Where Angel Delight Fears to Tread Fruit Fools Rush In

Only once has a dish been served to me in a restaurant that moved me to tears.

Even for a relatively well-adjusted and emotionally balanced chap I find this fact slightly embarrassing to admit, but there were extenuating circumstances.

It was the last day of my 30s, the milometer of my life was hours away from ticking over to hit 40, I was sitting in Pierre Gagnaire in Paris, one of the best restaurants in the world and, more importantly, I was sitting opposite a beautiful woman who a few months later was due to become my wife.

And she was also picking up the bill.

So… if ever I was allowed a tearful moment surely that was it. But these tears came out of nowhere, welling up from a deep part of my mind as my taste buds and brain connected, resulting in a jolt of food memory that left me blubbing like a little girl.

And the cause? A relatively simply desert of banana puree, with a little mango on a biscuit base and a soft set cream, a single course from part of the multi course tasting menu. What this sublime piece of cooking had done was, in an instant, catapult me back to being 5 years old, sitting next to my mother who had just given me a plate of mashed banana with top of the milk and a sprinkling of sugar. And, as any Freudian will tell you, there is nothing more likely to get a fella to shed a tear than childhood memories of his mother.

What has this got to do with Angel Delight?

Well, apart from mashed banana and top of the milk the only other desert that resonates so strongly from my childhood is Angel Delight and if a mere, all be it Michelin starred, recreation of one desert could have such an effect I was fascinated, if slightly alarmed, to find out what a taste of a long forgotten childhood delight might do. So I set out to retaste Angel Delight while fully expecting the possibility of a full-on mental breakdown.

Having tracked down three flavours; Butterscotch, Chocolate and Strawberry I was more than a little surprised how easy each were to make. 300ml’s of milk, quick whisk and then leave for 5 minutes. I remembered much more complexity from my childhood although that could have been down to the elaborate addition of some squirty tinned cream and a glace cherry. 

Classy… our house. 

Having whisked and waited the moment of truth came and, armed with a large box of Kleenex, the tasting began.

First up Butterscotch.

And… oh… it was horrible. Maybe I’d got the ‘complex’ cooking instructions wrong but it was rubbery and tasted faintly of furniture polish.

Next up chocolate; a better texture but none of the deep coco flavour that you would expect or want and a disturbing visual double for something our dog is known to produce.

Finally, and always my childhood favourite, Strawberry.

Despite the violent pink colour, this looked good, this looked like I remembered from my 70’s childhood. Long forgotten images and scents were beginning to surface; the smell of a space hopper on a hot summer day, the feeling of my Action Man’s ‘life like’ crew cut under my fingers, watching Ipswich Town winning the FA Cup (the one and only time I’ve ever shown any interest in football) and then I tasted the pink goo and, drum roll please, it tasted almost exactly like Strawberry doesn’t.

What a disappointment, what a let down, part of my childhood had died a little with the tasting of those convenience desserts and that would be enough to bring a tear to anyone’s eye. 


First printed in the excellent http://www.theretrocollective.com/

In Search of Coq

When it comes to retro, you can’t get much more retro than the combination of red wine, bacon, mushrooms and an old farmhouse chicken.

Legend has it that Coq Au Vin was invented for Julius Caesar as he made his conquering way through Gaul and certainly it’s a great dish to fortify you against the soggy French countryside while you merrily go around subjugating, murdering and generally being a right royal Italian pain in the arse.

One suspects if Coq Au Vin was truly a dish created for a conquering Caesar whoever the down trodden French chef who first prepared it probably added a little of is own ‘special sauce’ by way of biting political satire.  Never annoy the chef and/or burn down his village – you will get spit (or worse) in your dinner.

So fast-forward a couple of thousand years; the Roman Empire has fallen, one suspects that the French are still pissing in our soup and Julius Caeser and Kenneth Williams have become the same person.

But Coq Au Vin is still one of the best dishes in the world… if you can get a good Coq.

It might have fallen out a favour a little, but right through the 60’s and 70’s it was a staple of a thousand local French Bistros and suburban dinner parties where it was often served with, God forbid, rice and some awful German wine.

The dish had a whiff of the continent about it, an air of sophistication, it went perfectly with Serge Gainsbourg’s pornographic muttering emanating form the stereo and made us all feel that little bit more glamorous and French. 

Even if we came from Colchester, which, as anyone who has ever been there will testify, is about as far form any sense of glamour as you can get.

And, of course, it was always made with a pale English chicken rather than a robust French Coq.

The whole point of a long slow, braising dish with fat in the form of bacon and a healthy slosh of alcohol is to coax some tenderness into an other wise tough and unyielding bird. Use a young chicken and you can end up with a cloying, gluey mess with an unsatisfactorily tasteless sauce and none of the big, robust flavours that you would expect.

So the challenge becomes to hunt yourself down a Coq.

I searched high and low in some of the best butchers in London and while most said that they could order me a bird, imported at great expense from France (somewhat making a mockery of what is meant to be a hearty peasant dish) none had a Coq in stock.

In the end I settled for the gamest, toughest looking chicken that I could find. There is NO point in making this dish with a cheap supermarket chicken. (In fact if you ever use cheap super market chickens for anything why are you even bothering to read this blog? You clearly know nothing and care less about food so I suggest you fuck off back to stuffing frozen reformed meat products down your neck and leave the food and eating to real men.)

Once you’ve got yourself a game old bird then the recipe is simplicity itself, joint the chicken (something that your butcher should be more than happy to do for you) and then it is just a matter of getting everything on the hob before cracking open your best bottle of red, putting some Serge on the CD player, sitting back and thinking suitable Gaelic thoughts. 


First printed in the excellent http://www.theretrocollective.com/

Prawn Star

It’s difficult to think of anything ‘good’ that came out of the 1970’s.

It’s the bastard decade that the rest of the century is embarrassed by. The inbred cousin who at family gatherings gets over excited and starts dribbling only to be ignored in the hope that he will just do the decent thing and die quietly in the corner. 

It was the decade that gave us Peters & Lee, terrorism at the Olympics, suburban wife swapping and Thatcher. Thanks a bunch 1970’s.

The food wasn’t a whole lot better.

In our house, Vesta Curry or a Fray Bentos pie from a tin followed with, if we were lucky, a fluorescent Angel Delight that tasted like shampoo and bubble gum was considered the cornerstone of a balanced and faintly exotic meal.

The only and very occasional jewel that lit up the ’70’s table was the appearance on high days and holidays of a deep pink mound of freshly defrosted prawns, covered in a wonderfully cloying sauce all piled on wilting lettuce and served in a Martini glass with a slice of lemon jauntily wedged on its rim.

The Prawn Cocktail drenched in Marie Rose sauce, possibly the best, and maybe the only, decent thing to come out of the 1970’s kitchen.

So why has the Prawn Cocktail fallen form grace? Why isn’t it celebrated and enjoyed in the very best restaurants, why can it only be found on the menu at Harvesters (£3.49 with a Thousand Island Dressing - - wrong) or at painfully ironic dinner parties held in Shoreditch?

It’s all because of the sauce.

The very thing that makes a prawn cocktail great, the thick almost cackling Marie Rose sauce that catches at the back of throat, is also what makes the dish deeply unfashionable, hated by chefs and completely and sublimely wonderful.

Back in the ‘70’s the quality of prawns left an awful lot to be desired.

Fresh un-cooked prawns, on ice, in their shells? Forget it.

What prawns we had were deep frozen, badly transported, little pink bullets which when defrosted had the strange texture of rubbery cardboard and the lingering taste of the inside of a cat’s mouth.

But despite these major drawbacks in both taste and texture we couldn’t get enough of them.

Prawns screamed glamour, they screamed expensive, they screamed that ‘yes, we have a new Ford Granda, Melamine kitchen and wall to wall shag.’ A prawn cocktail was a social indicator that you where going somewhere, that you had money and therefore good taste.

But, of course, you didn’t have ‘good taste’ because as with most things that people buy to impress others with, the only impressive thing about 1970’s frozen North Atlantic prawn was it’s price.

So the 1970’s host had a dilemma. How to show off your taste in expensive ingredients without actually making your guests retch?

What was needed to make the dish eatable, enjoyable even, was a strong flavoured sauce, so strong in fact that the main ingredient could be hidden, masked, used purely as a delivery system for the sauce.  

What was needed was a sauce that could stage a culinary coup and usurp the main ingredient entirely, taking over and becoming the reason for the dish to exist in the first place.

And that is what a Marie Rose sauce was born to do – it’s the ultimate culinary bullyboy.

No one in their right mind would take a flavour as delicate, light and precise as a fresh prawn and smother it in a combination of ketchup, mayonnaise and Tabasco but, in a trick as old as cooking itself, it you are faced with sub standard produce that is exactly what you do… smoother it in a heavy sauce.

Thankfully things have changed.

Some of the countries best chefs have, while not embracing the prawn cocktail, have allowed its upper class cousin the Seaford Cocktail to creep back onto their menus. Richard Corrigan’s Bentleys does a very fine, very dignified Seafood Cocktail that is light, luxurious and full of ozone tasting morsels.

However, most restaurants serving prawns, or any sea food, with anything other than the lightest of sauces, a little chilli or maybe a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil would be burned to the ground by a rampaging mob of Sunday supplement reading food snobs.   

And that’s a shame.

Because when it’s done with skill and attention there is a place for the 1970’s inspired Prawn Cocktail. A place which isn’t to do with the ironic, the kitsch or the camp but because it tastes really good and, with a few small alterations and changes, can work well with good quality, meaty, fresh king prawns.

Oh… and Prawn Cocktail is never acceptable as a sandwich filling.


First printed in the excellent http://www.theretrocollective.com/