Sheep
Posted: 5th June 2017
I haven’t been in London much this month. For reasons best left unexplained, I elected to tour the island of Great Britain, making a serpentine journey from Oxford to Inverness. My overriding impression was of sheep: big shaggy ewes, gambolling baa-lambs born at Christmas or Easter, and every now and then, the rare, hornèd ram lying exhausted in the midst of his womenfolk. I was not in Kent, East Anglia, Sussex, Devon or Cornwall but that notwithstanding everywhere I saw sheep, from the Cotswolds to the Welsh Mountains, from the Yorkshire Moors to the Pennines, from the Lake District to the Scottish Lowlands and from Fife to the Cairngorms: sheep, sheep, sheep. In all fairness, Great Britain should be renamed ‘Sheep Island,’ as it is not so very different from the Falklands with their famous ‘365’ – that is the number of times in a year the islanders are apparently reduced to eating lamb or mutton. We are luckier, I suppose, at least we have chicken breasts for those days when sheep meat is simply de trop.
I ought to add that, statistically speaking, there were 31,350,000 sheep and lambs on the island at the time David Cameron was re-elected Prime Minister in 2015 – half a sheep for every man, woman and child. If you include two-legged ovines (and that is not including bovines) they would win any poll by a landslide.
Before I left on my Odyssey, however, there were a couple of things to detain me in London. Castelnau champagne relaunched on 9 May at the excellent Sakagura restaurant off Regent’s Street. Castelnau is a cooperative in Rheims which takes grapes from 900 hectares of Champagne and 149 ‘crus’ or more distinguished sites – so they have a lot of good value champagne to sell. What really marks it out is the extended times in which the champagnes remain on their lees: six years for the Brut Réserve and as much as a dozen for the blanc de blancs or the vintage. There was also a summer tasting at Laithwaites’ HQ under the arches at Borough Market with a little flight of English sparklers, some of which were quite good, but at the price (£29.99) there was no question that the Cazals Carte d’Or champagne was better value. Otherwise the wines that took my fancy were the 2014 Domdechant Werner Hochheim Classic (£14.99) and a sensational 2015 Yellow Muscat from Royal Tokay (£12.49). There was a nice white Macon – 2015 Château de la Greffière. Among the reds was an old friend – Heinrich Hartl’s 2015 Classic from Austria’s Thermenregion (£14.99), and a strapping Tuscan, 2015 Saracosa Governo (£14.99). The 2015 Portinho Covo was one of my favourite wines of the tasting, and one of the cheapest too (£8.29). Another cheapie was the 2015 Prince de Courthézon (£8.99). Rather pricier was the 2014 Cuvée du Vatican Châteauneuf du Pape (£19.99), which was rich and truffly, and the 2014 Mas de la Devèze from the Roussillon had that enticing Grenache aroma of brown sugar. For £40 there was a 2009 Château Berliquet from Saint Emilion, perhaps for a special occasion? It was damned good.
So that business being despatched, off we went to explore the mighty mainland, pausing at Oxford to see how the Cornmarket and the Westgate Centre have been conquered by the ‘major brands’ we apparently all crave. Nursing a coffee at Marks & Spencer’s on Queen Street I tried to identify the old premises of the Gridiron Club, where public schoolboys used to bray for lunch all those years ago. The need for lemons and tonic water drove us into two supermarkets in Magdalen Street. It was decidedly not the Oxford I knew.
Despite the abundant sheep, it proved a whole month of chicken breasts. Anything other than chicken breasts, it seems, is beyond the imagination of British hotel kitchens. The gastronomic awareness that apparently colours the small screen, is largely absent from the bigger hotels. I suspect almost everything arrives pre-prepared in catering packs, and the chefs only have to overcook the vegetables and curdle the sauce. The other thing you are struck by is the paltriness of it all: a couple of square inches of chicken breast with a serving spoonful of sauce, a coffee-cup’s capacity of vegetables, and a similar portion of potatoes. Unless they are kind enough to toss in some pudding, that, my friend is that. I can, however, offer a tip: if you are still hungry after dinner there are usually two biscuits hidden among the sachets of instant coffee in your bedroom.
Bath is probably more propitious than Oxford. Since posh undergraduates were evicted in the eighties, the smart restaurants went elsewhere, leaving only the chains. At least there is still money in Bath, but you wouldn’t know it in the centre, where only chains are in evidence. I had dinner in a pub near Cirencester. There was a decent enough shepherds’ pie and a nice lemon roulade. With a couple of pints of IPA I felt almost human. When the publican’s mother was asked the secret of her pie, she proudly replied: ‘Bisto!’ And there you have it: eat your heart of Jamie! Our great culinary revival isn’t even skin-deep.
Not being a motorist I was innocent of motorway services. This was perhaps my biggest discovery of all. There is one not so far from the Oxford park-and-ride, and jam-packed with ‘high-street brands.’ Possibly the only thing that would make it different to America was the presence of Harry Ramsden’s fish and chip shop. As I learned from Telford (‘Salope!’) and elsewhere, Oxford’s version was positively luxurious. None possessed any features that identified them with the locality.
In Llangollen I was introduced to an oggi, a Welsh version of a Cornish pasty. It looked too vast to negotiate at lunch and I opted for a small pork pie: the meat was loosely minced, not solid or couched in gelatine like a normal pie. Our destination was Carnavon again and we ate that night in the Black Boy, where I had a nice bit of brisket, only marred by a silly barbecue sauce and an atrocious bung-it-all-in-and-toss-on-salad-dressing salad. Still, it was a lot better than Fu’s, a Chinese place down by the Marina. It looked quite swish for Carnavon, but the food seemed to have altered not a jot since I last ate in a provincial Chinese restaurant forty odd years ago.
And so on to Chester and York. We were offered a chance to try some cheeses on the way: Double Gloucester, Cheshire and Lancashire, but sadly from clammy Cryovac packets. You become aware too, that decent British cheeses come in at a hefty £20-£30 a kilo, and that the supermarket alternatives are really not worth buying. A shall forebear from commenting on ‘British’ wine served with it. At some point I was told that Decanter had given a Regional Trophy to an East Anglian wine made from the Bacchus grape: nice to hear that my old employers are doing their bit for Brexit.
There was another chicken breast at my hotel in York, a place where I had the sinister experience of entertaining a young American who burst into my room in the middle of the night and told me emphatically that I was sleeping in his bed. York was all chains: one night I had a decent Indian at Akhbar, another in an Anatolian of many branches. In both cases I concentrated on the genius loci – lamb. I might have been better off looking at pubs for my dinner, but I didn’t want all that bustle, beer and discomfort.
When you eat hotel, chain or street food over a long period of time, you rapidly get a pasty mouth from monosodium glutamate. You try to offset matters by eating whatever appears to be healthy from the breakfast buffet. Some (not all) three or four-star hotels provide fruit, like apples and oranges, others have compotes, prunes etc, and most can offer live yoghurt. Many travellers ‘pig out’ on huge platefuls of cooked breakfast with the (for me at least) unlovely option of baked beans. The cooked tomatoes, on the other hand, I found quite useful in the general dearth of fruit and veg. As a rule, lunch was just a chain sandwich, I mostly skipped it altogether, fortifying myself by adding a slice of black pudding, bacon or (north of the border) haggis to my breakfast plate.
From York we made an excursion to Whitby, much, as I would imagine, holiday-makers from Darlington did a century before. We went to Trenchers where there were plates of bread and butter on the table and pots of tea; and ate fish and chips cooked in beef dripping which repeated on me for the rest of the day. It was an authentic gastronomic experience, however, and I was grateful for that. I even had a nibble at some mushy peas which Peter Mandelson is famously supposed to have mistaken for guacamole.
The next day we passed the Pennines to Grange-over-Sands. I looked in on the butcher Higginson, whose rather more solid pork pies I had enjoyed in the past. He was a specialist in local salt-marsh lamb, where the pastures are impregnated with brine by the retreating tides. Farmers on the flatlands build dams to protect their houses from the encroaching sea. The idea of feeding sheep on salt was culled from the French Cotentin, where this sort of meat has always fetched very fancy prices. We went to see a farmer, who entertained us with his sheep dogs and a donkey, and told us that he imported the semen for his Holsteins from the United States. He didn’t admit it, but he doubtless voted for Brexit and now appeared to regret it because he wasn’t going to receive the very generous subsidies the EU paid him in the past.
After a pit-stop in twee Bowness-on-Windermere we ducked into Westmoreland and ended up in an unlikely motorway hotel for another chicken breast. The next day we crossed the border to Moffat and had a sort of school lunch, but it was beef (beef!) and the parsnips had been rolled in cornmeal and curry powder which made them a bit different at least. I bought a bit of Kendal Mint Cake and we set out for Edinburgh.
Leaving York I had spotted Lo Spuntino, which looked like a more promising place on the city outskirts. I had some foolish thought that I might find a pleasant family-run trattoria in Edinburgh, but even my attempts to stray from the garden path yielded little. On my first night I despaired and wandered into a Nepalese place on the other side of the university quadrangle. Most of the menu was anything but Nepalese, but there were some good chicken dumplings and another dish I didn’t know, so I settled down with a book and a glass of some of the ropiest wine I’d drunk in decades. The second one was marginally better: I suppose they must have opened a new bottle. They gave me a ticket telling me I had twenty percent off my next meal, but when I went back a few days later they were unaccountably shut and I had to make do with another – and very similar – Nepalese in Cockburn Street.
I hit on the idea that the hotly desired trattoria might be in Leith Walk, but apart from a couple of Sc-Italian places opposite Valvona and Crolla there was nothing to write home about. I recalled a Swiss place in Leith itself, and a snazzy bistrot run by Allan Corbett, the brother of the late and great Ronnie, but they were too far. I popped into Valvona and Crolla for a panatela and a decent glass of wine from Brindisi – the first palatable thing I had had since I hit the road. Although the Continis have gone on to bigger, more commercial things, their old shop remains a beacon of light in the Athens of the North. That evening I witnessed a stupendous vulgarama at Prestonfield House, a sort of Scottish bonanza with yard upon yard of tartan, three Scottish tenors, haggis (plus Ode) and a soprano with that annoying broken voice that people affect for musicals. My Edinburgh sojourn ended with a bit of rubbery pork in my hotel the next day.
We set out for Saint Andrews on a sunny morning. The place was teeming with American golfers. I found a butcher, but not the one whose whole sides of beef I had so admired a couple of decades before – although someone told me it was still there. Little Willie and his trysts seemed to have injected fresh life into the city. On my first visit I think there was only a curry place, the hotels and the Peat Inn: a posh restaurant near Cupar with Michelin stars a few miles down the road. Now Saint Andrews was heaving with smart shops and bistrots. We proceeded up the coast to Dundee then joined the A9, Scotland’s never ending narrow trunk road. In Pitlochry I was cheated by a shop purportedly selling local honey, which, I learned when I read the back label, was a blend of honeys from Auckland to Timbuktu. Astonishing numbers of tourists appeared to have descended on the place. I never did see any decent honey the whole time I was in Scotland.
My journey came to a premature end in Inverness. We had a half-way decent dinner at the Mustard Seed restaurant in an old chapel on the quay. Early the next morning I received instructions to return home: I had not been showing sufficient enthusiasm. I had an excruciating day to kill in the city before my flight and ambled about, taking in a couple of expensive butchers and two paltry fishmongers with very modest bits of fish to sell. One fishmonger offered fruit and vegetables – and indication that there was something cranky about eating fish. I suppose I might have found more in a supermarket but I very much doubt any of it would have been local, although my fondness for Scottish raspberries had been sapped by the sight of so many polystyrene tunnels on the hillsides. I had a salty sandwich from an Italian shop and a pint of English ale (the Scottish stuff was off) while I finished the Hardy I was reading, then I made my way to the airport and home.
It was a great relief to be back. I could appease my longing for home cooking and start working to cure the digestive problems I had developed during my profound investigations into the eating habits of my two-legged compatriots.
