Ready, steady, cook

In search of a free lunch Phil Mellows headed off to S&N's Food Training Centre in Northampton but had he bitten off more than he could chew?​

It's an exciting life, being a trade journalist. You never know what will happen next. One day you are treated to a slap-up lunch at a top West End restaurant, the next you are treated to a slap-up lunch some place more exotic - such as Islington. Occasionally, you even have to treat yourself to a somewhat slapped-down egg and chips in a back-street pub in Croydon.

The permutations are endless and I've done it all. But never, not ever, have I had to cook my own lunch - until I went to Northampton.

My come-uppance came up at Scottish & Newcastle's Food Training Centre where I was to spend the day casting a detached eye over what goes on - and hopefully scrounge a nice lunch.

The morning went smoothly enough, with no portent of the indignities to come. Charlie Swinburn (pictured above, with Phil Dukelow)​, who heads food development at the centre, was teaching a group of mainly area managers and stocktakers about the magic of portion control and profitability.

Did you know that Berni Inns, the old Grand Met chain of pub-restaurants, once saved £1.5m in a year by giving people half a tomato with their salad garnish instead of a whole one?

Then there's chips. Feeling generous? Ordered too many? Resist the temptation to pile up the plate. Your customers will only expect the same next time and be disappointed.

All good, hard-nosed stuff and so far nobody had got their hands dirty. Then Charlie threw white coats and paper hats at us. Were we going to play doctors and nurses? No, we were going to cook our own lunch.

Surely this was unnecessary, I argued. After all, these people weren't going to be actually cooking food in a pub. But Charlie was adamant. They need to experience what goes on in a real kitchen, rather that just knowing the theory.

I was nervous. My activity in the kitchen largely consists of transferring out-of-date foodstuffs from the fridge to the bin, a distance which, with ingenious ergonomics, I have reduced to a few inches.

The bin in the S&N training kitchen was miles from the fridge, which made me wonder whether they knew what they were doing.

Charlie introduced us to the equipment, all the latest kit, including an induction wok, a miraculous toy which I somehow knew I'd never get to play with.

He also showed us "how not to cook a sausage in a microwave" which apart from nearly burning the kitchen down seemed to me to be a waste of a perfectly decent sausage, although I suppose you could use it to do some charcoal sketches.

Charlie asked if anyone had any questions.

"Can I go out and get a takeaway?" I asked. Charlie chuckled demonically.

We were each handed a menu card which would tell us what to cook and and how to cook it. I got cumberland sausages with sweet potato mash. Sausage and mash. That didn't sound too difficult.

I was paired up with Paula Rigby, a student trainee with S&N. As she was a student, I imagined that whatever she cooked would turn out to be toast, but I was wrong. Paula had experience in a catering kitchen and it showed. She whizzed around gathering the ingredients for her dish - a mozzarella cheese and roasted vegetable salad thingy - and mine. I did what I do best at moments like this. Get in the way. I was, I reflected, playing Johnny to her Fanny (see footnote) but without the monocle and without getting sozzled on the cooking sherry.

She told me to get on with grilling the sausages while she started chopping. For some reason they wouldn't let me handle anything sharper than a lemon.

So I studiously grilled my sausages until they were nice and brown and only then remembered that I had forgotten the ingredient that makes all the difference to sausage and mash - mash.

I was concentrating so hard on my sausages that I hadn't noticed that Paula, bless her, had already boiled the potatoes. All I had to do was mash them with some butter and seasoning. But where was the masher?

Nowhere to be found.

Charlie handed me an egg whisk and told me to get on with it. An egg whisk? If I had been Ainsley Harriott would they get away with that? There again, if I had been Ainsley Harriott I would probably be scoffing a free lunch in the Bahamas or somewhere.

So I started whisking my sweet potatoes. "What a horrible colour!" somebody said. "They are sweet potatoes," I said, haughtily, by way of explanation. They weren't that horrible, I thought. Sort of dusky pink. They reminded me of a carpet I had stood on once.

The whisk mashed the potatoes into those stiff peaks beloved of Delia Smith. Seems like Charlie knew his stuff. I scooped the mash onto the plate, sculpting a small mountain, and sat the sausages on top, trying to replicate the picture on the menu card. It looked quite nourishing.

"Have you weighed the mash?" said Charlie. Weighed the mash? Ah, portion control. Everything I had learned that morning had gone out of my head like water through a sieve. But I was hungry! And I was only cooking it for me, after all.

Rules are rules, however. I weighed the prescribed amount of mash on some fiendishly complicated scales and reconstructed my dish.

All I had to do now was drizzle some sweet chilli sauce, as the recipe decreed, round the edge of the plate.

Paula found the bottle. I dutifully weighed the sauce, put it in a tiny jug, tipped it up and waited for it to drizzle.

Nothing happened. The sauce was too thick. After peering into the jug I could tell it was moving slowly but the sausages and mash were getting colder all the time. It was a race against time.

When I had eventually traced a delicate red border Paula sensibly suggested I probed the sausages to make sure I wasn't going to poison myself. They were still well within safe temperature limits. If they hadn't have been, would I have eaten them? I think so. Starvation is a much slower death.

Charlie came along and dropped a sprig of parsley on top. This is the artistic touch that turns a meal into a dish and he had stolen my glory. He hadn't even weighed it.

The sausages and mash joined the other dishes on the table to be passed by chef Nick Ridyard.

The results were, I have to say, proof that the S&N system works. Although nobody in the kitchen had made any of the dishes before, they all looked good enough to eat - fortunately - and, if anything, better than they were as pictured on the cards.

Tension grew as he praised each effort until finally he reached mine. "And now, cumberland sausages with sweet potato mash." The entire kitchen collapsed into laughter.

Nick kindly said it was no laughing matter and even seemed to find little wrong with my creation.

"Your mash has sunk, hasn't it?" I had to agree. "But it's been on the plate a long time, so it's probably the weight of the sausages, wouldn't you agree?" Relieved, I nodded vigorously.

At last it was time to eat. In a communal spirit, everyone was sharing their food. I offered around some of my sausage and mash but there were no takers. People became suddenly full, or remembered that they didn't usually eat lunch, or worried that they might fall asleep if they hazarded even another mouthful.

Never mind. Thanks to the menu card - and a lot of help from Paula - I had produced something that could rightly be called food, and, assuming you hadn't seen me fumbling around with it, if you were served it in a pub you certainly wouldn't complain.

Mind you, I've a feeling that my first venture into catering will also be my last. From now on I'll stick to eating the stuff.

For the benefit of younger readers, Fanny Craddock was the original celebrity chef, appearing with her husband Johnny, whose most famous live TV line was: "let's hope your doughnuts turn out just like Fanny's".​