Those were the days… or where they?
During a recent Herculean attempt to rid myself of a few rainforests' worth of old papers, I discovered a sheaf of menus I'd saved from 10 years ago. They brought back some painful memories.
Some of the older lags among you may remember the days when chefs decided that risotto was much better made with pearl barley and not rice, when mashed potato was flavoured with vanilla, crème brûlée was flavoured with anything but vanilla, and lollo rosso was considered edible.
Trends in food are nothing new, but there are certain dangers inherent in treating cookery as just another branch of the fashion industry. I'm convinced that a whole generation of chefs has grown up not realising that marmalade can be made from oranges as well as red onions, or that bread and butter pudding doesn't have to be made with panettone.
Innovation and adaptation are half the fun of cooking: new ingredients and techniques demand new ideas and new recipes. The trouble is that yesterday's catwalk creations mutate into today's prêt-à-porter. The cutting-edge dish of slow-cooked lamb shank turns into a tired old pub staple, boiled into submission and drowned in a glutinous sauce. Meanwhile, the catwalk has moved on. Heaven knows what will have happened to Mr Blumenthal's snail porridge by the time it reaches the Dog and Duck.
It is not, of course, the fault of our highly inventive culinary couturiers that their ideas are pinched by lesser chefs, who might profitably spend more time learning to cook a good fish soup or a proper steak and kidney pudding than indulging in Fat Duck knock-offs. On the old menus, the dishes I would still want to order were invariably the classics, not the whims of a chef with more ingredients than sense.
I do, however, have a confession to make: the menus I discovered were mine. It was akin to finding a fading photo of oneself sporting maroon loon pants and dodgy facial hair, and I felt suitably ashamed.
Suppressing an immediate urge to burn them, I decided to keep them. As the philosopher George Santayana once said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Over to you
Simon Wright, restaurateur and food critic
"I had a meal at Cracco-Peck in Milan a few years back, and I recall with particular disgust a martini glass containing strips of smoked salmon in a misty foam of what I took to be egg white, salmon eggs and something incredibly bitter apparently called Crodino, which is a non-alcoholic version of Campari. Acrid and toxic-tasting."
Gerard Greene, chief executive, Yotel, London "The deep-fried scorpion I had in a restaurant in London. When it turned up on my plate I was pretty horrified and felt somewhat pressured into eating it. It felt a bit like I was on I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here."
Harry Murray, managing director, Lucknam Park, Bath "I once saw somebody order oysters and then cover the whole thing in chocolate sauce before eating them. In terms of strange meals I've served myself, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton came in and she ordered lobster and smoked salmon with Champagne while he ordered sausage and mash covered in gravy, and a bottle of vodka."
Sean Valentine, managing director, Missing Ingredients "They'll probably kill me for saying this, but it was probably at the Fat Duck in Bray. Heston Blumenthal was doing lots of things with ice-cream. Black pudding ice-cream was the strangest thing I have ever eaten in my life. It was just weird."
