Ploughing the wrong furrow
Should the ploughman's lunch ever be celebrated with its own week (after all, every other foodstuff seems to have its annual seven days in the spo?tlight), that week would be in August. This is the time of year that cars stuffed with happy holidaymakers roll into our country pubs for a rustic lunch.
The visitor, surrounded by beams and horse brasses, peers at the menu through a pair of rose-coloured Ray-Bans for a taste of the English idyll. It matters not a jot to him that the local farmer is drinking keg lager and tucking into a ham and pineapple melt.
What the visitor wants is a plain glass of Scrumpy, a chunk of wholesome bread and a wedge of home-made Cheddar.
What he usually gets is fizzy alcoholic juice from an industrial estate outside Bristol and a mass-produced unappetising oblong of coagulated milk. It is not a dish that would be recognised by your average 18th-century farm labourer.
A barometer of pub cuisine
In fact, the ploughman's lunch was invented as a marketing concept in the early 1960s by an advertising company hired by a group of publicans to promote the English inn.
The nomenclature may even then have been nonsense, but it was based on the sound principle that a trencher of bread and a chunk of cheese is the best accompaniment yet invented for a glass of good beer. (It was also the only real nourishment on offer in many rural pubs 40 years ago).
The name successfully evoked the gastronomic rural diet of wholesome food eaten al fresco by a plain-speaking rustic.
Unfortunately, over the years, the ploughman's lunch has not only been aggrandised, but also tarred by a score of sobriquets, from Combine Harvester (from the Harvester chain, naturally) to Ploughman's Platter. A Ploughman's Platter sounds more like an album by the Wurzels than sustenance for a turner of the sod. The change of title transforms the pub grub staple into a lounge bar light-bite. A Ploughman's Platter strikes me as a dish best suited to a paper doily, not a muscular son of soil.
This variation in content and terminology of the classic summer staple is because the ploughman's has become a barometer of British pub cuisine.
Sadly, it is almost impossible anymore to find a pub serving merely an unadorned slice of farm bread, a lump of cheese and home-made pickled onion. The only one I know that does just that is the wonderful Hunter's Lodge Inn, near Priddy, Somerset.
Most ploughman's lunches are made from bland supermarket cheese with a frozen baguette, branded pickled onion, iceberg lettuce and whole tomato. And as the combo climbs the social and gastronomic ladder, the baguette becomes a granary roll and the cheese is Tesco's Finest. Apple, coleslaw and watercress are more and more likely to appear in the garnish and the working man's onion will be transmogrified into the more presentable Branston Pickle (the original chunky relish, not the new smooth version).
By the time one reaches the bourgeois rural gastropub, the bread is home-baked and full of bits, the cheese is obscure and organic and the accompanying salad will contain walnuts, bananas or strawberries - or very possibly, all three. The pickle, whether it be a solitary onion or a sauce made from green tomatoes, will come in a French jar.
And whatever the quality of the ingredients, the further one ventures into English holiday territory (Cornwall, Devon and Norfolk, in particular), the more likely it is that the dish will look like the watercress sandwich once served to Oscar Wilde. After surveying the butty he remarked: "When I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it."
A hundred years later, at the height of the English holiday season, a ploughman's lunch is more often than not a vegetable patch with a bilious rubber brick in the middle of it.
English wine puts on a sparkling performance
I am impressed that the Nyetimber Classic Cuvee 1998, produced in Sussex, has been crowned the best sparkling wine in the world. However, I would like to add a postscript to this award-winning English "Champagne".
About 10 years ago the Evening Standard tested the Nyetimber wine to find out how it
compared to other classics. Stars and wine buffs were asked to blind-taste sparking wine, including Bollinger and Moët et Chandon, to see how the English drink compared. With the exception of the MA's Andrew Jefford, who could ID the Nyetimber, other contestants - and they included Leslie Ash and Dai Llewellyn - all said the best "Champagne" in the world was the Tesco's Spanish Cava.
Meanwhile, at the height of the worst wine crisis in France for years, Thierry Guillon is successfully distilling malt whisky in Champagne. The producer of Malt de la Montagne de Reims expects to produce 60,000 bottles this year and claims "the Scots and the Japanese come to Reims to buy their malt." It is extraordinary the French are producing whisky and the British make "Champagne".
What further proof do we need that climate change is upon us?
