktail deconstructed into a sandwich whilst reading Elle Decoration….