It doesn’t seem right to ‘review’ the Queen’s Head at Newton for about a thousand different reasons. It’s a funny little old pub at a crossroads about 7 miles south of Cambridge. It’s a ‘free house’ (I should explain for non-UK readers that by far the majority of pubs in England are ‘Tied houses’, meaning their buildings are owned by large breweries who control what beer is served by the tenant - confusingly called the Landlord or Landlady.) having been bought, in a state of dereliction back in the 60s by the same family who run it to this day.
It’s a sweet story and has resulted in a uniquely idiosyncratic place, full of its own unforced character. It’s been a pub since the 1700s, it’s listed all to hell and it’s packed with refreshingly uncurated nick-knackery. It’s too old and distinguished to be judged, too comfortable in its own eccentricity to need validation.
Its customers on a Thursday lunchtime, a gratifying crowd of local tradesmen, a small crew of staff from the hospital nearby, some bikers, some pensioners, and a couple of mums with babies - love the place, won’t thank anyone for recommending it to others and probably wouldn’t give a fuck if a reviewer liked the place or trashed it.
Of one thing I’m certain, though, if someone whipped out a phone and started shooting themselves gurning over the menu, they’d drag him out to the scrubby patch that failed in its ambition to be a green and immolate him in a 40’ whicker man.
No. The Queen’s Head doesn’t want a review, and I have no desire to review it.
But I do want to tell you about the food, because it’s genuinely interesting. It’s sometimes referred to by locals as ‘The Brown Soup Pub’ because there a ‘soup of the day’ on the menu that’s not specified by flavour. Instead, you compare it to a colour chart on the wall which, in a brilliantly cryptic way, tells you not what flavour it is, but the colour.
It’s a great gimmick. Amusing. But it tells a much larger story about pubs and food.
The soup at the Queen’s Head is a proud and ancient culinary tradition that might once have been found in any institution from asylum to gentlemen’s club. Latterly referred to as a ‘Brown Windsor’ it’s a regularly updated, kitchen stock, thickened with vegetables and sometimes a little roux if necessary. It’s usually some shade of brown - hence the name (Actually A Brown Windsor was, for some inexplicable reason, Royal Flying Corps slang for a cock-up) but there’s been a brown soup on the go for as long as there have been kitchens.
When you think about it, a single flavour soup is a bit of a faff, a bit of an affectation. It requires careful sourcing, prep and cooking, whereas a brown soup, is a process not a recipe. It’s the way of extracting the last nourishment from ingredients and serving it in a palatable way. A brown soup shouldn’t taste of anything but soup, if you get my meaning.
My soup, in a stout china mug, was mid-brown, at least that’s what the barmaid told me after she’d yelled the question back to the kitchen. Though as you’ll see from photographic exhibits a) and b) it’s a clear case of Yellowish-brown.
It’s warming, with a great texture (no detectable flour thickening), carefully cut chunks of carrot, parsnip, and leek, that distinctive use of pepper as an actual spice rather than a diffident ‘seasoning’. I want to say allspice, but it could equally well have been cumin and coriander … but crucially, none prominent enough to make you think of any particular ethnicity. It was served with fresh-baked brown bread and a wodge of salty butter.
Alongside I had the beef sandwich (specify horseradish when you order) with the same bread, the same thick butter and layer upon layer of perfectly rare cold roast beef.
The reason this is key is that any cook looking at this would know it was cut from a recently roasted joint. And they’d know there would be drippings and fats, juices and jellies. Blackened scrackly bits and trim.
The circularity of knowing that all those bits went into the stock*, along with the trimmings and bones from the slicing ham. That also features prominently on the menu The pointedly emphatic ’Not Suitable for vegetarians’ on the bottom of the soup chart.
This is hospitality at it’s most elemental level. A ‘public’ house. A place for communal gathering, with food preparation at the precisely appropriate level. There’s no chef to have an ego, there’s nothing ‘innovative’ or performative on the menu. The colour chart gimmick is amusing but it overlies something much more significant, more honest, more deserving of our awed respect.
If I had set the Queen’s Head up as a social experiment in 1962, I couldn’t have been more delighted with the results. Let decent, enthusiastic hospitable people buy a place back from the ‘hospitality industry’. Let them run it for decades, listening and adapting to the needs of its decent little community. Put them in a place where trend and fashion will pass by them, as easy to ignore as assholes in Audis.
And the result will be Brown Soup.
And it will taste gloriously of soup.
And I will not review it because I’m unworthy.
*Perhaps not quite ‘all’. They offer toast and dripping as a bar snack.
Priceless and tantalising. Not least, the footnote. Sorry, we are leaving now….sans Audi.
I really want to try this soup. Sandwich sounds pretty good too. When I do, what’s in my glass?