Although there are relics of one or other of his bodies conveniently available in Roquemaure in France, in the Stephansdom in Vienna, in Blessed St. John Duns Scotus church in Glasgow and in Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, they don't see a particular upsurge of visitors on the 14th. Like many old festivals, St Valentines day has gone the way of all flesh and been turned into a commercialised orgy by purveyors of insincere cards, garage forecourt flowers, uncomfortable underwear and, above all restaurant owners - because, on St Valentine's evening we feel we have to go out for dinner.

Why we get this atavistic herd urge, no-one can be quite sure, but it's become deeply engrained - Valentine's day has become all about eating out and failure to secure a reasonable booking on the 14th can be cited, if not as grounds for divorce, at least for weapons-grade recrimination for the rest of the year.

And so, for one blissful night, the balance of power shifts away from the whiney, demanding and unpredictably fickle customer and firmly into the hands of the restaurateur. Along with the week prior to Christmas and Mothering Sunday this is a time he can be sure of filling every available seat several times over. If you can't fill a place on Valentine's night you have no right to call yourself a restaurant. In fact, in most towns the UK you could stick red napkins in the mugs in a soup kitchen and sell tables. Shove a rose in a jam jar and you'd be sold out six months in advance.

It's not just the quantity of customers that's different on this, the catering trade's most magical night of the year, it's also the quality. Over recent decades we've become, as a nation, more comfortable with restaurant going. The 14th of Feb, ('VD' as it's known to the trade) is no longer likely to be our only annual visit - but, as far as the restaurant trade is concerned, it is the time when they'll get the most inexperienced diners.

I don't want to make the restaurant industry sound too cynical. There are, of course, considerations of shareholder profitability and competition in a tough market but the combination of guaranteed demand and undiscerning, desperate customers doesn't show their best side in them in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, it brings out a sort of crazed, vulpine bloodlust.

The big name restaurants and the small, romantic independents are, of course, booked up months, sometimes years in advance leaving the ordinary human being, who only got their brain into gear to book by December, entirely at the mercy of the chain restaurants and the Conranised gastrobarns .

A request for a table for two at 8 is met with a startled and contemptuous snort but if, by some twist of good fortune, you've managed to find a place that's either so entirely unknown or just flat-out awful that it still has a couple of vacant places, you'll be subject to a bewildering list of mean-minded restrictions and contractual boilerplate.

"We can fit you in at 6.30 or 10.30". "We'll need the table back in 90 minutes. "You'll need to order from the set menu... in advance... online". "Confirm by telephone on the day... and we'll need your credit card details so we can exact a charge if you cancel or don't show".

To be fair, these restrictions didn't all come from the same restaurant - just the first three I called in late January - The fourth was kind enough to offer me a consolation table "elsewhere in St. Valentine's Week".

And once we've secured our inconveniently timed and strictly limited tenure of the table by the toilet, what's on offer? In the early C19th, aphrodisiac menus were popular. “Turtle soup with ambergris, sole à la normande, reindeer fillet in cream sauce, salmis of veal, roasted young pigeon, watercress salad, asparagus in hollandaise sauce, bone marrow pudding, port; Bordeaux, coffee and coca" was one suggested option. Not, I admit, the kind of thing likely to instil anything other than unromantic lethargy and flatulence in the modern diner but at least it showed flair, imagination and a degree of choice.

There's no choice available to participants in the modern 'Valentine's Experience'.

As one high-end chef, anonymous for obvious reasons, put it "Everything shitty, clichéd, and horribly 80s gets wheeled out. Duo of lamb chops, cut to resemble hearts. Coeur a la fucking crème. There will be at least one nancying, ninnying chicken dish, especially for the ladies, and steak, which will be ordered by 80% of the men. Well-done, of course - medium if you're lucky".

It's pleasant to know that, as you enjoy your romantic dinner, catching your date's eye in the candlelight, your thoughts turning lightly to love, there's an entire kitchen brigade, in a murderous sweating, loathing rage separated from you only by a flimsy MDF door.

Your experience is unlikely to be enhanced by your busy server, as the Valentine's evening shift isn't exactly an unalloyed pleasure for them either. Most of the waiting staff I spoke to agreed that while "no-one wants to look a cheapskate by under-tipping and ruin their chances of copping off" they'll spend a fair part of their evening fielding ill-informed complaints from men who believe it "makes them look forceful and educated in front of their date".

Dining out on the 14th of Feb is an experience that doesn't reflect well on any of the participants. We go be cause we feel we have to, we're served by people who'd rather it was any other day of the year, with food that the chefs are ashamed of because they know they could do better.

Apart from the proprietor, nobody in the restaurant is having much fun on St Valentine's evening and any tiny hint of romance in the air is easily overpowered by the naked aggressive commercialism of the occasion. If St Valentine deserves to be patron saint of anything it should be catering industry shareholders.

Unless we collectively turn our backs on restaurants on St Valentine's Day, things will only get worse. This is not necessarily as unromantic an idea as it might sound. There has to a better way to say 'I love you' than getting industrially fed in an environment where the one nod to atmosphere is a tealight, a wilting rose and an intrusively sleazy soundtrack. Why buy into a Disney date or a Grand Guignol parody of a candlelit dîner à deux? Since the Vatican have relinquished it, St Valentine's day is up for grabs. You and your partner can choose any other day of the year to go out, get treated well by a decent restaurant and create your own romance.

Like many of us, he'd been blown away by the quality of food he'd encountered and told us so, in florid prose, for the first 800 words. He then rounded up by explaining how hopelessly, incurably crap food would always remain in his part of the world.

It genuinely saddened me to see that sort of weak-minded, unthinking dreck coming from an American - because I'm so used to reading it from English writers.

There are a lot of historical reasons why the English have problems with food. Some blame the industrial revolution, some blame a class system that puts the responsibility for cooking solely into the hands of servants - these theories are well documented - but there's something else. There's a powerful strand of middle and upper class worship of French cuisine at the expense of English, and it goes back a long way.
'The French Cook', a translation of La Varenne's ''Le Cuisinier françois' was a bit of a bestseller in the UK (insofar as a book which could be read by few and afforded by less could be considered a bestseller) back in 1653.

In 1747 Hannah Glasse averred that...

'If Gentlemen will have French Cooks, they must pay for French Tricks. So much is the blind Folly of this Age, that they would rather be impos'd on by a French Booby, than give Encouragement to a good English Cook!'

Half a century later, Tallyrand was losing his chef, Careme, to the Prince Regent and the British aristocracy were falling over themselves to worship at the feet of any Frenchman in a toque - and they've never stopped.

Things probably reached their most egregious after the war in Elizabeth David's early books, where her breathless worship of everything Mediterranean bordered on the lubricious.

Though St David is often credited with the regeneration of food appreciation in the UK, the way that she redirected the moneyed classes towards France at the moment the privations of war were over means she could equally well be blamed for keeping English cookery in the dark ages for a further three decades.
This is a shame, because by all accounts, by the time she was into her later books, 'Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen' and 'English Bread and Yeast Cookery', she had matured enough to realise that perhaps all the sun sea and shagging had turned her head a little in her early years. She acquired a little historical rigour and began to get really interested in English food. Much to her disgust, of course, it was too late to redirect her myrmidons who were rushing off, lemming-like to clog up Provence with their Volvos.

The French, obviously, think their food is the best in the World. It's a fair opinion, but I wonder if, at the peak of their international influence, the English hadn't agreed with them so very much then the whole of the English-speaking world might not consider other cuisines just as worthy of attention.
But the idea that French is the ur-cuisine and the only one which matters is just one of the many tired tropes that food writers slide so easily into.

It offends me that the French are so unquestioningly worshipped as the best because the Brits are, equally thoughtlessly, singled out as the world's worst. Our national attitude to food has been questionable but, for example, the Dutch, who with a religious predisposition to regard enjoyment of food as actual sin and with almost no culture of dining out or entertaining, are benignly ignored by those who pontificate on culinary matters.

Similarly, though our nation could be characterised as half a dozen foodie hotspots interspersed by a moaning, crud-chewing herd of junk-fuelled semi-morons, one could argue the same for the US and Australia, both regularly praised for their exciting, cutting edge attitude to food.

Ask any honest Frenchman and he'll tell you how French supermarkets are filling up with packaged rubbish, French farming is going to the dogs and burger bars are despoiling his city. In fact, he'll tell you, it's every bit as easy to eat crap in Paris as in London.

The authentic cuisine of the British Isles has solid, unbroken and documented history as old as the nation itself and every bit as dignified as the French. If the middle classes hadn't been quite so distracted by the worship of French food they might well have written about it instead of allowing recipes to drop off the cultural radar. Now we're starting to rediscover, the stews, pies, pasties, cawls, hotpots, the game, the smoked goods, the amazing fish recipes, the superb lamb dishes - any of which would, in France, have a 'confrerie' founded in its honour, be declared a national treasure and get written up by panting international gourmands. With a bit of luck, our food culture might be extricating itself from generations of neglect and perceived inferiority - but not unless we can wrestle our concentration back across the Channel, to give it a fighting chance.

Now, lest you think I'm just indulging in the olde English sport of baiting the French, lets drag ourselves back to Arizona.

There are several reasons the article pressed my buttons.

First. I'd always assumed that blinkered, romanticised Francophilia was a disease of the English middle-class (and, of course, the French) which is why it's shocking to see it trotted out in a country that has no reason, cultural or historical, to bother with it.

Second, I think it's ill mannered. No-one with a public platform and a desire to communicate about food should anyone attack his own food culture for failing to be French.

But these are really minor gripes. The real problem is much wider. I believe that unthinking, reiteration of these tragic old predjudices is fundamentally damaging to the interests of anyone who loves food.

When I was at art-college, I was probably over-influenced by critics like John Berger and Peter Fuller. They argued that what was regarded as 'art' in the West fitted into a tradition shaped by imperialist expansion and the acquisition and collecting habits of the wealthy - basically, western art starts with the Greeks and passes through the Italian renaissance and the Dutch masters because Victorian gentlemen nicked or looted so much of it to populate their museums and stately homes.

This didn't mean that, as some people have interpreted it, that everything from Fra Lippo Lippi to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was unmitigated crap, but it did mean that, in order to understand art it was important to have understood its historical and cultural context.

Articles that simply parrot the same old nonsense about the cooking of France without context show that the appreciation of food and cooking today is as developed as art history was in about 1890 - ill-informed, elitist and reflecting very poorly on the intellect of its perpetrators.

Writing that French food is great, English food is unremittingly awful - or even that Phoenix lacks decent chefs - is easy, but without an understanding of the web of national, cultural and class preconceptions behind it, the statement is completely pointless.

Food, to me, is one of the most important creative outlets available to human beings. It will never be taken as seriously as it deserves, as seriously as art, literature or music as long as our appreciation of it remains intellectually naiive.

It might seem that the ability to write a pleasant 1000 word adjective laden piece on why French food is simply lovely is the very definition of a food writer. I believe firmly to the contrary that, in 2006, it displays a complete lack of objective taste, zero knowledge of food history and an almost criminal ignorance of a wider world of food appreciation.

Not metal spoons, you understand. I've no problem with them. The manly heft of the tablespoon, the witty reflectiveness of the deep bowled soup supper, the cheeky, gamine little teaspoon, I can regard them all with benign equanimity. No, my problem is with the wooden spoon.

As a child, I regarded the spoons wielded by the women of my family with nothing short of awe. They were mighty pieces of treen, ceremonial totems of maternal generosity, vast in size, substantial in capacity and hewn, doubtless, from the same logs as Nelson's ships. They looked like bloody shovels.

They stirred stew, spanked kids, hauled washing out of the boiler and, for all I knew could paddle longships on coastal raids. Each was unique. One bleached by soda from the washing, one indelibly stained with beetroot. One chipped, one scorched but each laden with character.

Now I gaze upon my own spoon pot and find it full of ridiculous little bits of stick. Machine carved out of some pitiful 'sustainable' timber. Short of handle, warped for God's sake, by hot liquids. Unable to stir a thickening stew without snapping at the shaft. Too shallow of bowl to sample soup without pouring it down your arm. Each of them subtly undermining my pleasure in cooking by their weedy, pusillanimity, their manifest un-fitness for purpose.

Why, you ask, do I allow the bastard things in my kitchen if they piss me off so much. You see, I've never bought a wooden spoon in my life. I inherit the things. Some belonged in flats I once occupied, some were left by visiting friends, a set of three came free with a magazine, two were stolen by my ex-wife from her college room-mate.

And there lies the problem - the fundamental thrift of the cook. I can't throw away an adequate spoon: it would be wrong, and yet I couldn't, no matter how badly I'd like to, go into a catering supplier and declare, in a loud, clear voice "I'd like a half dozen of your best wooden spoons, my good man" because I've already got loads at home.

I would have to take my spoons out into the garden, like some ugly and unwanted pet and quietly destroy them and that, I lack the courage to do.

And still they keep coming. Last week my daughter came home from school with a doll she'd made from a wooden spoon. How could she know, as she handed it to me, her eyes alight with pride, what pain she caused her old Dad. I knew that when the inadequately glued wool hair and the cut-out felt dress had fallen off I'd be lumbered, probably for at least a decade, with another crap spoon.

That thing will still be causing me daily pain when she's grown up, left home, met some slack-jawed , leather-jacketed, hoodlum and shacked up in a trailer park. Even then she'll probably be stirring the bastard's microwave curry with a better spoon than mine.

And so I must carry on with my crap spoons. With every act of stirring or sampling another burr under the saddle, I plod on, my culinary life held permanently short of bliss by a few pieces of warped wood and my own thrift and cowardice. The spark of joy when one breaks inevitably extinguished by the arrival of another freebie.

O where are my Granny's great paddles?

Ou sont les cuilleres en bois d'antan?

I learned to cook through the eighties and nineties. Great things were happening in the world of food, particularly in the UK. We were turning our collective backs on the overcooked, the stewed, the heavily sauced and the 'international cuisine' our post war parents had enjoyed.

We sniggered at our mothers and grandmothers with their roasting tins, their basting spoons and their barding needles. We smirked about their big, grey 'overcooked' roasts, nurtured in the uterine warmth of the slow oven. We flung it all aside in favour of seared meat.

With a swashbuckling yuppie elan we scorned the cheaper cuts. The finest, most tender meat our new wealth could acquire was 'sealed' in pans as overheated as the market. With vampire zeal we fed and the juices of near raw meat ran down glossy chins.

And ever since, we've been perfecting this technique. Looking at the supermarket meat section these days you'd imagine that animals were made of steak. Where once, scrag, neck, chump and shin would have occupied valuable retail space there is nothing but glistening slabs of pure, tender muscle. Once favoured cuts like legs or shoulders are brutally 'butterflied' or boned and rolled so they can be flash grilled. Do cows have bones any more? Are sheep composed only of tenderloin, remaining erect in the field by virtue of permanent clenching. Do pigs exist at all?

The same principle holds throughout - buy meat good enough to eat raw and burn the outside.

But in recent years - really quite suddenly in the tectonically slow moving world of food - there has been a real change.

For me the epiphany was Paula Wolfert's magnificent book 'The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen'(2003) and more specifically a single recipe for slow cooked leg of lamb. Though she correctly credits Harold McGee and to a lesser extent Heston Blumenthal with rediscovering the idea, they merely provide the scientific rigour behind a kitchen truth as old as cooking.

It doesn't require much. A little water in the roasting tin, a temperature around 100 and anything from 6 to 24 hrs. Really showoff recipes drop the temperature even further, though writers often feel the need to recommend a scalding in boiling water as a kick off, to kill off anything living on the surface before cooking.

The basic principle is this. If you want the centre of your meat to reach a certain temperature - let's say 65 degrees for rare lamb - there are two ways to approach cooking. One can either use a substantially hotter oven and expect the outside to cook faster than the inside or one can set the oven only a little higher than the eventual temperature required and allow a considerable period for the meat to cook.

Either method will work - to the extent that the meat will be properly cooked through, but the first method will yield a classic crisp browned outside and rare centre while the second method seems to result in something altogether more homogenous. A consistently perfect texture all the way through.

McGee's other great gift to the cooks of the world has been to debunk the myth of 'sealing in the juices' by searing. High temperature cooking, even when a suitable resting period is allowed, still results in the loss of juices and fats. The most exciting part of Wolfert's technique is the way that the fats throughout a more challenging cut of meat can be raised to such a temperature that they seem to combine with the body of the meat. Like a good, old-fashioned kleftiko, the fibres of meat in Wolfert's lamb leg are 'confitted' in their own fats.

Eating slow cooked meat for the first time you realise why sauces were invented. A pan-seared piece of meat cries out for liquid accompaniment - usually fat-based and highly flavoured - to make it digestible. Slow cooked meat is perfused with flavour and fats. It requires nothing.

For someone to whom meat is religion, epiphany is not too strong a word for the effect that Wolfert's recipe has had on me.

Though I still look at the colour of meat, worry about its hanging time and occasionally enjoy a crisply seared filet - I'm now far more interested in complex cuts with challenging mixtures of muscle fibre, fat, cartilage and connective tissue.

I'm bored by the garnet hues of perfectly marbled Wagyu. Any idiot can slap that on a grill, I'm looking for something as complicated as a footballer's knee that can be coaxed, with time and gentle heat into a rich, self-saucing meat jam.

Shins, shoulders, pork bellies and whole ducks, anything shot through with enough fat gets the slow treatment and, though my life may be shortened, its quality has risen.

And now, suddenly, everybody is doing it. Every half-baked media hash-slinger is rediscovering their inner Mum and bringing out perilously low and slow cooked cheap cuts. 12 hour lamb leg, 24 hr pork belly, it's only a matter of time before some food channel nonentity comes up with slow roast ox-skull - cooked for two months on the pilot light - that cuts with a spoon and tastes like heaven.

It galls me to say it but our mothers may have been right. Though there's nothing quite as disheartening as an overcooked roast there can be nothing as satisfying as a properly slow-cooked joint.

I turned up in Cannes on Wednesday at around midnight to meet my wife at the advertising festival. For those of you who've never been, it's like the film festival except that nobody, and I mean nobody, is in any kind of twelve-step programme. Highly paid people with expense accounts and hotel suites, on the other side of Europe from the moderating influence of their families can be debauched in ways I no longer care to imagine. I had to attend several of these before I finally retired (hurt) from the industry and, frankly, was looking forward to this one like some shellshocked vet being choppered back to the zone.

It was Hell, much as anticipated. The Croisette was awash with body fluids, elderly executives pawed their comely PAs like Soho Humbert Humberts while a midget prostitute in leopardskin cavorted through the hotel lobby. Very last days of Empire.

By Saturday everything was winding down in preparation for the Porn Industry awards the following week (I think I was the only person left in town detached enough to see the irony of advertising being squeezed in between Film and Porn) and on Sunday morning I put Al on the plane and was left with a day to kill before flying home myself, at midnight.

Having never been to St Paul de Vence I thought it might be fun to whip up there for breakfast but I discovered that every available flat surface was being laid to take advantage of selling lunch to incoming coaches of Americans so I couldn't even find coffee and a seat.

I lurked about a bit then, around 12, headed back to pick up the car. As I passed the low gate of the Columb d'Or I thought I might try to duck in and check out the paintings. I was immediately apprehended by the Maitre D' who eyed me like I was about to nick the cutlery.

Knowing there was absolutely no chance, the place being double booked by admen two years in advance I said...

"Any chance of a table for lunch?"

To which he replied "Certainly, Monsieur" and seated me immediately at a table by the gate.

This was ludicrous. Sure, I was very hungry, but I was sitting in the most overbooked piece of dining real estate on the Mediterranean, by accident, and entirely alone.

First course was a salad of summer truffles which arrived looking and smelling pretty good. The tables had started to fill but, as everyone was still involved in the 15 minute preliminary ritual of air kissing, texting to missing members of the party and arguing with the maitre d' to get their table shifted to a notionally better spot, I was the only one eating.

It's been a few years since I was among these overpaid vampires and I suppose the most noticeable change is that their previously, merely gorgeous trophy partners were now clearly benefiting from the meteoric advances in cosmetic surgery.

This year, it's no longer sufficient to be draped in someone with the body of an aerobicised Greek statue, surgery is, it seems based on favoured patterns. First up was a rotund Italian producer with a faux Elizabeth Hurley followed by two Germans sporting sockless loafers and ersatz Jemimah Khans. It quickly became unnerving.

I think the final straw was a bewildered looking elderly Australian exec who appeared to be accompanied by a counterfeit Tori Spelling - I somehow think he'd got the wrong end of the stick.

(There was also a fake Burt Kwouk. I know it sounds weird... maybe he was real... Maybe there are people who want their partners rebuilt to resemble elderly Chinese comic bit-part actors. Frankly, I find the idea too disturbing to investigate).

The table by the gate would have been a disadvantage to most of the more status conscious guests but to me it was an ideal place to watch the drama of producers at work. Ad producers are the footsoldiers of the conference. Young, bright, frighteningly ambitious and, by the last day emboldened by encroaching renal failure to try anything.

Five separate producers tried the old 'I've got a reservation' trick on the jaded maitre d', only to be sent away with a scornful sneer. Finally, one, a feisty, redhead with a New York accent tried a new tack.

"We have a reservation"

"Non, Madame. You do not"

"It might be under another name...Weiss?"

"Non"

"Wassermann?"

"Non"

"Chung?"

There was a sudden flash of lightning.

Three security men jumped up from a big table in the centre yelling "No Pictures" and as the waiters looked up, the heavens opened.

The staff moved like greased polecats. The maitre d', a blur of efficiency uttered a few terse commands and within seconds every table was stripped. The remaining guests, fearing for their hair, had fled to the bar and once again I sat, in solitary majesty, alone with my truffles.

This was getting weirder by the minute.

A fantastically aristocratic looking couple meandered through the gate and sat next to me under the thundering canvas of my umbrella. He looked like a retired Colonel in the Guards and she clearly been a stunner back in the day.

"English?" he asked

I suppose it must have been fairly obvious.

"You're not with these ghastly advertising people are you?" she asked in brittle RP.

I replied in the negative with some degree of truth

"Ghastly people, he said, worse than footballers. We've been coming for the same fortnight since 68 and it's become unbearable".

"Next year, she said, we're coming a week later to avoid them".

I pictured their evening constitutional along the Croissette being interrupted by the ceremony for 'Best Double Penetration' or 'Best Supporting Actor (Group Anal)' and held my counsel.

They left to their 'favourite table under the mimosa' and, admiring their pluck, I turned back to my now empty plate.

There was a large, fat, maggot, string up at me with his little black eye.

I summoned the maitre d'

Now I've spent enough shifts as prep bitch to know that livestock gets through - particularly in fresh mesclun. I really didn't want to make a fuss and get some poor KP kicked to death in the washup so I quietly made my point by gesturing at the beast with a fork.

"Qu'est que ce?" shrugged the maitre'd

The creature lay utterly dormant looking exactly like a piece of discarded lettuce stalk. I poked again. It uncoiled itself like an overacting anaconda and the maitre d' took an involuntary pace back in revulsion.

"Wait... wait" I placated him in broken French.

I wanted to say "No, it's OK, I understand. I'm a cook. I don't want to make a fuss" but my French, crap at the best of times wasn't up to it. Try as I might, I couldn't remember the French for 'talentless and underpaid, sometime line-cook in my student days' and instead blurted out...

"Je suis un .....Chef!!!'

He looked at me in unbridled terror, glanced down at the open notebook on the table and fled...

Under the mimosa, the only other diners in the horizontal drizzle were the only witnesses to my abject confusion.

There are moments in a chap's life that will stay with him forever. Seeing my daughter born, driving a big rig over Blackfriar's bridge at dawn, seeing my first picture in a magazine, eating focaccia for the first time, breakfast in Les Halles in the rain and the sun breaking through on the terrace at the Colomb d'Or, eating truffles alone but for a pair of British aristos who's sexual horizons are about to be catastrophically expanded.

Of course. I shouldn't have been eating truffles in June. Allow me to digress for a moment.

When the recent CITES ban came into effect, I (along with every other hack in London) was commissioned to do a feature on caviar. Some other time and thread, I'll gather you round the fireside for the strange and savage tale of Sergio, the gay, Chinese caviar smuggler, but until then, content yourselves with this.

I was fascinated who still bought the stuff. Most foodies I know could take it or leave it, most people who actually could afford it were certainly too smart to spend money on something so overpriced and anyone left over with any conscience had stopped buying it on principle.

"Only the airlines buy it now, said Sergio. People who are thick enough to think it's classy but are spending other people's money. If they don't get their complimentary caviar in first class they're likely to storm the cockpit".

There's a whole economy based around selling supposed signifiers of luxury to those on expense accounts who know no better and, as you can imagine, Cannes during the ad festival is probably the high season.

Actually, they didn't taste too bad considering they'd come out of a jar, though, frankly, they could have shaved a champagne cork into a jar of sweatsocks and it wouldn't have mattered. That's not the point for these guys. A great big pile of truffles works like a brandy snifter bigger than your head, a cigar the size of a baby's arm and any old piece of horsemeat called 'Chateaubriand'. Next year I fully expect to see porkchops poached in Cristal, with a diamond crust and a light dusting of cocaine.

Note to self: Salade des truffes d'ete = jar of alba truffles, handful of leaves, empty wallet and a maggot

Now the diners were coming back. I ordered the aioli avec morue and watched the hairdos returning like a fleet of expensive yachts. A porn star, so well known he even cropped up on my radar was seated under the mimosa and was swiftly joined by two transvestites and a silicone-based life form of indeterminate gender. My new acquaintances went a strange colour.

I've never had aioli before. The veg were kind of cool, though a bit over carved for my taste and the stuff itself was pretty near sublime. I felt I wouldn't mind using it as a body moisturiser. The morue, though, was a pretty average bit of boiled cod. I'd got the idea from somewhere that it was supposed to have been dried then re-animated but these guys had cut out the intervening phase.

For most of the rest of the meal the maitre d' hid behind plants like a sniper. Occasionally I'd catch him out of the corner of my eye, slipping, wraithlike from behind the potted fig to snap up a check or failing to hide his face behind a bit of business with a napkin. Finally, when the tension became unbearable. He sidled over and comped me the whole meal.

I felt kind of guilty. I'd had a great experience, a better than average meal and enough material for a small book so I left a nice fat tip for the waitress and slipped out to the car.

In an ideal world, here's what would happen next.

I hop into my open topped Mustang and pull up outside the walls of the restaurant. I whistle quietly and, with barely a sound, Werner, my highly trained Swiss circus maggot drops into the passenger seat, winks conspiratorially and we screech off into the sunset.

What actually happened, is this - I ran into a bunch of animators I knew from London, spent the afternoon drinking, and missed my flight home but, hey, a guy can dream.

But I still have one small secret, one ritual moment that puts my morning on track even when I've been up since four and I have Rice Krispies in my hair. It's the sound, the calming Zen click of the Bakelite switch on my Pavoni Europiccola coffee machine.

Hypnotists, life coaches, yoga teachers and black-hat NLP masters tell us that a sound or other sensation can become 'attached' to a series of feelings - programmed if you will. I obviously can't agree with an assertion from any such fraudulent quacks. Yet that simple sound has a huge effect. It's evidence that I've set in train the series of events that will lead to assured gratification. My wheels slot into the grooves and nothing the day can throw will better me.

I love my Pavoni. I love it more than any man sensibly should. If I could afford to, I'd set it up with a flat in Mayfair, lavish it with gifts and visit it once a week. I've leered sneakily at the fecund curves of the Francis Francis and even toyed with the idea of plumbing in a semi-pro, pump-pressurised Gaggia but I always come back to the Pavoni.

The Europiccola is elemental. It's utterly functional and, even to the mechanically naïve, each part has a clear function. The boiler is a tank. A pipe connects it to the head. The receiver can only fit one way with an arousingly positive twist of the wrist. The pressure is applied with a lever and there's a tap for the steam.

It's like the first diagram of the theory of espresso turned in brass and chrome plated.

The design of the Francis Francis might win awards today but the Pavoni looks like it got a medal from Mussolini. The tank has the fascist lines of a 30mm shell. The wheels and valves could fit one of those trains that always ran on time and the lever requires the brawny forearm of a stormtrooper. Marinetti, the futurist poet would have loved the Pavoni: there's a Francis Francis on the kitchen counter in 'Will and Grace'. I rest my case.

As far as I know, the Pavoni is the only machine that uses manual pressure to express the coffee. Hauling down on the arm takes physical effort and reminds you constantly that one day a bolt will shear, a thread will strip, a seam will fail and the whole thing will blow up in your face in a spray of shrapnel and steam. I embrace the fear. When she finally blows I'll affect an eyepatch like the man in the Hathaway shirt and wear my scars with fond pride.

The awful truth, of course, is that for the first couple of years of its life, a Pavoni doesn't even make very good coffee. By the time you've got the blend, roast and grind right, the quantity of coffee and the tamp pressure you realise that the pressure in the cylinder varies by how full it is and that constant force on the arm is impossible to repeat. You have to be prepared to throw out a lot of coffee.

A couple of months ago I found a nearly new Pavoni in a skip. It was almost exactly six months old. That's the point at which any normal mortal finally gives up trying with the damn thing and buys an automatic. Most people hide it in a cupboard and use it as a a sort of Yuppie memento mori - a salutary reminder of the time when romantic notions of misty post-coital breakfast outweighed the practicalities of really needing a decent cup of coffee. Vain people leave them on the counter for the cleaner to polish and nip into Starbuck on the way to the office. This person obviously had either the guts or the sheer rage to throw it out.

It's a pity. That kind of single-mindedness is exactly what you need to master the Pavoni. If only he'd had the stamina for another six months.

An automatic pump machine could make the process so much easier. No shards of red-hot brass or clouds of scalding steam. No worrying about a million arcane variables of grinding, no hauling on a lever to express one thin dribble of undrinkably bitter oil, just excellent coffee from day one, instant highly-frothed milk, and a quiet life.

But that's not for me. I need more. I need something cantankerous, unpredictable. Something that delights and disappoints with equal heartbreaking facility, something that I can learn to live with that can learn to live with me. Something that gives back as much as I put in - sometimes.

Come to think of it, why else would I have a daughter?

Do you want to spend money? What sort of food do you like? Do you even like food or would you rather sit in a celebrity fishtank and poke a salad about? Do you feel disappointed if the waiter isn't fawning or does intrusive service embarrass you? Do you always pick the second cheapest red on the list or do you have the urge to come back and firebomb a place for not having sideplates?

If I do come up with a suggestion, there's no guarantee you'll enjoy it as much as I did. I don't feel comfortable recommending the newest and most fashionable places because they rarely live up to the hype and, besides, you'd never get in after 6.30 or before 10.00. Little 'out of the way' discoveries have a way of being either disappointingly inconsistent or have been cleaned up and 'relaunched' by the time you arrive.

There's just too much to choose from, too many variables and that, I suppose is the real reason I love London so much. It's nothing to do with the individual restaurants it's the way that big cities, by sheer mass and demographics reach a point where they are really all about food.

There are seven and a half million people here and the requirement for three meals a day is the only thing they have in common. It's London's diversity of culture, class, wealth and ethnicity that creates one of the most exciting food environments in the world.

Rich and poor live side by side. This guarantees world-class restaurants for those who can afford them but also a vibrant market in cheap street food. We've got as many Michelin stars as other capitals but we still maintain a fantastic variety of independently owned caffs and sandwich shops.

Any ingredient money can buy can be found in our expensive delis yet, around the corner, in some strange little corner shop or market stall, you'll find something solely imported for an ethnic enclave. Every cuisine is catered for at every level - anything is available.

London sits in symbiosis with the other great Metropoli. Global food phenomena affect us as deeply as New York or Paris yet, at the same time, our own national food culture is firmly back on the public agenda.

Back at the height of the dotcom boom an American theorist was asked which industries he felt would be safe from the new technology. He identified food provision, waste management and construction as the only sectors that could survive unchanged. (He also noted that these were areas controlled by organised crime in the US but that's rather a side issue). These are the fundamentals, the fixed costs, if you will, of urban existence. You need a roof over your head, and when you live in a concrete jungle rather than an open field, you need someone to cart in the food and someone to pipe away the shit.

The capital city of a small country attracts everyone who can survive it. It's kept stuffed to capacity by a constant flow of incomers that's only stemmed when there is simply no more room. Under this degree of pressure food waste and shelter become even more important. Is it any wonder that Londoners only seem to talk about where and what they're going to eat next, house prices and whether they remembered to put the rubbish out.

Whenever I visit friends in other towns they're always keen to show me the latest new place that's opened. 'We've got a new deli/farmer's market/gastropub you've got to try' with the silent but implied '…every bit as good as the ones in London' and of course, they're right. A Michelin star or an organic salmon smokery in Nottingham or Brighton is every bit as good no matter where it is.

But that's where it stops. Thank you, the fishmonger in Leeds was every bit as good as any single one I could find at home - I could even park - but it was the only one. When I go to my fishmonger, every step I take is surrounded by people eating, selling, making, loving food. From the KP standing by the bins, smoking a sneaky rollup and excavating his nose to the pigeon pecking at a discarded arepa bun it's everywhere. It's like being an ingredient in a particularly thick soup. Trucks drive past delivering bread from Turkish bakeries to Somali corner shops where Lithuanian countermen will wrap it round Italian salami. Even the pavements and bins smell of food - putrescent it's true, but there's no way of escaping food in everything. God knows how anorexics survive without blinkers and a nose clip.

It's not about restaurants, it's about being immersed in, obsessed with and surrounded by food. In an environment this intense, some celebrity chef's latest overhyped excursion into public eating is totally irrelevant. I'm stuck trying to decide between pho or pirogi for lunch, whether I can fit in one more espresso without getting the creeping jitters, if the bread delivery has arrived at the corner shop yet and …what is that fantastic smell coming from the Portuguese deli?

I can't tell what the tipping point is. I can't tell if it's the size, the relative national importance, the human concentration or diversity of a city that causes it to form this foodie gestalt but I know London has it in big lardy helpings and that's why the only recommendation I can give is to live here.

‘You said a bunch!’

‘Yeah. As in ‘a whole bunch of thyme’. I didn’t mean a whole bunch of thyme’.

I’ve never felt the need for greater accuracy in measurement than Bruce taught but I’m aware that others do. For this reason, I’ve decided, as a service to cooks everywhere to finally put the whole system on an empirical footing. No matter what your own arcane system is, every cook uses a basic pinch. If, therefore, I could create a base quantitative measure for it - a kind of ‘International Standard Pinch’ (ISP) - then each cook’s own system would translate. I see international awards, statues in my honour in capital cities, the first Nobel prize for cookery.

Observation has shown that pinches are taken either with the tips of thumb and two fingers or between the ball of the thumb and top knuckle of the forefinger. For the sake of experimental simplicity we’ll plump for the first option, the three-digit grab. This is the most convenient for extracting things from narrow necked jars.

Perhaps the largest variable is that we could characterise as ‘intent’ in the person making the pinch. The culinary world is divided into those who, on receiving the instruction ‘add a glass of wine’ will add one glass and then free pour at least another half and those who will pour nearly a full glass in, vacillate over the last quarter then pour it back into the bottle. The first type, let’s call them ‘profligates’, are likely to take larger pinches than the second type, let’s call them ‘tight’. We will need to test the spectrum defined by these two extremes to obtain the average pinch.

As luck would have it, I am a confirmed profligate, while my partner is as perfect an example of the tight as one could ever wish to meet. I also tested a dozen foodie friends, amateur cooks and professional chefs. This is by no means a statistically robust sample but it's as far as I'm prepared to take it. After asking a grill cook in my local breakfast joint if he'd be prepared to have his pinch measured and being offered physical violence by his dishwasher, I feel I've taken this as far as investigative journalism requires

By an amazing stroke of good fortune I live in a centre of excellence for the accurate measurement of small quantities of herbs and powders. London’s fashionable Camden Town has long had a thriving trade in narcotics and has some of the best-stocked emporia for drugs paraphernalia in Europe.

It would be difficult to recommend my supplier as the shops and stalls in Camden avoid anything as legitimate as names. If you come out of the station heading north, it's the third one on the left. Ignore the scrum of red-eyed entrepreneurs, hissing their wares, and duck in past the glass case of hookah pipes.

Inside, the shop is vast and strangely peaceful. Clutches of Dutch students, their bondage shirts pressed by their mothers, stand in silent wonder staring at the huge vitrines. And little wonder - the array of technology for intoxication is truly bewildering; doubly so as drugs are never mentioned, either on packaging or by the canny salesmen. I confess I was tempted by the titanium herb grinder, because it looked genuinely useful, and by the 'herbal aromatherapy inhaler', because it looked like an enormous bong.

After protracted haggling I bought a 'Diabolo™ Fuzion FP50 Professional Digital Mini Scale'. This, according to the mellow gentleman behind the counter, was designed for 'gardeners who might want to weigh leaves' and was accurate to 0.01g.

Back in the kitchen, I took twenty pinches of Maldon salt and placed each on a standard extra-large cigarette rolling paper. This was less for the purposes of experimental consistency than because they came free with the scales. The first and last five samples were discarded to obviate any initial effect of developing technique and any manual fatigue towards the end. Each sample was weighed and the results entered into a complex spreadsheet of my own devising.

My own pinches varied widely from as low as .51g up to 1.61g. In this experiment they averaged at 1.10g which was at least statistically pleasing. On the other hand further experiments have proved that I can't get two pinches within 25% of each other even if I'm trying. My normal carefree, Bohemian strewing habits mean I will have to continue to ignore recipes and rely on tasting.

My partner returned results of astonishing consistency and terrifying restraint averaging .55g with .08g error either side. I snort with contempt.

The extremely compact and concealable nature of the 'Diabolo™ Fuzion FP50 now came into its own. At lunch with a friend - a phenomenal cook - in a Soho dim sum restaurant - I was able to whip out the scales during a lull in the gavage and perform field research.

This was, frankly, weird. The scale has a blue neon digital readout, the staff spoke no English, we were surrounded by paper lanterns and the detritus of Chinese new year. It felt like a scene from Blade Runner. His average was .72g. His margin of error .18g. I put the former down to his natural Northern restraint, the latter to his creative nature and unrestrained lifestyle.

Further tests at a variety of odd locations added meat to the bones of the experiment. The FP50 was whipped out wherever there was a saltcellar and a friendly cook could be persuaded to spare 2 minutes and slowly two trends emerged.

1. The individual pinch is based entirely on character. It's as tediously reliable as those quizzes in women's magazines that extrapolate your psychological profile from your choice of cocktail. The conclusions are obvious but suffice it to say, I intend, in future, to only drink with those who pinch an average exceeding .95g.

2. Accuracy and repeatability in pinching is entirely random amongst the sample. Some professionals vary in a way that makes one wonder at the consistency of their output. Some amateurs are frighteningly consistent.

The average, for what it's worth, was .78g

One interesting point, though, has arisen from this research - inspired, I confess, by a conversation with my new best friend at the head shop. Drugs have defied decimalisation because of the wonderfully simple technique of halving a mound of anything. A quantity of known weight can be split in half with, shall we say, a credit card and the exercise can be performed under the most trying of conditions - let us say the lavatory of a Soho member's club - with as great an accuracy as a costly scale

The trick of scraping an ingredient into a line and dividing it by length is, in my friend's opinion, sorely underutilised in the domestic kitchen.

It could be argued that the old eighths, quarters, sixteenths method of measurement, devised long before the FP50, would give us the greatest accuracy of all with minimal effort. I know, it's just a foolish whim, but I just long to hear Delia Smith say,

"Rack out a gram of salt and chop three lines into a pan of boiling water"

Note

The observant reader will have noticed that final weight will vary according to the density of the ingredient pinched. We have chosen to conduct this experiment with pinches of salt and can only suggest you do the same.

Partly I suppose it’s because reviewing restaurants, even if it’s an honest attempt to share an informed opinion, places eating in the sphere of commerce rather than the sensual. A ‘Which’ report on vacuum cleaners is a service to the appliance-buying public. A gushing article describing the latest celebrity haunt as a foodie Valhalla just for getting the service prompt and the steak medium-rare is more about conspicuous consumption than hedonism.

Finally, I believe that a column is about entertainment. It’s like a meal – an end in itself and, if you enjoy it, you should feel better at the end of it. A restaurant review isn't entertaining unless you go there and either agree or disagree with my opinion. If we agree that it was great, my review was irrelevant. If I liked it and you didn’t, I’m a poor judge. If you liked it and I didn’t, I missed the point. In either case we’d have to politely agree to disagree which rather undermines the point of reviewing.
Having said all that, I’m going to talk about some specific eating-places in this column to illustrate a point. Please don’t take it as a review.

For a variety of reasons, not unconnected with my honeymoon, I’ve spent the past fortnight in various parts of the English South.

First stop was Ventnor, a faded, dilapidated but stunningly romantic little seaside town on the Isle of Wight. I’d love to say that I’d booked Venice for my honeymoon but ended up in Ventnor due to a keyboard error but, in fact, it was purely intentional.

The trend for ‘Boutique’ hotels has now thoroughly infected every British seaside town – yeah, even unto Ventnor. There can’t be a single backwater left where either the local hairdresser and his partner or a couple of downsizers from Hampstead haven’t bought up the town’s most ghastly Edwardian B&B. They evict the elderly or DSS occupants, smother the entire thing in a thick layer of architect’s white, prop it with carefully chosen objets and throw it open to the ‘lifestyle’ press.

Travellers may thank God that, after years of charging extra for the cruet, the Hotel trade has recognized the existence and importance of customers and has started to cater to them in small ways.

On the other hand, this does leave one at their mercy when it comes to eating that that is not always a good thing. In our particular hotel, the menu reflected the décor – utterly tasteful and entirely devoid of feeling. It works for rooms – it doesn’t for food.

This left us in an interesting position. A choice between two tourist-trap pubs for dinner.

British readers will know that in spite of our culinary renaissance, over the last few years, the UK is still a bit of a curate’s egg when it comes to public catering. Though there are streets in all the major Metropoles where one can buy a fantastic variety of food and drink there are still cafes in the provinces that can actually advertise…

"Chili Con Carni, “Jacket” Potatose, Tea, Nescafe AND Kenco" (All spelling and punctuation restaurateur’s own)

Ventnor’s magnificent Esplanade in not so much a Golden Mile as 217 yards of faded tat. The Gaiety Amusement arcade, a highpoint, would be tragic in Brighton but here has a certain ironic charm. ‘The Spyglass’ lurks, brooding, at one end. It has a terrace that will seat the entire population of the town, eight times over, in February. In July, you queue. The décor looks like someone coated the place in epoxy then sprayed a shipbreaker’s yard at it through a high-pressure hose. Compared to the Spyglass, Disney’s ‘Pirates of the Carribean’ ride has an unpretentious nautical motif. The Spyglass would give a lifeboatman mal de mer.

Two foreign students, attracted by the offer of a room and minimum wage, service around a hundred covers. The menu offers 50 items ranging from the "Cap’n’s sirloin ‘n’chips" to a half lobster. Using rudimentary dead reckoning, I calculated the nearest organic ingredient is 40 miles over the Solent.

I had ‘Whole Tail Scampi and chips garnished with salad’. The scampi was IQF, probably mechanically recovered and deep-fried in industrial batter. The chips were fat and the salad was an undressed combination of cos leaves, tomato wedges and cress. We ate it with Guinness, overlooking grey sea. It was bloody marvellous.

In London, I expend extraordinary effort in finding traceable meat, low-mileage, organic, seasonal veg and would happily chew out a waiter for daring to bring an espresso with an incomplete crema. Out here in the boonies, I’m eating the sort of stuff my Father would have relished in a Berni Inn in 1976 and loving it.

Don’t get the impression I’m automatically against pub food. It didn’t get to be popular because it tastes bad. Whatever you think of chicken-in-a-basket or jacket potato and tuna salad, you’ve got to admit it’s survived the years and, Richard Dawkins would point out, become better at doing its job. But there was something else going on here, some ineluctable quality that transcended even the food.

This is the problem with holidays, they leave you far too much time to think.

A week later I was in North Cornwall and so, naturally, made the pilgrimage to Rick Stein’s. The experience was enormously disappointing.

I’ve always liked Stein’s curmudgeonly take on eating. If you watch his programmes you’ll believe that nothing could taste better than a sea-trout, jerked out of the water and griddled on a shovel over charcoal – that nothing could be more authentic than fresh seafood, simply prepared by local people. Yet, for example, the £65.00 tasting menu features ‘Mackerel Recheado’, a three-inch baby mackerel, split, stuffed with a ginger and chilli masala and tied to a skewer for grilling with neat little pieces of string. I’ve rarely seen anything so fussy and the flavour… well as my more robust Australian guest put it…

“Christ, they could have given the poor little fella a chance.”

In fairness, he makes his money from the wealthy, middle-class second homers of the surrounding county and is consequently booked out every night. Perhaps they really want to dress up and pay a big bill and perhaps you can’t justify that over simple, fresh seafood.

Slowly, the idea was formulating. Sure, the taste of the food and the quality of the ingredients is important - when I cook at home that’s all that matters - but eating food someone else has made adds another level to the experience. Sharing food is the simplest act of generosity we can perform. In most cultures, the act of breaking bread is laden with symbolism and a supporting imperative of hospitality.

I’m beginning to feel that this strange, outdated notion may be a lot more important than we currently think

What disappointed me about Stein’s was the disjunction between his beliefs and his product. Christ knows I’m not naive enough to assume he’s going to cook it all personally, but the place has a man’s name over the door. When the menu ceases to reflect his highly public beliefs, he breaks the personal connection between the cook and the diner - the connection that is hospitality.

Back at the Spyglass, laden as it was with all the faux ‘mine hostery’ of the traditional pub, there was a genuine feeling that there was a cook out the back. He was probably a great tattooed hulk who’d been cashiered from the Catering Corps for poor personal hygiene but it felt like he was putting something together for me. There was a definite feeling of hospitality.

If you go to your granny’s and she makes you an appalling, overcooked Sunday lunch, with a grey ‘joint’, soggy roast potatoes and packet gravy, you tell her it’s wonderful and you’re not lying because it was made with the best intentions and, probably, love.

If a restaurant makes even the weakest attempt to fulfil the fundamental human exchanges of offering hospitality I’ll forgive them anything – no, that’s too patronising – I’ll enjoy food I might reject elsewhere.

If that sense of ‘being cooked for’ is lacking, it doesn’t matter how famous the chef or brilliant the ingredients, I feel like a dumb consumer and that puts me off my food.

In the UK we often refer to the ‘Hospitality Industry’. Isn’t that an oxymoron?

One place finally brought this home to me. Ironically, it was the sort of place Rick Stein would love.

On the south coast of the Isle of Wight, each stretch of beach is managed by a ‘Longshoreman’. The job, handed down through families, comes with fishing rights plus the responsibility to provide management, first aid, rescue and even deckchair services on the beach.

At Steephill Cove, the Cawes family have been longshoremen for generations. The men run lines of pots for crab and lobster and the women make crab pasties fresh every day and sell them from their kitchen door just above the beach.

Steephill Cove is a tiny semi circular bay, surrounded by high cliffs and with no motor vehicle access. Once you’re in, there’s a feeling of staring out to the open sea with an impenetrable rampart at your back. You are enclosed in a micro community, ecology and economy. Catching, cooking, selling, serving and eating take place in sight of each other. Nothing could be in sharper contrast to the disembodied and secret processes of the ‘hospitality industry’.

It’s a fair hike from Ventnor but this is only a good thing. It discourages any but the culinary zealot, makes keen the appetite and ensures that you arrive just after noon when the pasties come out of the oven.

Real purists get up earlier. By arriving at eleven, they can see the contents of their pasty being scooped wriggling out of the pots and dropped into the boiler in the shed.

I find it hard to understand how this only happens at Steephill. Surely the idea of combining the two foods that the South coast is famous for must have crossed some other poor fisherman’s mind at some time. Every seaside town south of the Wash should surely have it’s own special crab pasty recipe. Christ, a pasty even looks like a crab.

http://www.fireandknives.com/images/crabpasty.jpg

I resolve to make it my life’s task to remedy this terrible situation. I have promised myself that I’ll make the crab pasty something of a personal grail – trying over and over until my guests scream for mercy or I create a reasonable inshore facsimile.
This is one of those things that can’t possibly be replicated but here’s where I’m proposing to start. If you try it, let me know how you get on.

1. Obviously the crabmeat has to be utterly fresh so I’m intending to boil them myself. I’m not squeamish, but if you are, the web is awash with theories about humane killing of crustacea. I get my crabs at Borough Market. They are as fresh as can be obtained this far from the sea and cost more per pound than heroin. Fortunately they are so posh they can probably be lulled into a coma with Yogic Chanting.

2. The Steephill Cove originals had a definite leek content, visibly green, so I’ll be softening finely shredded leeks in butter before adding the crabmeat.

3. Either the crabs are exceptionally fit and muscly down there or they’re discarding some of the brown meat. I shall experiment with the latter.

4. The traditional pasty seasoning is simple - just a little more white pepper than you’d think sensible. I propose to grind mine fresh. Salt is usually pointless with seafood so I’ll start without and work my way up.

5. There seems little point in preparing puff pastry from scratch though I know we should. For preliminary experiments any reputable premade puff pastry should do the trick. I understand there are versions made with other than full fat butter. These are of no interest to us though they’d probably make a serviceable sealant should your radiator spring a leak on the way home from the grocers.

6. Roll out the pastry. Trim into a circle using a side plate as a guide. Paint the rim with milk and put a dollop of the seasoned crabmeat and leek mixture into the centre. Fold in half and pinch to seal.

7. Paint with milk then try about 200 degrees for around 30 mins. If you don’t over pack and avoid bursting it comes out looking amusingly like a pastry crab...

8. Hmm, there’s an idea. Next week – tortoise meat pies.

I’m not sure what possessed me. Perhaps it was the little portable Weber. It had looked so lovely in the Conran shop but now lurked malevolently under the stairs, reproachful, unloved and still wrapped. It may have been that my partner, (a woman who, though brilliant in every respect has never grasped the concept of ‘clean–as-you-go’) had occupied the kitchen and was now making a carrot cake the way Michael Cimino made ‘Heaven’s Gate’. It could have been that the meat (skewered cubes of aged mutton back-strap marinated in argan oil and ras-al-hanout) might have benefited from an authentic trace of charcoal smoke.

Whatever the cause, I found myself crouched like a Neanderthal over the device cursing, from the profoundest depths of my soul, the utter bloody stupidity of barbecuing.

Barbecuing, it is commonly accepted, is a man’s task. People assume that cooking meat over fire is has some deep elemental evolutionary significance to men. It’s a nice thought, but as I stare out of my window at the ranked gardens of Camden, watching frustrated salarymen in three quarter length trousers struggling with charcoal and lighters, it doesn’t seem to ring true. Barbecuing seldom requires any of the talents or attributes which distinguish us from women - ability to hunt, physical strength, stamina, aggression, ability to know the way without asking directions from passers-by… ever – instead it utilises all our weaknesses - stupidity, stubbornness, total lack of taste, complete greed and an infantile fascination with setting fire to stuff.

Let’s face it, barbecued food tastes crap. Charcoal is wood so thoroughly carbonised that none of its original aroma or character can have survived. It is chemically indistinguishable from coke. It burns hot and clean and is a bastard to get going which explains why, at its simplest barbecued food is carbonised and reeking of whatever accelerant was used to start the pyre.

For those refined enough to dislike the overpowering odour of hydrocarbons special equipment has evolved to ensure that any taint of actual smoke is expunged from the process. Many who fancy themselves as pros use enormous gas-fired appliances

Perhaps this explains why otherwise rational cooks barbecue ingredients far more awful than anything they’d ever cook in their kitchens. Drumsticks from mutant chickens that grow six at a time and shed them monthly, mechanically recovered slurry patties in a pre-stressed fibreglass insulation bap, and above all sausages…

“It wouldn’t be a proper barbie without the sausages”

I’m sure it wouldn’t. I’m positive that without a burnt-up sawdust and pigbits™ filled condom, scorching shreds of reddened flesh off my palate, this would be an infinitely worse experience.

Marinades, the cook will tell you with a nauseatingly conspiratorial wink, are the big secret. As secrets go, enlivening dried out and insipid ingredients by embalming them with corrosive, highly flavoured mixtures is hardly up there with the bloody Enigma machine is it? And by the way, if you can stop yourself gagging long enough, the ‘Chef’s Secret Ingredient’ is always either Tabasco, ketchup, pineapple juice, Marmite or honey and often all of them together.

The real secret to a great barbecue is this – don’t bother. There is nothing you can barbecue that wouldn’t taste infinitely better from the kitchen. Inviting people round to watch you ruin food over a naked flame is like inviting them to watch you defecate in a hole you’ve dug in the rockery when you have a perfectly acceptable flushing lavatory indoors.

No, barbecuing is not clever, or funny and I don’t think it’s even terribly manly. All of which has got me thinking about really manly food. What defines properly butch nosh?

First rule is that it shouldn’t be a meal. That whole sitting down and eating thing implies we have time to spare between slaughtering animals, building skyscrapers, wrestling bears and all the other cool stuff we do every day. Really manly food is some form of grabbed snack.

The most atmospheric piece in Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Kitchen Confidential’ is the heartfelt description of opening up the kitchen in the morning. It’s the time when a cook gets contemplative, casually inspecting his patch and mentally preparing for the day. Bourdain describes whipping up a breakfast omelette with chorizo and scallions. I can picture him eating it standing at the range, with a chunk of bread fresh from the delivery palette and the first espresso of the day.

Admittedly you can’t describe Bourdain as effete to begin with, but that’s just such a manly way to eat. On the job, standing up, throwing together something wonderful out of found ingredients – notice there’s nothing girly like shopping going on here, just grabbing handfuls of stuff from the fridge.

The second rule is that it must contain three of the four major food groups: bread, meat, cheese and onions. Onions are what men have instead of vegetables.

The final rule is that it must be cooked on top of the oven. French food writers would waffle on for hours about the incubating enclosing warmth of the uterine oven but I think it’s simpler than that. It’s all about control. You can’t tell a man to put something in a metal box, turn a few buttons and wait to see what comes out.

Cooking in an oven is about relinquishing control to the mysteries of convection and leavening. Baking is a dark and mysterious art with few certainties. It’s about communing with forces of nature – it’s bloody witchcraft. Cooking on the top is all about taking command - the manly struggle to keep the food on the edge of burning, wreaking change on nature’s ingredients – much more like alchemy.

My own favourite manly recipe follows all these rules. It came from an excellent cook who used to open with me in a San Francisco restaurant. We used to knock these up while gossiping about last nights’ exploits, comparing hangovers and setting up for the day. The 'Philly Cheese Steak', though about as culinarily undistinguished as you can get is as hotly debated a regional speciality as bouillabaisse. I just think it’s a hell of a lot more fun to eat.

1. Take a large roll, split it, leaving a hinge and scoop out a little of the crumb on either side. In the US one would be looking for a Vienna roll though these can be a bit tough to locate in the UK. I’ve had excellent results with ciabatta and a sourdough batard from Chez Paul.

2. Take a large, white onion and slice it into vertical segments. Work the segments through your fingers into a bowl to make loose, long slices. This should be a big, ugly cheap onion, one of those that are so coarse in flavour it makes you weep as you buy them. You’ll need a couple of large handfuls per sandwich

3. Take a medium sized, thick cut steak from the cheaper end of the spectrum and slice, on the bias, into finger thickness strips. Skirt, onglet, anything chewy and flavourful will do. If the butcher recommends beating it for a week with a mallet, you’ve got the right piece of meat

4. Shred a ball of fresh, wet buffalo mozzarella into a bowl. Don’t get too fussy about draining it.

5. Turn a low heat under an enormous cast iron griddle, Ideally, this should be mounted in the back of a truck outside a metal bashing factory in Pittsburgh. Failing this, use your very largest frying pan. Drop in the onions and sweat them gently until they have clarified then whack up the heat to begin to caramelise the edges.

6. Throw in the meat and dredge generously with pepper.

7. Take enough salt to kill every dietician, food allergist and yoga nutter in North London and strew it liberally onto the meat, laughing like a hyena.

8. Keep tossing everything until the meat is nicely browned but still pink inside. To be authentic you should be doing this teppanyaki style with two large offset spatulas. It’s important to continually scrape up any matter sticking to the pan surface and stir it in.

9. Lower the heat a little and throw in the cheese. This is the magical bit. As it hits the heat, the mozzarella yields loads of creamy fluid which combines with the onion juices and deglazes the pan. By the time the last curds of cheese are melting to strings the ‘gravy’ will be perfectly reduced.

10. Using your spatulas, shape the whole gluey mass into a long mound, lift it and dump it without ceremony into the waiting bun. Scrape, chisel or pour any remaining pan residue over the top and serve it forth.

Serving suggestion: Eat standing up with male friends. Position yourselves near a window where you can watch the pitiable Australopithecus barbecuing in the next garden. He’s just lost all the hairs on his forearms trying to drive the botulinus toxin out of frozen hamburgers. He’s already lost the respect of his weeping, hungry children, he’s about to lose his friends to food poisoning and eventually he’ll lose his wife to a man who can actually cook.

Knock back cold beers, chew on your cheesesteaks and laugh ostentatiously.

Why? I can understand needing an offset spatula to fillet or serve fish but can someone explain what I’m supposed to do with the miniature version they insist on sticking next to my plate in some restaurants? Am I allowed to spoon the fish into my mouth on the flat of the blade? Can I have another knife for the rest of the stuff on the plate? Why do I get one with a lobster when what I really want is a pair of pliers and an electric bone saw?

Queen Victoria banned them from the Royal table. If this is what they mean by a ‘return to Victorian values’ then I’m with Baroness Thatcher for the only time in my life.

The letter Y

I don’t get many opportunities to order yak so I believe I’m safe in my desire to expunge the letter Y from all description of food. Any recipe or menu entry that uses the words ‘cheesey’, or, God help us, ‘lemony’ should be ignored on principle; they were invented by advertising men to conceal the fact that the product contained no real cheese or lemon. They debase food. Even if a dish is laden with cheese and lemon, using these words makes it sound like a ready meal or an air freshener.

‘Crispy’, ‘crunchy’ and ‘tasty’ have no place here either. These are not benefits to which our attention needs to be drawn, they are givens in good cooking.

In San Francisco, once, a passing homosexual gentleman in chaps and a moustache called me ‘Chunky’. I took it as a complement, as I assume it was intended, but I can’t welcome it as a description on a menu.

There was a time in when recipe books were written by admen to promote products. One memorable recipe, involving canned tuna, cream of mushroom soup, crushed crackers and aerosol cheese whip was called ‘cheesy, crispy, mushroom ‘n’ tuna bake’ which sounds to me like colon cancer in a handy, family-sized serving. Perhaps the admen thought housewives were so abidingly thick they could only countenance food that was described like other household goods.

This probably explains why Delia Smith still does it.

"Good olive oil"

Even the immortal, Elizabeth David had this strange verbal tic. In one essay she specifies that we should use good things -good olive oil, good butter, good white breadcrumbs - seventeen times.

It wasn’t just the Goddess David either. MFK Fisher has it in spades, the Grigsons never stop and Mistresses Glasse and Beeton are larded with it.

I love these people… why do they do this to me?

Thanks for specifying the ‘good’ oil, Elizabeth. I was just about to reach under the bench and dress my salad with this three-gallon sump of reclaimed 20W40.

‘Lemon cuts through the richness’

Any used car salesman will tell you how to spot a mug. Anyone who knows absolutely nothing about cars will walk around the heap, stroking his chin contemplatively and then kick the tires. The minute you have a tire-kicker on your forecourt you can wheel out your rustiest lemon and rack up the price. His money is yours.

Now cooking programmes are omnipresent on British television, legions of people with no idea whatsoever about food are being asked to taste things, live on air and come up with something to say. They flounder hopelessly. ‘Hmm, that’s tasty’ seems too weak. ‘Mmm. Tastes just like chicken’, is a little obvious - especially if it’s chicken - which leaves only one line, the culinary equivalent of tire kicking…

‘Hmmm. The lemon really cuts through the richness’

The problem is, it’s not just civilians. I’ve heard every chef ever interviewed say it…repeatedly… like it’s on some ghastly tape loop. God knows I understand the difficulty in coming up with fresh language concerning food. There have been a few writers – Coleridge, Huysmans, Genet, Apollinaire – who’ve confined themselves to describing the realm of the purely sensual. Frankly, they all get a bit of a yawn after a while. It’s obviously a stretch. If stone geniuses like that can’t keep it up for more than a slim volume, what hope has Ainsley bloody Harriot who’s expected to fill endless hours of our time using a markedly smaller intellectual armoury?

But please, please, can’t professionals take it for granted that lemon cuts through bloody grease. It’s so obvious it’s humiliating. It’s like saying ‘’Hmmm. Plunging my head into this deep fat fryer has made it really, really hot”.

Come to think of it… “Ainsley? Can you come over here for a minute?”

Pan Frying

OK… I admit it… my dirty little secret. I’ll stand up in front of a huddled circle of twenty guilty looking cooks and make my full confession…

“My name’s Tim. I fry things… in a pan”.

Other, better people don’t have this weakness. American chefs fry in buckets, the French have always favoured porcelain vases and I’m told that Gordon ‘Hard Man’ Ramsay cups the boiling oil in his bare hands and tosses the food like a juggler.

I’ll order ‘pan fried’ sea bass the same day I can get a side of ‘saucepan-boiled’ potatoes.

Until then, it’s off the menu.

The “French Stick”

To wander into an English bakery is to plunge into a glossary of obscure and beautiful nomenclature. Cobs, baps, split-tins, bloomers, Coburgs, flowerpots, quarterns and farls gratify the ear as well as the eye.

Doubly, distressing, therefore, to encounter the ‘French Stick’, the biggest con to be perpetrated by bakers since they stopped adding alum and ground bones to the flour.

Aspiring middle class parents know that feeding their children white bread is but a step short of inoculating them with rickets, lice and poor grammar. They also know that the French have those lovely long loaves that they carry under their arms as they cycle around, selling each other onions and indulging in soft focus bonviveury.

Cunning bakers have responded, not with an authentic baguette but with a preservative-laden, turd-shaped travesty called – with callous humour – a French Stick.

It’s exactly the same rubbish they extrude into white loaves but delivered in a staggeringly inconvenient shape. Trying to eat a sandwich made with one is like trying to fellate a torpedo.

It sums up everything that’s wrong with us as a nation; our willingness to settle for crap food, our obsession with social distinction, our inability to countenance change and our refusal to attempt French pronunciation in public.

Frying “off”

We used to fry. Then professionals came onto our screens and began to fry ‘off’.

‘I’ll just fry off these onions’

Sounds great doesn’t it? Sounds so professional. Which, of course, it is…

‘I’ll just pour two pints of industrial-grade grease into this metre square brat pan, fry off 800 battery chicken breasts, slap them under the heat lamps and hope no-one dies on my shift’.

That’s professional.

‘I’ll fry off this Marks and Spencer salmon fishcake’

… is absurd

Parsley

God, I hate parsley. It’s the invariable adornment of unthinking cooking. A ‘sprig’ of parsley can be used to garnish anything because it means nothing. It actually has a particularly distinctive taste, but that never matters because no-one ever eats it.

I’m sure there’s beautiful parsley somewhere, light, fresh and tender, like a less rank cilantro, plump and juicy with a misting of dew, but I’ve never tasted it. In an entire life of cooking and eating, I’ve never encountered parsley that didn’t taste like a weed that had choked into leathery senescence behind the chemical toilet on a building site.

The French call it persil, which, for obvious reasons, never makes it onto even the most pretentious menus in the UK, but in spite of the fact that they have some wonderful recipes using parsley, for me it’s an unremittingly English herb. The limp, re-used sprig on an overdone steak in a country pub, the light sprinkling on the skin of a flour-thickened nursing home soup, the triumphant flourish on gammon and pineapple in a seaside boarding-house with delusions and boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley sauce.

Parsley will never pass my lips as long as I draw breath but I, herewith, give notice to my family and loved ones that, at my funeral, once the three mysterious, veiled women have cast their roses on my casket and left in a cloud of chypre and once my body is interred, they should serve over-boiled ham entirely surrounded with a rosette of the oldest, most leathery parsley they can find and weep for my passing.

Thank You. I feel much better. Next time, Deo Gratia, I will be in better humour.