A complementary drink
Cookery writers from the USA and Germany clearly feel deeply about cooking with beers as they produce heavily academic volumes on the subject and enjoy scholastic disputes over detail and correctness.
The classic British beer recipe, on the other hand, is the "three-pint roast" - that is, you bung a roast in the oven and go to the pub for three pints of beer while it is cooking. Beef and beer casserole, a nip of barley wine in the Christmas pud, and a drop of pale ale to lighten batter (you drink the rest of the bottle) are about as far as cuisine à la bière goes on this side of the Channel.
The historic problem is that until recently the British middle classes have not dined out much. Traditionally, while the workers drank beer in the pub and had chips on the way home, the upper classes drank wine with their food. So there is no great tradition of choosing the right beer to accompany food.
This started to change in the 1960s when a middle-market emerged that began a trend of eating curry with Kingfisher lager, moved on to chicken in the basket and a pint of keg bitter, and is now accustomed to ribs with Dos Equis swigged from the bottle.
The pub is now the fastest-growing venue for eating out, and it is unusual to find one that offers no food at all.
A number of factors stand between the enjoyment of well-cooked pub food and the appropriate beer to go with it, however. One is the tie; many pubs would love to stock a mouth-watering range of world beers, but are not allowed to.
Another, perhaps more serious, stumbling-block is the British habit of finding a favourite beer and sticking to it. Some people drink bitter. Some drink lager. Some drink Guinness. Few people are equally happy with all three.
But can you imagine washing down a freshly-caught, pink, juicy trout with a pint of Guinness? And what damage might a pint of hoppy bitter such as Shepherd Neame do to a rich chocolate pudding? Nevertheless, it is common practice for those who do drink beer with food to drink the same type throughout the meal.
Some pubs are addressing the question of matching food and beer. One is The Harrow at West Ilsley in Berkshire, where Morland beers dominate the bar but a more liberal regime rules the table.
The Harrow and its landlady Heather Humphreys are well-known for their beer banquets. A recent event offered the following menu: starters of mushrooms marinated in Caledonian Merman xxx or lamb and barley broth made with wheat beer; main courses of beef stew made with Nethergate Old Growler, wild rabbit in Shepherd Neame Bishop's Finger, or lamb, apricot, ginger and Morland's Old Speckled Hen pie; and to finish, baked cherry batter made with Timmermans kriek, raspberry syllabub flavoured with Timmermans frambozen, or brown bread ice-cream flavoured with Traquair House ale.
The beer list at this banquet of barley was as follows: Morland's bitter, Adnams Broadside, Rodenbach Alexander, Duvel, Timmermans kriek and frambozen, Courage Russian Imperial Stout '92, Guinness Foreign Extra Stout, Leffe Brune, Blonde and Trippel, Benesov Ferdinand, and N chod Dito.
Pub food competition
Heather Gant runs the Skirrid Inn near Abergavenny. Her chicken liver and Usher's Dark Horse Porter Pâté has just won Usher's second pub food competition.
A special award for cooking with beer in the same contest was won by the Fountain in Wells for a nutmeg syllabub made with Usher's Founder's Ale and brandy.
This kind of inventiveness goes hand in hand with a soaring public interest in all things to do with ale. Sales of foreign beers are booming, as are real ale sales - up 9% last year in a market in overall decline. CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) membership has soared from 30,000 to 50,000 in two years.
The chef tasting
Michael Jackson, of Channel 4's Beerhunter and a respected beer writer, must be the only person in the UK who could call the Belgians "daredevils" and keep a straight face. It was a line clearly intended to engage the participants in Jackson's tutored beer tasting at Caterer's Chef Conference held last month, and it raised the intended laugh.
But laughing at the Belgians does make a serious point about the British catering trade's narrow attitude to beer. Too many British caterers regard beer as no more than a commodity that has little place in hotels and restaurants. Jackson's tasting and the talk that preceded it were designed to help dispel the prevailing snobbery by offering a tantalising glimpse of the diversity of styles that exist around the world and their quality and character.
Jackson put the habit of drinking wine at civilised tables down to French dominance in Western cuisine generally, but pointed out that brewing bore many similarities to winemaking and could produce just as stimulating results.
That did not stop one chef from whispering "disgusting" as the ingredients of Timmermans kriek lambic - wheat, wild yeast, and cherries - were described, but he drained his glass once he'd tasted it.
There were similar misgivings about the "bits" evident in the two wheat beers on offer, Spaten Franziskaner from Bavaria and Hoegaarden, flavoured with orange peel and coriander seeds, from Belgium. (The "bits" are yeast particles and prove that the unfiltered beer is still living.) However the identical bits in Worthington White Shield went down well.
The questions from the floor showed that however keen some delegates were about the beer and food issue, the base level of knowledge was not as high as it might be.
Did Antony Worrall Thompson, chairing the session and clearly an enthusiast, think that the seed had been planted? "Restaurants such as Belgo in north London have made the idea of beer at the table much more acceptable," he said.
"The café society idea is much more relaxed - people don't just eat out on formal occasions, and no-one raises an eyebrow if you want a beer with your meal rather than wine."
