WHILE WE’RE LISTING IRRITATIONS…
Debora’s reassuringly unfussy soup with walnut pesto
FOOD PHOTOGRAPH: INDIA WHILEY-MORTON.
Here are five things never to serve as a canapé. Eating is complicated enough without trying to do it standing up and attempting to emerge with dignity intact.
I thought I’d seen it all. And frankly, I thought we were better people now, after the bad old days of the 2010s. Remember then? When eating out was all square plates and slates, the latter designed to set nerves jangling as cutlery scraped across them, as soothing as an angle grinder on a Sunday morning. We had the mini wire baskets, or even little shopping trolleys, for chips, things with gravy served sloppily on chopping boards, and salad dressing served in pipettes, bestowing on dinner all the easy charm of a lab experiment.
ANYTHING TOO DRIPPY AND SAUCY Dry cleaning costs a fortune.
There was the restaurant in York that served bread in cloth caps and the wine waiters were whippets. Fine, I made the last bit up, but it only didn’t happen because they didn’t think of it first. Then there was the London restaurant that really did (notoriously) serve a dish called Sex on the Beach, which comprised mushroom ‘sand’ upon which was draped a used ‘condom’ made from tapioca filled with honey. How clever, how witty I guess – perhaps not so much now when our real beaches are, well, you know.
ANYTHING TOO CHEWY OR LARGE All that masticating gets in the way of your best stories.
I thought those dark days were behind us, that we were living in more honest times, when food could be messy, where squiggles and foams were as fashionable as perms and winkle-pickers, where ‘honesty’ when it came to presentation was the norm. But perhaps that’s where it all went wrong. There was a time a couple of years ago when almost every young chef I spoke to was taking pottery classes in order to, in the spirit of authenticity and truly expressing their unique aesthetic, make their own plates. Isn’t it lovely to have a hobby?