When it comes to preparing and serving food, we British are hopeless, says Andrew Jefford
"More in sorrow than in anger" is, you will remember, the time-honoured phrase employed by headmasters who are about to cane their pupils, parents who are about to lock up their over-exuberant children, and magistrates who are about to send wild-eyed young offenders off to correctional institutions.
It smacks of sanctimonious humbug; the speaker, after all, is rarely sobbing as the words are delivered. Which may be why I feel a certain queasiness at the fact that the phrase has suddenly come to mind as I begin to type out this article.
On the day, however, it was chiefly anger I felt. Anger and disappointment that, after all the efforts made by hard-working hosts and pub owners to im-prove the quality of food served in British pubs, things can still go not just wrong, but so spectacularly and dismally wrong that one suddenly feels ashamed to be a citizen of this food-illiterate, food-incompetent island. Nothing, it would seem, helps. Jamie, Nigel, Nigella and all the rest of them are just a shower, a bunch of comic turns, an excuse to flop in front of the telly instead of putting in a bit of hard work with the knife, chopping board and skillet. When it comes to preparing and serving food, we're still pants.
What has brought on this fit of intemperance? Flashback to Sunday 3 October 2004. Loca-tion: Oxford. My partner and I were helping a friend to move into college for a year's residential course. After spending most of lunchtime heaving boxes of books up and down narrow stairs, we set off for a late lunch.
Too late for Laurel's Turf Tavern, which (despite the listed food hours in The Good Pub Guide) said it wasn't serving any more meals until the end of the afternoon. This was disappointing and dull-witted, since the town was full of parents bent on the same task, as well as thousands of tourists who don't share British mental rigidity about meal times. But at least we knew the situation before we ordered drinks, and could move on.
The second pub was still serving food, or so we were led to believe, so we did order drinks and then joined the "food queue". Queueing for food is, by European standards, a depressingly institutional procedure, but we would have been prepared to put up with it if the end result was satisfying. Alas, the end result was catastrophic.
When we got to the end of the queue, the kitchen and its sole counter attendant seemed to be wildly out of their depth. All the dishes we wanted (hardly complicated: my own choice was a plate of ham sandwiches) were on a handwritten list of things that they weren't prepared to provide. All the unfortunate Spanish students ahead of us in the queue wanted was hot chocolate, but even that, they were told, was going to "take too long". What could we have? Soup. OK, we said, we'll have soup.
The soup, when it came, was one of the most horrible substances I have ever had to eat. It was thin and grey. None of us could work out what "flavour" it was meant to be. I use the word "flavour" advisedly, since it was obvious that anything this macabre had to come out of a packet rather than being made with fresh ingredients. It was served with a small stack of white sliced bread (stale), and little pats of catering-pack butter. Forgive a final detail, but this wretched slop kept malodorously "returning" for two or three hours afterwards. It was, moreover, served with such ill-grace that complaining seemed a waste of breath.
I couldn't actually believe this was really happening. Here we were, sitting in the heart of Oxford, within view of the Sheldonian Theatre, within strolling distance of Wadham, Trinity, Balliol and St John's on the returning Sunday of the 2004/05 academic year, with the city thronging with hungry and affluent people, and this pathetic display of culinary incompetence was the best that Britain could manage.
Sorrowfully, too, it was a Young's pub: the famous King's Arms on the corner of Holywell Street and Parks Road, also written up enthusiastically in The Good Pub Guide. The Young's Ordinary I was sipping was a lovely pint, or at least it was until I began weeping salty tears into it.
Despite my huge affection for the company, its staff and its beer, this was a criminally bad performance, the kind of thing that should not, under any circumstances, be allowed to happen in any pub at any time. Yet here it was happening in one of the company's flagship houses and one of the nation's most attractive cities.
Perhaps it was a glitch, a one-off, but in a professionally-run establishment, glitches of this order will simply not be possible. We owe it to our fellow citizens and to those generous enough to cross the seas and the skies to come to visit us to do better.