Julie Bindel

I was recently in a café that promoted its salads as being served with ‘low-fat dressing’. I couldn’t possibly imagine what that might be: no olive oil? That stuff you spray on the pan when on some god-awful calorie-controlled diet? It turned out to be bottled – bought in from a supermarket – and contained lots of yoghurt, vegetable oil and dried herbs. I ordered a ham sandwich. The very basis of any salad dressing is a good-quality, fruity, preferably first-press or at least virgin olive oil. All the other ingredients are up for grabs, and can even be the subject of fairly robust arguments – at least in my house. My partner Harriet was first taught how to dress a salad by her father, during a holiday in Italy.

It smells, very badly. And even after decades of complaints, it seems Parisians still consider themselves too chic to pick up after their dogs. Taxis are a nightmare. The traffic makes central London seem like a village in Ireland. Uber drivers park as far away as possible from the designated pick-up point, fail to answer messages or calls, then charge a fortune in waiting time. The expense is phenomenal. For three coffees, one mint tea and a croissant that had the texture of a carpet slipper, I was charged more than £30. And don’t get me started on the coffee: if Paris is the home of café culture, shouldn’t it also be that of good coffee? Wrong! It usually tastes like recycled dishwater, or as if it’s been dredged from the bottom of the Seine.

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.

Honey enjoys almost superpower status. It is credited with healing viral infections, cuts, hay fever and insomnia, to name but a few of honey-curing maladies. On a regular basis, a particular honey is discovered that bodybuilders swear by, or religious leaders have considered akin to holiness. I had never been keen, considering it an overly sweet inconvenience of a food: however fancy the spoon used to dispense it, it somehow always ends up on my hands (and my hair) before it reaches the yoghurt. I have tended to stick with a very good quality dark brown sugar when in need of something to take the bitter edge off English strawberries.

I will never forget the horror of walking into the breakfast room, jet-lagged to hell, in a hotel in Chicago, looking for coffee and a sugar hit to wake me up. I was hit with the stench of barbecue, in waves. It was being deliberately wafted through the ventilation system. Apparently this is to help get the appetite going, but it had the opposite effect on me. As I discovered during that trip, barbecue can be a beautiful thing; Chicago is known for its great smokehouses and rib tips. The fake smell, manufactured especially for hotels and the kind of smokehouses that buy their ribs in, bore no relation to the real thing.

I love having friends over for dinner, and like to think I’m rather good at hosting. And while I always strive for a relaxed atmosphere and dislike formality, there are a few hard rules that my guests should adhere to if they want a repeat invitation. Let’s start at the beginning. When checking on any foods you don’t eat, I am asking if you are vegetarian or coeliac, or if you have an actual allergy; what I don’t want is a list of your preferences. One person I invited replied telling me all about how, although she quite likes fresh tomatoes, she can’t eat them cooked, adding that she’d rather the food wasn’t flavoured with cumin or oregano. I felt like telling her to stay home and order from Deliveroo.

There’s a joint in east London that describes itself as a ‘family-run osteria’ and posts about the ‘Italian tradition of generous hospitality and simple, beautiful food’. The menu is a combination of several Italian dishes with Japanese ingredients, and I can’t think of anything more inappropriate. One of the dishes described as dolce (meaning ‘sweet’) is a cheese panna cotta with herring caviar. This restaurant has soy sauce nudging the balsamic. Is there no end to the revolting madness that is fusion food? I can understand why young chefs – those tattooed to within an inch of their lives – think they are a cross between Anthony Bourdain and Marco Pierre White and love the idea of mixing miso and chocolate pudding. It has all gone too far.

A colleague took me out to dinner recently, repaying a favour. Ben likes his steak and we ended up at some high-end joint in Mayfair. Unsure what to order, I left it to him and was served Wagyu beef, which literally translates as ‘Japanese cow’. When it came, it was pale in colour with lines of fat running all the way through. It didn’t look like steak. Nor did it cut like one – I probably could have used a spoon. Worst of all, it didn’t taste like one. It was a bit like eating solidified grease that required no chewing and left a funny kind of aftertaste. More foie gras than steak – not just in terms of flavour and texture, but also in terms of force feeding.

Fancy a slappy? It’s not what you think – unless you’re from Wigan, in which case you’ll know exactly what I’m offering. A slappy, otherwise known as a ‘Wigan Kebab’, is a whole pie served inside a sliced barm cake (not cake, but a soft, sweetish bread roll). Wiganers are known as ‘pie eaters’. I don’t mind a slice of mince and onion or chicken and leek every now and again, preferably in winter – but I certainly couldn’t imagine indulging on a regular basis. But if I am to eat pie, it should be in Wigan. Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely no way I would travel to Wigan especially, because – and I mean no offence to its inhabitants – there isn’t an awful lot else going for it. I can say this because I’m from Darlington.

Attempting to make lunch for a friend today, I discovered I had run out of anchovies – even though I always have some in stock: tins and jars of the salted variety in oil, tubs of boquerones in vinegar, and, lurking in the back of the fridge, a tube of anchovy paste. I was bordering on hysterical as I made my way to the local supermarket, only to find they too had run out. I instantly went online and ordered a massive tray of the salted ones that last forever to ensure this never happens again – though I know it will, because I use them all the time. One of the numerous uses for anchovies is as an integral part of a dressing for Caesar salad. Without it, the entire salad is a flop.

The drift began with the Anglicised version of tapas – a word meaning ‘to cover’, or ‘lid’, that originally described the small pieces of food used to cover and protect drinks. But ‘small plates’, now a mainstay of those fashionable, overpriced restaurants that pride themselves on being the antidote to stuffy and formal, have dominated the restaurant world for more than two decades. In Venice once, in the early 1990s, I ended up in a backstreet bacari, which is a booze and snack joint, as I couldn’t afford the restaurants in the centre. It was full of working men, and cheap as chips. Huge platters of cold mussels, cured ham, anchovies and crispy gnocchi sat behind a glass counter. Perched above the bar were a barrel of red, and one of white.