During the reign of Elizabeth the First it wasn’t unknown to keep the celebrations going from Allhallowtide (November 1) to Candlemas (February 2) when hope in the form of light began to penetrate. Unlike our own noisy preoccupation with Christmas Day, it was Twelfth Night, or Epiphany—the Feast of the Three Kings as they made their journey to Bethlehem to pay homage to the newborn King of Kings—that was the focus; the culmination of an open house policy that began on December 25 welcoming in friends, relatives and neighbours, servants, and strangers, until the final blowout on January 6.

“So I do really enjoy myself, and understand that if I do not do it now, I shall not hereafter,” as Pepys noted in self-exculpatory mode in his diary after Twelfth Night in 1688. He had drunk too much, eaten too much, stayed up too late, and spent more than he could afford. A century earlier, Sir William Petre of Ingatestone Hall had been having an even better Twelfth Night than Pepys. In her book, Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book, the culinary writings of  an Elizabethan housewife, Hilary Spurling describes a dinner given by Sir William on January 6 in 1552 at which 100 people consumed between them “16 raised pies, 15 joints of beef, four of veal, three of pork (including a whole suckling pig), three geese, a brace each of partridge, teal, capons and coneys, a woodcock and one dozen larks with a whole sheep . . .”

Despite the astonishing quantities of food, the real focus of these evenings was the Twelfth Night Cake, a spicy fruit concoction into which was baked a bean and a pea symbolising the King and Queen of the Revels. The person who found a token in their slice gained or forfeited  a privilege. Pepys’ cake cost him 20s and was enough for 20 people including gatecrashers but paled into insignificance when compared to the annual Fettiplace cake which was a yeast cake made with “good ale”, 12 1/2 pounds of flour, four pounds of currants, and an ounce and a half of cinnamon and ginger, capable of feeding upwards of 160 guests.

In the late 17th century, the series of tokens secreted in the cake expanded to include cloves for knaves, rags for wanton girls, and so on, and by the 18th century the tokens became a series of characters printed on paper which were cut out, folded and drawn from a hat—vestiges of these customs still survive in the sixpences and threepenny pieces that were sometime put in Christmas puddings.

There are similar traditions found all over Europe: in Spain, the Roscón de Reyes is a ring-shaped cake decorated with candied fruit containing a sorpresa (surprise), a coin or tiny ceramic figure that will bring luck to the finder. It’s a close cousin of Portugal’s Bolo Rei, a cake made with port and candied fruit. The person who finds the bean hidden within must provide next year’s Bolo Rei. Swiss and German Dreikönigskuchen are rich bread wreaths, each concealing an almond which will confer kingship on the finder.  Further afield, in New Orleans, King cakes, brioche loaves iced in purple green and gold, each contain a plastic baby whose finder must give the next Twelfth Night party.

Best known, perhaps, of the Twelfth Night cakes is the French Galette des Rois. This is a round flat cake made with many variations on a theme of flour, sugar, butter and eggs, or with puff pastry filled with frangipane. A bean hidden in the pastry renders the finder into the day’s Lord of the Revels.

The Galette in its puff pastry form has become a welcome antidote to the modern British Twelfth Night which has largely dispensed with revelry in favour of  the gloomy ritual of taking down the Christmas decorations and despatching the tree. In 2021 it might be especially welcome—a delicious distraction from the woes of 2020 and the possibility, pace the appearance of a vaccine, of yet another lockdown currently forecast for January. You can buy a Galette quite easily, or frozen puff pastry makes it simple to construct your own, method  below. The recipe for Elinor Fettiplace’s cake, with modern translation, can be found in Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book by Hilary Spurling (Penguin, 1987).

Galette des Rois

400g ready-made puff pastry
100g softened butter
100g caster sugar
1 lightly beaten egg
100g ground almonds
2 tbsp cognac or dark rum
dash of almond essence (optional)

Heat the oven to 200C/fanC180/gas 6.
Divide the puff pastry in half, roll out each piece and cut each piece into a circle.
Put one round on a baking sheet, set aside the other.
Beat together the softened butter and caster sugar until light and fluffy, then beat in the egg. Stir in the ground almonds and cognac or dark rum and the almond essence if using.
Spoon the mixture over the pastry disc, spreading it evenly. Brush the edges of the pastry with water, then cover with the second piece, pressing the edges to seal. Mark the top of the pastry in a zig-zag pattern, then brush with beaten egg.
Bake for 25-30 mins until crisp and golden. Serve warm or cold.

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I was reminded of this recently when visiting friends in Oxfordshire who have just acquired a hen-house and hens to put in it. The minute I saw them I wanted some of my own. Could hens be rehomed on to a roof in central London? My friend thought they could and, surprisingly, The British Hen Welfare Trust agreed. “Our hens are very versatile,” founder Jane Howorth MBE told me. “They need a bit of space to move around, and the sun on their backs but since they’ve mostly been in a cage, they’re not  expecting grass . . .”

The British Hen Welfare Trust (find them at www.bhwt.org.uk) has been much in demand during lockdown. They usually rehome 60,000 birds a year, but in the first week of lockdown, they had triple the normal number of enquiries. By the end of April, roughly 5,000 people had booked 27,000 hens. They now have 20,000 hens waiting to be dispersed to good homes. Ironically, Jane noted, the initial reason for the sudden interest in hen-rehoming had been a lack of eggs in the supermarkets. By now, successful rehomers probably have far too many—the average hen lays around five eggs a week, depending on breed, age etc, so if you’ve rehomed three laying hens, you’ve potentially got 60 eggs to get through each month.

These lockdown rehomers are not the only ones grappling with an egg mountain. Back in Oxfordshire, the friends reported a backlog of eggs stretching from July; on average they get over 100 eggs a month. What on earth can you do with them—even giving them away comes fraught with trouble as the recipients of your bounty now discover that you have merely given them an egg mountain of their own.

Obviously you can boil them for breakfast, make cakes out of them and use the oldest ones to shine up your dog’s coat. You can fry, coddle or scramble them, turn them into quiches or custard puddings and, if artistically inclined, mix them to make tempera, but the method that uses up the most eggs in one go is . . . an omelette.

This simple dish is one that has an illustrious history. It can be traced back to ancient Persia where it took the form of chopped herbs stirred into beaten eggs and fried until firm (kuku sabzi). The first recorded omelette in the UK appeared in 1611 when it was defined in Cotgrave’s Dictionary as “haumelotte—a pancake of eggs” but more than likely, thinks Alan Davidson in his Penguin Companion to Food, the omelette had been around from early medieval times since “the concept of frying beaten eggs in butter in a pan is as simple as it is brilliant.” In this context he adds, the French omelette—light, fluffy with a runny interior is a “diversion from the mainstream”. Although, of course, it’s generally the French version one thinks of whenever the occasion for an omelette arises. That’s certainly true in fiction, where omelettes are often shorthand for romantic intentions—all of Jilly Cooper’s characters can knock them up at the drop of a hat in order to lure back a man or net a girl, and in Madam, Will You Talk?, Mary Stewart’s wonderful romantic thriller set in post-war France, the heroine stops in mid-car-chase to consume the perfect omelette at a roadside café, thus allowing the right man to catch up with her.

An exception to this rule is Beatrix Potter who describes one of the most sinister omelettes in British fiction when the wicked gentleman fox, in the guise of making this dish, almost succeeds in persuading the gullible Jemima Puddle-Duck to provide her own stuffing. “Let us have a dinner party all to ourselves!” he suggests in tones that makes shivers run down your spine. “May I ask you to bring up some herbs from the farm garden to make a savoury omelette? Sage and thyme, mint and two onions, and some parsley . . .”

In real life an omelette is trickier to get right than you think. For one thing, the ingredients must be at their best: fresh eggs, good butter and a decent pan. Herbs are optional, but if you don’t want to leave them out go with Paul Bocuse’s recipe for Omelette aux Fines Herbes—two eggs per person, half an ounce of butter for every two eggs, one teaspoon each of chopped fresh parsley and chopped fresh chives.

But unless you’re cooking for a large family, Bocuse is not going to use up enough eggs to make a dent in the mountain, so you might be better off following Robert May’s 1660 omelette recipe: “Omelette. Break 6, 8, 10 eggs more or less, beat them together in a dish and put salt to them; then put some butter a melting in a frying pan and fry it [the egg mixture] more or less, according to your discretion, only on one side or bottom.”

Robert May, Queen Elizabeth I’s chef, had acquired this recipe during his time in France, where he had learned all kinds of culinary tricks—pies shaped like castles stuffed with live frogs and birds, blown up by gunpowder at the table which “make the ladies skip and shreek” was one—which he enthusiastically practised on his long-suffering monarch.

As odd-sounding as May’s gunpowder suppers, but perhaps more soothing, is Crempog Las, a Welsh variation on the omelette which, for those whose hens turned out to be less prolific layers, uses fewer eggs. This version is based on Jane Grigson’s recipe in Good Things (1971).

Crempog Las

225g plain flour
Fines herbes: 3-4 tbsp chopped parsley
1 tbsp chopped chives (or spring onion stems)
1 tbsp chopped tarragon
1 tbsp chopped watercress
2-3 beaten eggs
enough milk to make a thick batter
salt and pepper
butter

Mix all the ingredients together to make a thick pancake consistency. Heat a little butter in a hot pan and add a good spoonful of batter and cook as for ordinary pancakes. Repeat until you’ve used up all the batter. Eat buttered and hot. They are sometimes served with sausages and bacon. “Very good,” Grigson adds.

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My children rely more heavily on Deliveroo for food than on the leftover  green sludge lurking in the vegetable rack, and think the idea of boot soup is a joke, but recently I was thrilled to discover an actual recipe for cooked shoes. It’s a mysterious entry in a medieval cookery book first published in 1545. 

A Proper New Booke of Cookerye is by an unknown author, and was one of the first cookbooks written in English and aimed at general readers,  specifically women who were running their own households, so the recipes are more detailed than those usually found in cookery books of this era.

It begins with a comprehensive list of seasonal meats, still useful today, in fact, and from which you can learn such handy rules of thumb as:

A fat pigge is ever in season. A goose is wurste in Midsommer mone and best in stubble time . . . Hennes bee good at all tymes but best from November to lent. Pecockes be ever good but when thei bee young and of a good stature  thei be as good as fesantes. A Mallarde is good after a frost till candlemas so is a Tele and other wylde foule that Swymmeth. A Hare is ever good but best from October to lent.

Apart from the list of meats, the author also includes 49 recipes, mostly for meat and pies and a couple of puddings. The recipe for boiled shoes comes near the end, and begins promisingly:

To Make Shoes

Take a rumpe of beife and let it boyle an hower or two and put therto a gret quantitie of cole wurts and let theim boyle together thre (e) howers then put to them a couple of stockdoves or teales, fesand, partrige or such other wylde foules and let them boyle altogether then ceason them with salte and serue them forth.

Similar to the recipe by Roman cook Apicius which spends pages instructing the novice chef on how to make a complicated sauce, only mentioning at the end that the sauce should be poured over the roast pig. I like the way the several types of bird needed for the Shoes recipe are only mentioned in passing, long after the time you should have been plucking and gutting. Cole wurts, translated as cabbage, kale or other leafy vegetables and herbs, are much easier to get hold of at the last minute than a couple of stock doves and a teal.

The shoes themselves only appear in the title, so perhaps  they’re nothing but a medieval spelling mistake, or possibly a sole-shaped piece of tough beef that needs a good stew, rather like the legendary black herring, so desiccated they were stored in the joists and joints of sailing ships on long-ago sea voyages, eventually becoming part of the vessel’s internal structure.

Boiled shoes don’t make many further appearances in cookbooks until the 20th century, when they take a leap into film. The 1925 silent comedy The Gold Rush contains a scene in which Charlie Chaplin boils a shoe and eats it, twirling up the laces on his fork like spaghetti. And in 1980, Werner Herzog ate his own shoe as a result of a lost bet. He cooked it with the help of Alice Waters at her restaurant Chez Panisse. She braised
Herzog’s boots in a pot of rendered duck fat with “thyme, rosemary, salt and pepper, bay leaves, the whole nine yards”. The leather never softened but Herzog ate some of one boot by chopping it up with a pair of poultry shears. He later turned the event into a short film entitled Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, dedicated to people who want to make films but are afraid to start.

Since you’re unlikely to find cooked boots on Deliveroo, and modern day trainers, if you were thinking of doing a bit of DIY boiling, would only make a very thin gruel, it’s probably best to save your shoes for purposes other than soup. But, just in case you’re in the last-dregs saloon food-wise, and unable for some reason to get out to the shops, here’s a recipe for Scrapings Soup, made not with footwear but with things that grow naturally in the back of anyone’s fridge or cupboards . . .

Scrapings Soup

Feeds as many as necessary.

olive oil

bay leaf

1 large onion, peeled and chopped, or substitute a leek

a knob of butter (optional)

Any vegetables you happen to have lying around (e.g. potatoes, parsnips, carrots, sweet potatoes, celery, old tomatoes), peeled and chopped

A few frozen peas (optional)

water or stock or stock cube

a handful of fresh herbs, spinach, parsley or other greenery (old kale is good for this), chopped

single cream (optional)

Heat the oil in a deep pan or medium-sized saucepan. Add the chopped onion and the bay leaf and fry for a few minutes over a low heat. Add the butter and cover and continue to cook for 10-15 minutes, stirring from time to time,  until the onion is soft and translucent.

Add the chopped vegetables and peas if using and cook for a few minutes, stirring so that all the vegetables are covered in the oil.  Crumble in half a stock cube (if using), raise the heat, stir and add the water to cover the vegetables (or substitute stock for the water and omit the stock cube). Lower the heat and simmer for 20-30 minutes, until all the vegetables are cooked through. Add more water if necessary. Add the herbs and continue to cook. Season with salt and pepper. Stir in a spoonful of cream (if using). Blend to make a smooth soup, or serve unblended in bowls or mugs. You’ll be surprised how good it is.

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I was thinking about Dorothy Hartley and her Vicarage roast, because I had lately acquired my own version—a leg of gigantic lamb, last in the shop, a birthday treat capable of feeding at least eight hungry revellers, destined for a sad lockdown twosome. It was astonishingly expensive too, but by dint of employing the cost-per-wear theory/excuse of the fashion world (i.e. you buy a fancy thread for Priti Patel amounts of money and then carefully whittle the cost down by wearing it at every opportunity), my leg produced a further eighteen meals (including one for the dog) at roughly £1.50 per person per meal.

It turned out to be one of the most cost-effective lumps of meat I’ve bought in ages, giving rise to numerous old-fashioned suppers and also made me think of mutton in general—a meat once revered by people like Dr Johnson and Mrs Beeton but which fell out of fashion towards the end of the 20th century. Its recent small revival has been helped by Prince Charles’s strenuous campaign for a Mutton Renaissance which he launched in 2004 at the Ritz.

Food in England, a celebration of old-fashioned English food, came out in 1954, coincidentally the same year that the American francophile and partner of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, published her own bestselling cookbook. The two could hardly be more dissimilar.

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book is famous for its hash brownies, but is more of an eccentric disquisition on life, love and the elaborate art of French food and cooking—a kind of autobiography recounted through recipes. It describes a very different attitude to food and eating from that which was to be found in post-war England—especially when it came to mutton.

Amongst references to octopus, fennel sauce and other “little known French dishes suitable for American Kitchens”, Toklas recounts the eccentric instructions for the preparation of a leg of mutton given during the war to her friend Madame Pierlot by “a surgeon living in the French Provinces”.

The surgeon’s directions begin: Eight days in advance “cover the leg of mutton with a marinade of old Burgundy, Beaune or Chambertin and virgin olive oil. Into this balm to which you have already added salt, pepper, bay leaf, thyme, an atom of ginger root, put a pinch of cayenne, a nutmeg cut into small pieces, a handful of crushed juniper berries and a dessertspoon of powdered sugar. Twice a day you will turn the gigot.”

But before you get on to the turning, the instructions continue, “arm yourself with a surgical syringe of a size to hold half a pint which you will fill with half a cup of cognac and half a cup of fresh orange juice. Inject the contents of the syringe into the gigot in three different spots. Each day you will refill the syringe with the marinade and inject the contents into the gigot. At the end of the week, the leg of mutton is ready to be roasted.”

Toklas assumed that the daily injections with a syringe full of cognac had been a kind of Gallic joke, but years later and much to her surprise, she found the exact recipe in Bertrand Guégan’s Le cuisinier français.

Gigot de la Clinique couldn’t be further removed from the vicarage leg whose virtue resides in simplicity. This British staple shares a much greater affinity with another French recipe for mutton originating from the Auvergne. This is a stew described by Marthe Pampille Daudet in her book Pampille’s Table (1919), an attempt to group together some of the best traditional recipes of French cooking.

When not collecting recipes, Mme Daudet had a much racier life as wife to the poet Alphonse Daudet’s son Léon. Proust makes several references to her in À la recherche du temps perdu, usually through the persona of a nostalgic Mme de Guermantes but once with a side swipe at the snobbish salonnier, M Verdurin who “died at the right moment, àpoint, as the lobsters, grilled according to Pampille’s incomparable recipe, are going to be”.

The stew in Pampille’s Table was from the Auvergne and considered by Pampille to err on the plain side. The Auvergnat is “stingy without much ambition beyond a bowl of soupe aux choux” she notes. “But for more festive occasions, he will cook up a leg of mutton with potatoes . . .” though he is “quite likely to do this without the leg of mutton”.

Life being what it is, one is more likely to encounter an Auvergnian or clerical leg of mutton than the tipsy Toklas leg which seems more like a magnificent one-off, never to be recreated. And anyway, would its leftovers feed another eighteen people? Alice B. does not let on, but Dorothy Hartley had one more trick up her sleeve for the Vicarage roast to perform.

“If you use mutton fat for cake making,” she writes, “(and it makes farmhouse gingerbread, apple cake and the homelier kinds of cake very well), beat it to a cream with the lemon juice, or a spoonful of cider, till it whips like snow.”

Thursday mutton curry

A variation on a dish first published by the London Oriental Club in their cookbook Indian Cookery by Richard Terry (1861).

Feeds 2—4.

1 large onion, finely chopped

olive oil

butter

2 tbsp curry powder

1 tbsp curry paste

leftovers from a leg of mutton, cubed

2 medium tomatoes, chopped

1 tsp salt

Heat the oil in a deep frying pan, add the onions and fry for a couple of minutes. Add a knob of butter, cover the pan and cook for 10–15 minutes until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the curry powder and paste to the pan and stir. Add the mutton, and the tomatoes, stir together and pour in enough water to cover, season with salt, and simmer on a low heat until all is cooked through and you have a thick aromatic gravy. Serve with rice.

This article is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

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On one level the milkshakings seem like a response to the weird relationship  that dairy products have with the internet-enabled fringe and alt-Right. In 2017 an anti-Trump art installation—consisting of a camera on an external wall which anyone could stand in front of and, I guess, talk about their feelings—at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, was shut down after being overrun by shirtless white boys chugging vast quantities of milk and declaiming neo-Nazi catchphrases. You can watch the video on YouTube. One guy holds up his gallon-sized milk bottle and says, “You may not like it, but this is the face of white nationalism.” There’s a lot of yelling about Vikings and testosterone. The museum shut the art project down due to “dozens of threats of violence and numerous arrests”. On the other hand, a rando on a website called “ageofshitlords.com” claimed the milk thing was “ironic meme shitposting”, so really, who knows?

Animal products don’t have to be manly or right-wing, but people keep trying to make them so. Alex Jones, the barrel-chested conspiracy theorist, once tweeted a picture of himself carrying a tray of miscellaneous raw meat. “Celebrating Americana with some Red Meat, f-you, Obama!” In an interview with Spiegel Online, Jones spontaneously tore his shirt off and started eating barbecue, offering the reporter a sausage: “Wanna suck?” I doubt Jones has read the 1990 feminist-vegetarian classic The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams, in which she describes “the overt association between meat and virile maleness”. As a result, “our society equates vegetarianism with emasculation or femininity”. In fact, she points out, pregnant and nursing women have higher protein requirements than men.

One of the core alt-right insults is “soy boy”—a stereotypical young male leftie who drinks soy milk, probably because he’s worried about the environment. A contributor to the website UrbanDictionary describes him as “a feminist, nonathletic, has never been in a fight, will probably marry the first girl that has sex with him”. Another user offers a different definition: “Someone who beats a conservative in an argument.” But the basic idea is that he’s emasculated

This partly comes from the conspiracy theory that soy contains oestrogen-like chemicals which reduce male fertility. The evidence from medical studies is at best inconclusive and contradictory. It also comes from the belief that the ability to digest milk in adulthood (a mutation called lactose persistence) is something only white Europeans have. In reality, eating dairy is complicated: yoghurt, cheese and fermented milk have less lactose than fresh milk, and the ability to digest milk evolved in several different places, including east Africa. Ultimately, it’s an accusation that men are giving in.

According to Adams, there is an “ongoing superstition that meat gives strength and men need meat”. If you check the hashtag #MeatHeals on Instagram or Twitter you’ll find evidence of this: proponents of the “carnivore” diet who claim, that eating only meat can cure any number of long-term conditions. Mainly what meat “heals” appears to be a) fatness, which is entirely possible if you’re forcing yourself to only eat one thing for months, and b) vaguely defined “sensitivities”. Emasculation comes up repeatedly: the soy conspiracy theory gained acceptance via online bodybuilding communities. A man posting on “meatheals.com” says—as if quoting from Carol Adams—that before he took up the carnivore diet, “I felt like I had no penis or any balls.”

The carnivores claim a feeling of greater mental clarity, which sounds nice, if scientifically unmeasurable. The downside, apart from never enjoying food again, is that you have to make it through at least a month of unpleasant side-effects: diarrhoea, dehydration, nausea, fatigue, bad breath. And going off the diet even briefly sends you back to the beginning of the process, they claim.

Taking up carnivorism, or its parent, the “keto” (high-fat, low-carb) diet, seems to convince people that they’re medical experts. Carnivore evangelists weirdly like to claim that having a zero-fibre diet reduces bowel cancer risk, against all the medical evidence: fibre is known to have a protective effect.  Both carnivore and keto are suited to stats and encourage obsessive measuring, gram by gram, requiring elaborate explanations of any health test results which don’t show quite what you want them to. Shawn Baker, a high-profile body-building 52-year-old carnivore who doesn’t look a day under 58, posted blood test results after a year of a diet of ribeye steak: his blood glucose was in the diabetic range, his cholesterol was high, his testosterone vanishingly low, and his vitamin D was low. In every case he had an explanation which boiled down to: actually, this is fine. He claims to eat about 3kg of meat a day.

The underlying assumption is that steak is delicious—who wouldn’t want to eat it? But who on earth would choose this permanently? A clue: one of the highest-profile carnivores is Mikhaila Peterson, Jordan’s daughter. Peterson senior took up the carnivore diet on her advice, has repeatedly tweeted about it, and credits it with getting rid of his feeling of “doom”. Mikhaila suffered depression and juvenile arthritis from childhood—she went though a hip and ankle replacement as a teenager. Her main argument is that she has become healthy.

It’s hard not to have sympathy for her. But she advocates trying out elimination diets based on practically anything: “Muscle pain, fatigue, digestive issues, minor skin problems, the occasional mouth ulcer—all things people ignore. Don’t. These are signs.” Even if there’s no reason to,  “if you’re a ‘healthy’ person, cut out gluten and dairy. All of it . . . Cut it all out for 4 weeks and see how you feel.” We’re meant to take her proclamation of health at face value, but obviously not our own. 

The carnivores are boldly heading somewhere, even if it is to a place few others want to go. I guess we’ll find out in 20 years’ time if any of them are left.

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They had a butler and a cook, and we think the books were written and used by them. There’s no suggestion that any outside person saw this stuff.  But the purpose of writing it all down can’t have been to avoid repetition. What springs out most from these volumes is the sheer repetitiveness of the food,  although it’s possible that the lists are not presenting it to the best advantage. Flipping through the pages, you see the same dishes again and again: braised celery, cheese soufflé, eggs au gratin, endless roast chicken (in one week somehow they had it three times), roast lamb, potatoes, potatoes and more potatoes. There is an echo of the classic food of London clubs. The Woodhams (as they’re always called in these books) eat a lot of grilled sole, lamb cutlets and stuffed eggs, here given the rather more elegant name “eggs mimosa”. They eat pheasant, and occasionally woodcock, but no other game; by anyone’s standards they seem to eat a lot of meat, and sometimes both fish and meat in one meal. The cuts are always high-end but there’s little sense of anything different in the manner of cooking from one meal to the next, and you have to look hard to see any culinary progress. For example, “Miss K. Hepburn” had dinner with Mr & Mrs Woodham (as they’re always listed) on March 9, 1954. The menu was troncon de saumon cuit à la vapeur, poulet de grain, chou fleur, céleri, pommes de terre “à l’eau”, Crême coffee (sic) — steamed salmon, grain-fed chicken, cauliflower, celery, boiled potato, coffee cream. The wine was Montrachet 1949. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t be very good, assuming the ingredients were good and the cook was good, but is it not a bit beige-sounding? A 1960 lunch consists of asperge — sauce beurre fondu — saumon cuit à la vapeur — Pommes nouvelles. Petit pois. Groseilles à maquereau. Asparagus with butter sauce, steamed salmon, new potatoes, peas, gooseberries.

They were certainly limited by seasonality of produce, and for a few items, such as cheese, the after-effects of rationing. For the first couple of years, the cheese they eat after practically every meal (post-pudding, the English order) is totally generic — just listed as “Cheese” — the famous “government cheddar”, the only cheese produced in the UK during and just after the war. It’s only in the late 1950s that the menus get cheeses which actually have names, and often they are French (gruyère, camembert).

But the Woodhams (or rather their cooks) make the most of produce when it’s around. For example, in June 1957, when strawberries are in season, they eat them at every recorded meal. On July 4, they switch to raspberries, with very occasional peaches, and then in August to compote of pears. In May 1954 they eat asparagus at every opportunity. The idea of this seems incredibly luxurious — even today strawberries and asparagus are not exactly cheap. The wines, too, by today’s standards are far too expensive for everyday drinking. They have a lot of Meursault, which to me seems bonkers: a cheap Meursault today is around £30 a bottle. They also like the now-unfashionable Beaujolais, as well as Montrachet, Ch. Montrose and Chambertin. They drink both Meursault and Ch. Lafitte when Sir Michael and Lady Balcon come round — along with cheese straws, the ubiquitous steamed salmon, roast duck, peas, broad beans, new potatoes, followed by raspberries and cream. Occasionally, there is a cheaper choice — in summer they have a lot of Tavel, i.e. rosé. But this is the rosé from the rosé-only domaine — a far cry from Jacob’s Creek or Blossom Hill.

I’ve been told so many times that Elizabeth David changed British food in the 1950s that I look for any trace of her influence, but in vain. For several years they clearly have a French cook, who writes down everything in French, down to “sauce pane” — bread sauce to have with the “faisan rôti”. But her French recipes are along the lines of canard à l’orange, crême caramel, blanquette de veau (veal in white sauce), chocolate soufflé — classics, no Provençal peasant influence, and absolutely nothing Italian. As a test, I looked through a much more boring cookbook of the era than Elizabeth David — the 1955 Collins Pocket Guide to Good Cooking — subtitled Recipes for the Discriminating Housewife, Bachelor and Bride. There are similarities with the greatgrandparents’ diets, but even here there are more adventurous (or at least less Anglo) recipes which just don’t appear in the great-grandparents’ Dinner Books — schnitzel, gnocchi, fritto misto.

The modern foods which do creep in are, predictably, avocado pears and prawn cocktail (according to my mother, always served in a wine glass). A first isolated avocado shows up in about 1958, and they get practically routine in the next decade. But if anything the menus  get less appetising as we get into the 1960s — eggs in aspic (argh!), cold lamb tongue (yikes!), stuffed marrow (fine! whatever! I suppose I’d eat it if I had to), and in 1964, gulls’ eggs, which I honestly assumed were illegal, but appear not to be. Perhaps they were limited by their cooks’ repertoire, perhaps by their own taste.  The whole thing probably tasted perfectly good but it’s an odd combination of luxury and repetition. It makes you crave a plate of spaghetti.

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Food grown in the lab — or, as in Star Trek, “replicated” by a machine — is a staple of science fiction, because it sidesteps the issue of what humans might actually be able to eat 5,000 years from now (not to mention how they’re going to keep it fresh in the depths of space). How will it be grown? Will we have the resources to do it? You do get suggestions of some agricultural difference in the way food is grown — Luke Skywalker’s uncle and aunt are “moisture farmers” on the desert planet in Star Wars — but it doesn’t extend as far as recipes.  But a concern about meat, or really animals, does crop up: in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, animals are rare, almost extinct, and owning one is a symbol of status, a sign that you’re a good person.

The flipside of the animal-less future is in the trope that aliens are mainly interested in trying to eat us — most gruesomely, the aliens in Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, themselves from a nightmarish dystopia, who visit Earth to catch what they call “vodsel”, a delicacy on their home planet: men are captured, castrated, hobbled and fattened up, as factory-farmed animals are. A fillet of “voddissin” — vodsel meat — costs the same on their planet as “for an ordinary person, a whole month’s worth of water and oxygen”. The aliens view themselves as human and find bipeds bestial, disgusting.

But the best known food in science fiction is probably “soylent green” — which in the eponymous film, famously, “is people”, the last remaining protein resource. (Soylent, the real-life meal replacement drink, borrowed the name.)

In the novel the film is based on, Harry Harrison’s 1966 Make Room! Make Room!, set in an overpopulated then-futuristic 1999, in a world which has used up almost all its resources, soylent is what it sounds like: soybeans and lentils. “Soylent brown” made into “steaks” is the most appetising food we encounter. A teenage boy steals a boxful during a food riot and immediately devours three, marvelling at their “lovely softness”. The other food options include “ener-G”, made by compressing plankton into “little dry bricks”, margarine made from “chlorella oil”, algae, because “there’s hardly any flavour to the fats made from petrochemicals and you know there aren’t any whales left so they can’t use blubber”.  Kwashiorkor is rife across the US; people are mugged for their water rations. But Harrison’s numbers were off: the apparently untenable population in the novel is seven billion. We are now at 7.7 billion and, in 2015, there were 200 million fewer hungry people in the world than 25 years previously.

Memphis Meats is just one of several imitation-meat companies which seem remarkably well-funded. The Impossible Burger, so far available only in the US, has the most attractive website of all these companies, plus the unique selling point of the ingredient “heme”, a red, bloody-tasting molecule which, in what sounds like another visitation from fiction, is made by fermenting a genetically-modified yeast. The heme lets the Impossible Burger (based on textured wheat protein and coconut oil) actually “bleed” — ooze red juices and look pink in the middle like rare beef.

We can’t eat the “Impossible” meat in the UK precisely because of this ingredient, which is not approved in the EU, but apparently the taste is meat-esque, or at least meat adjacent; one reviewer compared it to game. But already available in Tesco is Beyond Meat (made mostly of pea protein and vegetable oils), and the Beyond-Burger can be ordered from the chain Honest Burger. When I ordered it I decided it was convincing until about halfway through when I suddenly lost my appetite: it has a sponginess, a decided bounce and chew, which are sort of meat-reminiscent rather than meat-identical. I seemed to get a sudden whack of coconut-taste (that would be the coconut oil, the third listed ingredient). The experience reminded me of the coconut-oil vegan cheese I tried, which smelt, looked and texturally felt totally acceptable until three or four seconds into chewing it. But unlike the disappointing “cheese” the Beyond Meat is OK.

I wonder if the faux-meat obsession is because protein is, still, the one food group that hasn’t been demonised. (Carbs are Bad.  Sugar is Bad. Fat is Bad. Fibre is Good but hardly glamorous.) I begin to suspect the market is not vegetarians but people who think they should be vegetarians. All faux-meat makers emphasise the green and eco side of their products — making, or growing them takes less water, fewer resources, less land, produces less carbon dioxide, etc. But then Impossible have the tag “Love meat? Eat meat . . . We found a way to make meat using plants, so that we never have to use animals again. That way, we can eat all the meat we want, for as long as we want.” There is an allure in being told you can consume as much as you like of the “bad” food. I’m not convinced any of these are better, or nicer, than the traditional veggie burger — which is made from plants in a relatively direct way, not hyper-processed textured proteins.

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“Veganuary” and “dry January” are now fixtures and at least encourage us to try to revert to the mean. But what I love most about this time of year are clickbaity articles about “wellness”. Last month The Times Saturday magazine published the routines of “wellness” enthusiasts in an article which reads like a description of recreational hypochondria, or Patrick Bateman’s morning routine in American Psycho. One man makes his morning coffee thus: “Coconut oil, some chaga mushroom powder — great for the immune system — a little bit of potassium, colostrum and collagen. I use a low-mycotoxin coffee — some brands contain mycotoxins, toxic chemicals produced by moulds . . . I fill out a spreadsheet on my computer inputting my weight, my urine pH, my hydration and how well I’ve slept.” Compare Patrick Bateman: “I take two Advil, a multivitamin and a potassium tablet, washing them down with a large bottle of Evian water . . . I eat kiwifruit and a sliced Japanese apple-pear (they cost four dollars at Gristede’s).”

These people are outliers — it’s probably worth knowing that the most popular order on Deliveroo in London last year was the cheeseburger from the American chain Five Guys.

Meanwhile, Netflix gave us Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, which told us that we should keep things only if they “spark joy”, and a team of scientists published a paper on the “planetary diet”, which told us that the world can feed 10 billion people and we don’t even have to be vegan. The core concern of both Tidying Up and the planetary diet is overconsumption: Marie Kondo, a Japanese organising expert, thinks most people simply have too much stuff; the Planetary Diet says most of us are eating too much of something, and not just meat and dairy, but too much fish and too many starchy vegetables.

I hadn’t heard of Marie Kondo before the Netflix show, although her books (called things like The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up) have been successful. I like to imagine the trends combining: think of the number of items you’d have to buy to get onto The Times’s level of “wellness”, and then wonder if you would feel OK throwing away your maca, acai, coconut water, glutamine, apple cider vinegar tablets, “digestive enzymes”, etc (all of which appear in the Times article) when you realise they no longer “spark joy”.

But the kitchen is really the place where the Kondo (or, officially, KonMari) method breaks down. She even says reassuringly to a couple in the first episode, “Approach it in a lighter way, because it’s never going to be perfect.” It’s a room which re-messes itself up three times a day. Every fridge has a shelf of rarely-touched half-empty jars and every drawer has too many spoons. Other people — apparently — buy ingredients which get used once and then languish in the back of the cupboard. I am accused of doing this but in my defence I always intend to use up the glutinous rice flour/red beans/dried limes.

The Kondo ideal is totally empty counters, with everything stacked vertically so as to be more visible. She reportedly stands carrots upright in the veg drawer. But on tidy kitchens Elizabeth David (in Is There A Nutmeg In The House?, Penguin, £12.99 ) expresses a similar desire for order and serenity: “There will be the minimum of paraphernalia in sight. It will start off and will remain rigorously orderly.” She goes on: “Naturally there’ll be, as now, a few of those implements in constant use . . . hanging by the cooker, essential knives accessible in a rack, and wooden spoons in a jar. But half a dozen would be enough, not thirty-five as there are now.” She touches on Marie Kondo territory:  “Cookery writers are particularly vulnerable to the acquisition of unnecessary clutter. I’d love to rid myself of it.”

Will getting rid of clutter make you happy? That’s the whole KonMari philosophy. A cartoon by Tom Gauld for the New Yorker a couple of years ago transposed her advice to a post-apocalyptic world: “As society collapses around us and we cling to life among the ruins, it’s more important than ever to have an organised and pleasant home in which to cower.”

Clearing out the old kitchen at my parents’ house I found some unusable yet un-throw-outable treasures: tiny moulds in the shape of shrimps for — I don’t know what, jellies or aspics? A complete pristine set of 20 jars with orangey-red plastic lids in the classic Sainsbury’s Design Studio style of the 1970s, three of which I immediately broke when the bottom fell out of the rotten cardboard box they were in. (Fans of this style — sans serif fonts, a lot of orange and brown — can view old Sainsbury’s packaging at sainsburysarchive.org.uk.)

We could have equipped another small kitchen in its entirety: minichopper, blender, kettle, toaster, all functioning, if a bit grotty, such as an electric carving knife — working — which looked as if it was from the 1970s and smelled of hot plastic when you turned it on.

What did we chuck? A couple of hundred lidless glass jars, a peeling nonstick pan which left little black pieces in the food, rusty biscuit tins — all stuff which we should have got rid of long ago.

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The original Dabbous in Fitzrovia did something that felt remarkably fresh at the time — haute cuisine skill mashed with Shoreditch cool. The El Dorado dish there was a “nested egg”, baked in hay, so superlative in its perfect egginess that it infallibly did what all great cooking does, which is make everyone shut up aside from the odd faint groan of pleasure. The egg is still on the menu at HIDE, where the décor — the menu masthead and lampshades above the tables, witty half-domes of white porcelain — pay it tribute. It’s still a showstopper: disarmingly simple, just an eggshell filled with golden perfection. I wish and wish I could be equally complimentary about the restaurant.

From the moment one enters, there’s something off about the proportions of HIDE, which communicates a sense of draughty tension. It’s huge, reminiscent of those Conran megaliths of the Nineties, which is fine if it’s packed and the staff are nippy, but dismal and anxiety-inducing if not. A lot of money has obviously been spent on the interior — the staircase is a wonder of tactile wood, fanned as delicately as the skeleton of a bird’s wing. There’s some beautiful relief — intarsia panelling, the floors are pickled (I think) oak and everything else is a cautiously luxey greige. But nothing quite coheres. Neither formal nor relaxed, it doesn’t feel as though it knows what it’s doing, a problem it shares with the service. The staff are beautifully-trained and clearly enthusiastic, but they have a collective tin ear when it comes to interrupting conversation to recite the construction of the dishes, while the very grown-up wine list would benefit from an equally authoritative sommelier.

The collaboration with Hedonism should work in that one can order anything from the wine merchant’s cellar to be brought to the table. But why make it harder by presenting the wine list on an iPad that isn’t quite up to the job? Ordering anything — except Ocado — from an iPad feels out-of-date, not cool. The tech was no advance on a thoughtfully-planned printed selection, which also has the advantage of not sliding you into a portal of approachably-priced reds when you’re after an Italian white just because the previous user has smeared butter on the screen. If you’re going to do that trois-etoiles thing with the wine, where you present it, decant it, and then take it away to be poured at the server’s discretion, then please make sure that the server keeps an eye on the glasses. Telling your customers they have finished their wine only to produce the bottle still a third full with the bill because you’ve left it behind an originally-fashioned Murano vase is not laid-back, it is screamingly annoying.

The seven-course tasting menu, with limited choice of meat and fish and options on added luxury courses such as foie gras, was — entirely forgettable. This is terribly embarrassing. Usually, I have a joyously greedy memory for food, being the sort of person who would recall where they were when Kennedy was shot by what they happened to be having for dinner that day. I can still conjure perfectly the pressed belly pork I ate at Claridges in 2002, the duck breast in rooibos tea at Arpège in Paris in 2011, or indeed the first time I tried a Dabbous egg. I seldom take a notebook to review (bad manners, also I’m not a famous critic like Grace Dent, so a notebook will only buy me funny looks, not free champagne), and in this instance I was confident that the kitchen would produce enough dazzle to obviate an aide-memoire. I checked the example on the internet but the tasting menu, as is proper, changes so frequently that nothing I had tried was listed. I could have lied, picked a dish or two and attached some adjectives, but the black hole is maybe the point. I remember that it was technically extremely competent, that presentation was austere though not frigid, that everything was good in a modern European, bit Japanesey, bit pickley and preservey Noma way. Flavours were careful compositions of balanced intensity, textures impeccable. No smears, drizzles, clouds or decorative buffoonery impaired what should have been a proper event of a dinner. Yet the only dish that sang was the egg, which was old though delectable news. The foie gras was yummy, but then foie gras is always yummy. But if I can’t remember the food well enough to praise, let alone criticise it, something has to be wrong.

I’m sure the investors are happy. The place was packed, even for the late 10pm serving, and the kitchen was banging out those multi-course sets with admirable efficiency. What it felt like was pedigree food — it could have been made by Tom Aikens or Jason Atherton, Alain Ducasse or Hélène Darroze — pleasant, well-bred and ultimately innocuous. Just not charismatic, characterful or compelling. Which is what the original Dabbous restaurant did so memorably well.

OK, HIDE, maybe it’s not you, it’s me. I’m spoilt and apparently semi-senile. You have an extraordinarily gifted chef, a billionaire’s view and amusingly rustic napery. I’ve got a receipt for over three hundred quid, a nagging sense of shameful ennui and a feeling that I should be finishing this piece with a gag about a curate.

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