"The Fat Panel", incidentally, receives funding from the UK's Margarine and Spreads Association. I don't know about you, but I'd rather feast on proper cream and butter, Jersey where possible, and just do a little less of it than ever let margarine or spreads pass my lips. Pastry without butter or butter and lard? Unthinkable. A tart feeds six people in my house and has only three ounces of butter in it. That is 85g, or less than 15g a person. The moment I start reading about grams of saturated fat ingested per capita I want to give up and go and eat a slice of tart anyway, unless, that is, it is made with a spread or margarine. All of these processed horrors - for processed they are - are made with inferior ingredients which have been whipped and frothed and centrifuged to make more of less, and sport "with 30 per cent olive oil" and such things on their labels while not having a drop or a drip of first cold-pressed olive oil in them that would actually be both delicious and beneficial, in that order.

In my book, there are pies, tarts, cobblers and stews. There is also a "Happy Food" chapter where the recipes are mainly chocolate. But it's a balanced diet of a book. Wild Alaskan salmon with smoky aubergine polenta and cucumber in cream and tarragon for less than the price of the aforementioned KFC bucket. A rich chocolate cake damp with almonds and Cassis; a pot of Boston baked borlotti beans cooked with lardo and star anise, blackstrap molasses and mustard, among other things, and nothing designed to spell the pinch of paucity or the punch aimed at us by the food police.

No one lives on clotted cream alone and no one need eat badly in a recession if they only know how to shop and to cook. It is no small irony that for the first time in history the rich choose a peasant diet and stay thin and the poor get fat, seriously fat, except in Third World countries. The root of all evil is neither butter and cream nor the recession, it is in being deskilled in the kitchen and turning to industrial, processed foods and ready-mades. It is in not knowing how to stay in and cook on some occasions and stay in and eat pizza and a good apple tart with cream on others.