Daily Telegraph pubs writer ADAM EDWARDS lays out the ground rules for matching food with beer
Beer With Food Week starts on Monday. I have no wish to be thought of as an epicurean philistine during these seven foodie days, but I have to admit to having little interest in whether a pint of heavy complements a quail egg and truffle risotto in a poultry jus. Nor do I care if a presumptuous wheat beer with a bouquet hinting at violets and Victory Vs brings out the best in my chips pomme de terre aux fromage et oignon.
For it is not the beer with food that interests me, but the food with beer, or to put it more crudely, the butty with my bitter.
Coincidentally this month, the Morning Advertiser is searching for its pub sandwich of 2005. It asks "what do you think makes a good pub sandwich?" The answer is simplicity.
There is no finer accompaniment to a glass of English ale, excluding the salted peanut and the potato crisp, than a plain piece of bread and a slice of something cold. The "sanger" has complemented the hop-flavoured alcoholic beverage since the Earl of Sandwich first called for a slice of meat to split the staff of life.
The beauty of his request was in its purity. And so it should re-main. Cold rare beef with hot horseradish between two thick doorsteps of white bread is as sweet as the whistle of the arrows at Agincourt. Hand-carved Wilt-shire ham sitting in a fresh roll spread with English mustard is as succulent as a David Beckham cross. The unadorned bacon butty with a pint of bitter is an undefiled Union Jack moment.
What worries me, however, is that our newly-found obsession with food, while admirable in very many ways, is turning the simple into the complicated. A cheese roll, for example, should contain traditional extra mature Cheddar cheese and nothing else. If it must be turned into a gourmet dish add a pickled onion. There should be no other accessories. Accessories are for boy racers not buns.
Or take the bacon buttie. It should be as politically incorrect as a 40-a-day homophobic foxhunter. It should consist of several rashers of green streaky bacon, fried crisply and clapped between two thick slices of white bread (or a bap) that has been wiped in the hot fat of the pan. It should be served piping hot with a pint of warmish bitter.
What is not a glorious part of our pub-grub heritage is a lukewarm piece of dry-cured Duchy Original back bacon with a slice of organic tomato and radicchio lettuce, nestling in an Italian herb ciabatta roll accompanied by a cold Belgian Pilsner. That is not for the discerning drinking man. That is a fancy dish for Beer With Food Week.
Tear time
I wept a nostalgic crocodile tear or two when I saw that the figures for grapefruit juice sales had plunged. According to a report in February from the market re-search company Mintel, the de-mand for "old fashioned" juices is down despite a surge in sales of chilled and long-life fruit juices. In the past two years, sales of grapefruit juice have fallen by 23%.
The loss of the small bottle with its overly-large gold metal cap also means a loss of a little bit of English colloquialism. The mean glass phial that half-filled a regular wine glass defined the uptight and the non-drinking. To order a grapefruit juice was to be a big girl's blouse. Today's fashionable chilled-juice consumers cannot possibly comprehend the traditional unspoken English sneer that automatically accompanied a request for the warm grey liquid in its stubby bottle.
Boozer losers
A new book from English Heritage, Licensed to Sell: The History and Heritage of the Public House claims that the interiors of our pubs have been so ravaged in the name of refurbishment that only a couple of hundred retain any historical value.
Bill Bryson, the English Heritage commissioner, said: "Pubs are part of what makes England what it is, and like so much of the almost embarrassing richness of England's historic environment we need to hang on to what we've got."
With that in mind, perhaps English Heritage should forget about protecting the tasteful and the reclaimed.
Instead it should slap a few preservation orders on the interiors of the modern Victorian gin palace, the classic provincial town public house that personifies the early 21st century and is now in danger of disappearing from our high streets. In other words, the binge- drinkers' boozer.