Spectator Life

Sometimes a small detail in a news story tells you more than a months-long investigation splashed across the front page. ‘Starmer appears to realise that he needs to do more to connect with his party and has begun a new charm offensive,’ the Sunday Times reported. Some MPs have been invited for breakfast and ‘No. 10 has apparently purchased a new toaster to cater for the demand.’ There we have it, ladies and gentlemen. Keir Starmer’s secret weapon in his war against British decline: a few slices of Hovis and an awkward offer of jam. ‘Aerrr, are you planning to, um, support our Borders Bill? Oh, so sorry, we’ve got some Utterly Butterly somewhere. Morgan, would you mind looking in the kitchen?

Our economy is stagnating, our borders and our welfare state flung open to those who despise us. We once threw railway lines around the world and now struggle to build one to Birmingham. Free speech is under threat, and it’s almost impossible to get hold of a decent lettuce. I do not mean to be too gloomy. I hate those who think themselves virtuous for always looking on the glum side of life. I accept there is much to celebrate. We live longer and healthier lives. Children rarely die. People can read and books are cheap. In the veg aisle of the little Sainsbury’s Local on the new housing estate you find tarragon and pak choi and sourdough, and tomatoes raised somewhere better than Holland.

‘Live fast, die old’ ran the strapline to the David Brent: Life On The Road film a decade ago. The movie itself was a textbook example of how unwise it is to attempt to cash in on the earlier (read: much funnier) successes of your career. Not that Ricky Gervais gives a damn while residing in his Hampstead mansion, of course. As increasingly pompous as his persona now is, I’ve finally reached a place where I know I’d rather have a night out with Brent than with his creator. There would be pathos. But there would at least be lager. Although I’m certain that a 2025 London ‘big’ night out with Slough’s finest former paper salesman would almost certainly take place at the Hard Rock Café.

I don’t know how many teenagers are given a frying pan for their 18th birthday. Perhaps my friends managed to intuit my food-writing future, despite my party piece back then being an extremely tomato-heavy bolognaise. Twenty-five years on, having somehow survived university halls of residence and flatmates using – the horror – metal utensils in it, that beautifully thick-bottomed frying plan lives at the bottom of an excessively large pile of frying pans, well past its best. But even as the pile threatens to get taller than the cupboard, I can’t bear the idea of throwing it away. I’ve loved and lost too many pans to count. I had a little milk pan, perfect for a single portion of porridge, until the surface started flaking off.

My quince tree thrives – proof that nature can overcome adversity. I planted it, and I am a bad gardener. Childhood hours spent waiting for my mother to finish watching Gardeners’ World left me with fond memories of Percy Thrower, but in place of horticultural skill I inherited indolent incompetence. Our garden did not seem so big when we moved from a flat a decade ago. But for most of the second half of the 20th century, the former occupant of our house had been a keen gardener. Carefully planted beds, it turns out, need care, which I have failed to provide. Each spring I wage a blood feud with ground elder, to the point where I hallucinate its leaves.

How do you drink a £37,000 whisky? That’s what I’m wondering as I make my way to Speyside to try the Glenrothes estate’s latest release, the Glenrothes 51. I don’t mean physically; I assume they’re going to pour it into an appropriately expensive glass for me, and I haven’t yet met a whisky I don’t enjoy in some way. I mean: how do you get your head around consuming something so expensive? I’m the sort of person who squirrels nice things away for a rainy day, and doesn’t eat the expensive chocolate bar because it seems like a waste. How do I square this with drinking a dram that must cost £1,300?

The mood music around pubs lately has felt as if it were being played by the band on RMS Titanic while the industry goes down with the loss of all hands. Even before the body blow of the pandemic, people were generally drinking less, and more of what they did drink was from supermarkets. Then the spike in energy costs was particularly grave for publicans, who need to heat large rooms for 12 hours a day. Most recently, in the last Budget, they faced a hike in employer national insurance contributions, a parallel minimum wage rise and cuts in business rates discounts – with all of this offset by an insulting single ‘penny off a pint’ reduction in draught beer duty.

The name can’t help but invite mockery. When Sainsbury’s launched its ‘Taste the Difference’ range 25 years ago this autumn, I wasn’t alone in noting that the phrase almost begged for a question mark at the end. But the British public are (mostly) more concerned with dinner than with sarcasm. The Taste the Difference range now extends to more than 1,200 products, from Pugliese Burrata with Sunsoaked (sic) Tomatoes and Bacon Wrapped Halloumi Sticks with Hot Honey Drizzle to Anya Potatoes and Nocellara Del Belice Olives. I admit to having eaten most of the above products, despite being a keen ‘cook from scratch’ sort who loves to ramble around Electric Avenue in Brixton to buy fish, veg and lamb chops.

I’m driving a dirt road in the wilds of central Sardinia. And I mean what I say by ‘wilds’. This rugged region in the sunburned Supramonte mountains was called ‘Barbagia’ by Cicero – i.e. ‘land of the barbarians’ – as even the Romans never quite managed to subdue it. Centuries later it became famous for bandits, kidnaps, local mafias – and casu marzu, the infamous ‘Sardinian maggot cheese’. I turn to my resourceful local guide, driver and interpreter, Viola, as she negotiates the olive groves and goat tracks. ‘Do you really think we will find casu marzu?’ My voice is slightly falsetto with tension. Viola turns: ‘I hope so, there is a pretty good chance. And maybe we will find something even more unusual…’ But first, let’s rewind 30 years.

There have long been Le Creuset fanatics. During lockdown, John Lewis reported that sales of Le Crueset increased by 90 per cent. And last year, a sale at a Hampshire outlet store brought a crush of hundreds of people; police even had to attend. Then there was the affair of Pauline Al Said over the summer, a Le Creuset burglar who boasted that she was Britain’s poshest thief. Pots and pans have become part of a competitive aesthetic portfolio that not only indicates your degree of stylishness as a cook, but your attitude to the latest trends in wellness and health. The ideal kitchen is now free of ‘forever chemicals’, and exclusively stocked with glass, wood, cork, ceramic, cast iron and stainless steel.

My partner’s mother, Enid, introduced me to duck with 40 cloves of garlic. She told me it originated from an old Jewish Ashkenazi recipe, although the French claim it’s theirs. It doesn’t matter because it’s delicious, with most of the cloves shoved under the crispy duck skin, permeating the meat, and several pushed into the cavity along with half an orange. Because it is cooked long and slow, and the duck is very fatty, the garlic turns mellow, sweet and extremely aromatic. When I asked Enid if she counted the cloves, she held out both hands and said, ‘about this much’. That opened my eyes to the world of garlic as a primary ingredient rather than just a supporting player: I learned that cooking garlic in certain ways can completely transform its flavour.

Long Compton is in the Cotswolds, but to the east, where there are no boutique hotels or shops selling artisan candles to tourists. Banburyshire and its surrounds are actual countryside. Fields roll away in the manner Germans call Kulturlandschaft, meaning landscape shaped by centuries of human care. This is the sort of country that makes people write poetry about hedgerows and choral music about sheep: lovely to live in but, by long British tradition, a dismal place to dine out. Discovering a truly great restaurant in Long Compton – population 764 – feels like finding in rural Warwickshire one of those bucolic la France profonde dining experiences that seemed nostalgic fantasies even when M.F.K Fisher described them.

I love Roquefort, having been introduced to it when I was 16 by our French exchange student Geneviève, whose father was a producer of the cheese. She brought some in her luggage, wrapped in many layers of brown paper so that the unique, pungent smell wouldn’t invade her clothes. My parents, gourmet cooks and gourmands, immediately started incorporating Roquefort into their menus. Back then it was difficult to find a blue cheese on the US east coast (although Wisconsin had been making one for centuries). When a food shop called Amanda’s opened in Westport, Connecticut, my Swedish mother would drive the seven miles from where we lived to buy Roquefort and other international gustatory goodies (kuminost – a mild Swedish cheese with cumin – was also on her weekly list).

Given that almost 1.7 billion litres of beer were poured in British venues in the past year, you’d think we’d be able to keep the country’s biggest beer festival afloat. It is therefore sad to hear that the Great British Beer Festival will be taken off tap next year, its organisers claiming it can no longer afford to get its round in. ‘In the simplest of terms, we did not get enough people through the doors to cover costs,’ according to Ash Corbett-Collins, the chair of the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra), who may well be ruing the decision to move the festival to Birmingham, cited by more sceptical beer fans as a hindrance to the event’s footfall. It’s not the only skunky smell around Britain’s leading beer champions, who appear increasingly tired and emotional.