Spectator Life

The first time I tried the well-known Hungarian wine Tokaj, which I bought from an eastern European delicatessen in London, I was so taken with it that it quickly became a verb – and the expression ‘I was a bit Tokaj’d last night’ stuck. But I soon realised that there are so many wonderful versions of this wine that you will find one to suit every occasion, and a match for pretty much anything you eat. Options include bone dry, light as a feather, sweet, robust, and tannin-rich red. And I’m lucky enough to be drinking the dry variety here in Budapest. It has just a hint of honey, making it perfect with the dishes made with cheese and paprika sauces that are so popular across this landlocked nation.

We can thank Herbert ‘Herb’ Cobb McDonald for the modern-day all-you-can-eat buffet. Herb first introduced Las Vegas – and later the world – to this gastronomical abomination in 1946. The Buckaroo Buffet cost one dollar and promised ‘every possible variety of hot and cold entrees to appease the howling coyote in your innards’. The coyote of my innards has never been appeased by an all-you-can-eat buffet. On my last visit it was starved. Back at the table, the food smelt grey. I thought about all of the nice places I could have visited with £23 If John Hick can find God on a double-decker bus in Hull, I can find the answers to life’s biggest questions at the back of an all-you-can-eat global buffet.

I remember, vividly, when working at Raymond Blanc’s Michelin-starred Le Manoir, the moment the truffles were delivered. A frisson went round the kitchen staff as the napkin covering the precious morsels was dramatically whipped off. Physically inspecting the gnarled, knobbly nuggets was a right reserved for head chef alone. As a lowly pot-washer, I was confined to the back, neck craned for a glimpse. So I am not blind to the excitement and sheer theatre of the treasured truffle. I even like them. But why on earth have they taken over every restaurant menu, as plentiful as lashings of ‘EV’ olive oil and flaky sea salt? 2018-19 was when the truffle takeover first got going on the London restaurant scene. Then the rot quickly set in.

As Sober October comes to an end and we turn our attention to two months of forced festivities, it might be time to ask ourselves if these month-long periods of sobriety actually do anything. In short, I’ve found the answer is that they do. This year, I attempted Dry January. Why? For one simple reason: shame. There are few emotions in life more powerful and more potent than shame. And what is a hangover if not chemically-induced shame? The first time I got really drunk was at a house party. I was 15. My friend and I were new to alcohol and so we thought it clever to buy a litre of Disaronno Originale and eight pints of Kronenbourg. ‘Is that going to be enough?’ I asked. ‘Probably not,’ my friend said, ‘but we can always steal some more at the party.

It’s a bright autumn morning and I’m first through the doors. There are only two shops that can inspire such a disregard for my finances, and the other is Swedish. Today I find myself in Nisbets, and the first rule of Nisbets is not to bring a shopping list. If you’ve not heard of it, Nisbets is a catering supply shop, with outlets all across country. Every professional chef that has ever cooked for you will have spent a small fortune in Nisbets, some of it on their restaurant’s business card and likely even more from their own dwindling debit account. What is a hobby if not a means of spending all of your disposable income in ways that only make sense to a handful of other weirdos? Unlike online stores, buyers can go and fondle the utensils in one of their 26 shops.

Across vineyards in England and Wales, secateurs are being sharpened and buckets are at the ready as owners prepare for harvest. October is usually the month commercial vines give up their fruit before being whisked away to the winemaker–cum–alchemist who turns the juice into wine. As a former vineyard owner (I sold up in January) harvest was always a nervy time of year, enough to drive you to drink. It represents nine months of pruning, de-leafing, weeding, replacing vines, and chemical spraying (yes, pesticides), all assisted by the right amount of rain and sun at the right times. By October, the grapes have, hopefully, the optimum balance of acid and sugar to allow the winemaker to make a balanced, palatable wine with good body.

Sunday lunch is a bit like the Edinburgh festival. People make a big thing of it, it’s considered a British treasure, and I am meant to book it, go to it, and like it. But I don’t. If Edinburgh is forever associated in my mind with glowering edifices of grim dark stone, hostile chilly sun between spells of overcast cold skies, the worst comedy and theatre I have ever seen, and paying a king’s ransom for a nasty little room a 20-minute taxi ride out of town, then Sunday lunch is, for me, forever intertwined with desperately wishing to be somewhere, anywhere else. Maybe even the Edinburgh festival. Sunday lunch is what people traditionally do when they don’t much like each other, or at least don’t know how to talk to each other.

Foraging has become a sign of status rather than a lack of it and seaweed is perhaps the most abundant wild food of all. The alternative is mushrooms, but I’ve always thought fungus-hunting a bit too wild; the possibility of a first-class risotto being offset by the risk of death or, worse, expanded consciousness. Rotting seaweed is disgusting. My local newspaper in Cornwall regularly publishes complaints from tourists Caroline Davey, who trained as a botanist before becoming a forager, assures me that only three species of seaweed are poisonous and they are found only in deep water. They might conceivably wash up on the shore, but the basic rule of seaweed foraging is to avoid the stuff at the high-water mark – that’s all dead and decomposing.

They were loud, vivacious and gloriously un-PC.  Sometimes they seemed to be learning how to cook as they went, barely one step ahead of the viewer. It didn’t matter. If anything, it only made the BBC's Two Fat Ladies more watchable. And 25 years on – the last of the two dozen episodes pairing Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright aired on 28 September 1999 – I miss terribly their jaunty style of cooking, glass in hand. I don’t think I’m alone. Spectacularly and unexpectedly successful in their lifetimes – 70 million worldwide watched their programme over its four-year run, including many in the US – the internet has allowed them to find fresh admirers since their death.