This was the one dessert that never left the menu, and the one that people seem to feel the most nostalgic about, when I talk to them about The Hole in the Wall. I almost feel like I’m letting you in on a secret just by sharing it.
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Beetroot doesn’t appear particularly often on the menus of Indian restaurants. This hadn’t occurred to me until very recently, whilst I was flicking through Diana Henry’s A Change of Appetite a couple of days ago.
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I was well into my twenties before I ate my first cheese scone. My girlfriend at the time cooked me lunch on the same day I had my first telephone interview for Masterchef – which was also the first time she had ever cooked for me.
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If there is a food more maligned than the doner kebab, then it remains unknown to my palate.
Long the butt of jokes and the final resort of a hungry lush as he or she stumbles back home from the pub via a neon takeaway, the poor kebab as we know it in England is far removed from its original form.
The brief from BBC Radio Cambridgeshire was simple: create a dish that sums up the area using the best locally sourced produce available.
Cornwall has the pasty, Bedfordshire’s got a clanger and Bury the black pudding – but Cambridge? Cambridge has… well, therein lay the problem. Our county is bereft of a classic.
Nettles don’t immediately spring to mind when thinking of this time of year and the bounty the season offers.
Tender milk fed lamb, wild garlic or the first crisp spears of asparagus, perhaps, but nettles? They’re certainly not at the top of many people’s spring essentials lists, or the bottom, come to think of it.
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Beef cheeks can be a little hard to find. Legislation passed in the wake of the BSE scare of the mid 1990s meant they were completely off menu for quite some time and even now a quiet word in your butcher’s ear will likely be necessary to score the bounty.
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Thanks in part to the coarsely named ‘Fat Les’ football anthem of the late 90s, vindaloo became near synonymous with lad culture and the various negative connotations involved therein.
Going for a curry became an exercise in machismo and vindaloo, somewhat unfairly, was labelled as the number one challenge in the heat tolerance stakes. With such a tag, much of the subtlety was inevitably lost amidst an ever-increasing barrage of heat.
Confession time.
I’ve always said that my last supper would consist of hot dogs. As much as I’ve tried to develop the outward appearance of a sophisticated foodie, I can’t shift this love of cheap sausages simmered in cloudy water and slung into a fluffy white bun.