A labyrinthine, centuries old Bacchanalia; stone hewn, Gormenghastian temple of sweet, strong - near psychedelic - ale, The Blue Anchor is my favourite pub: the finest in the world.

A stone passage entrance - large, pleasingly wonky slabs of granite beneath your feet - lead off to two bars on the right, a snug and skittles alley to the left, while warped stone stairs toward the back reach the brewery at the top of the building. This is key - The Blue Anchor remains one of Britain’s longest continually operating brewery pubs (beer has been brewed here since the sixteenth century, the current brewery has been in operation since the eighteenth, and the pub also has its own well) and the beer brewed here - Spingo - is an idiosyncratic, beautifully eccentric, delight.

Spingo.

The word evokes drunken revelry or a luck incantation for a Hobbit, though the origin is in the old English ‘stingo’ - which, appropriately, denoted a particularly strong beer. It’s not a best bitter, although it has the body and, at 5% abv for the middle and 6.6% for the Special, certainly the strength. Neither is it a strong mild (mild has, generally, been low gravity since the mid twentieth century but in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century was often much stronger) though it has the sweetness.

No: Spingo is Spingo and there’s nothing like it.

Dark and malty, at first disconcertingly sweet, it is, above all, warming. It’s also, for a dark beer, incredibly easy drinking though not exactly ‘refreshing’, per se. Rather it is satisfying. Deeply, ineffably satisfying. It is also very slightly viscous though it doesn’t ‘sit’ particularly heavy in the stomach. After a few pulls you’ll notice a near absence of hops in favour of a deep malt character. It comes in two principle styles: Middle or Special. The Middle is what most people drink, while the Special is the very definition of a winter warmer - thick, treacly, positively Dickensian.

Above all, though, Spingo is moreish.

Perhaps it’s because I don’t come here very often (we’re a seven hour drive away), or maybe because I’m wont to be greedy for very good beer but Spingo goes down quickly: four pints can easily disappear in 25 minutes and you’ll wonder, slightly dazed, where they went…the pint that drinks itself.

A word of warning, though.

Spingo goes to the head notoriously quickly. The sugar content ensures an effect perhaps closer to cider than beer. The locals have a term for it - ‘Spingoed’ - (apparently a fair few Helston dogs are named after the beer, too). A few years ago I visited The Blue Anchor in December and the barman informed me some locals enjoy a mix of the Middle and Special together: this indeed produced a beautifully fulsome pint - the clove, stewed plum richness of the Special offset perfectly by the stability of the Middle. I usually enjoy a pint of straight Special to end a run of Middle but it wasn’t on when I called in a few days ago, alas (they also produce a more modern beer called Flora Daze - modern and hoppy - but I refuse to try it on principle), that said, the atmosphere was, as always, a mischievous, uproarious delight. The Blue Anchor is, you see, the very essence of a drinkers pub - it remains resolutely ‘wet’ and the clientele it attracts, both the old boys in the front bar and the visitors on pilgrimage, tend to be quite serious drinkers (people come from all over the world for The Blue Anchor - the Flora Dance aside, Helston isn’t really on the traditional tourist track so it is very much a ‘destination’ pub).

This is a big part of the charm, though.

Indeed, the idea of a ‘wet pub’ being in any way out of the ordinary would, a few decades ago, seem strange in itself. Pubs are, after all, for drinking but, sadly, recent years have seen the rapid decline of any pub not doing a food ‘offering’. I’m not going to go into the myriad depressing reasons for this here - it would merit a separate article, tbh (which I may write in the coming months) but needless to say, food is everywhere even though the idea of drinking only - or primarily - ‘with food’ is a mediterranean concept that has been (bizarrely) applied to Britain with ruinous consequences for pubs (why do we need to constantly eat, anyway?)

Children are generally fine here in the day, by the way - mine enjoy exploring the stone walkways, snugs and steps that offer the Blue Anchor a pleasingly dream like quality akin to the ‘classical dream equipment of tunnels, ramparts, cliffs’ of Paul Bowles description of Tangier - but it’s not really a family pub (that said, I think that it’s a good thing for kids to come to spaces that don’t explicitly cater for them. This is how I remember visits to pubs as a child of the eighties: the bottle of Britvic orange with one large ice cube that has odd ‘pockets’ of different temperature; crisp packets opened out on tables; the intense beery fug that you just don’t get if it’s diluted by food pub smells - vinegar, frying baskets and industrial mayonnaise - and, also, the waiting. It’s a fine tradition and, anyhow, there is a garden here - its just made entirely out of centuries old granite with a tent over the top of it. There you go kids, fill your boots…)

It’s haunted, too (many old pubs in Cornwall are haunted), due to various violent deaths on the premises - in 1717 a landlord was stabbed to death; in 1791 another landlord was bayonetted by nearby serving soldiers who were later hanged; in 1821 a man fell to his death in the brewery well; in 1849 another landlord hung himself in the skittles alley. Is there a slight chill in the Skittles alley? I always detect one. Regardless, the ineffable, deep warmth of community and, just as importantly, continuation more than offsets it.

Make the trip…

The butch alcoholic bistro owner staggered unsteadily to my outdoor table (Jonzac, 2016) and plonked herself down opposite, sighing and gesturing vaguely to the empty square.

‘Jonzac!’ She said, finally, in withering disgust.

Without asking she helped herself to one of my Gauloises Blondes. Shaking it clumsily out of the packet, she lit it, exhaling theatrically before starting a ten minute monologue about - I think - the pressures and unceasing depressions and deprivations of running a (very) slow brasserie in the arse end of Bordeaux.

‘Jonzac’ She said, finally, sighing.

‘Jonzac’ I agreed, taking a pull on my pastis. Shaking herself slightly on realising that she hadn’t taken her only customer’s order, she rose unsteadily and nodded expectantly at the classic red leather folder menu in front of me.

‘Andouillette’ I said.

Mild concern crossed her face.

‘You, err, like it?…you know it? You know the andouillette?’

‘Yes. I know the andouillette…I like the andouillette’

A layered, folded, malodorous sausage that inspires devotion or revulsion - and nothing else - the andouillette is made from pork intestines and tripe (hopefully) thoroughly washed and scrubbed before being boiled in a court bouillon, spiked with champagne, pepper and nutmeg and encased in a final - disconcertingly thick - layer of intestinal passage. It can be heavenly. It can be horrifying. Again, nothing in between. There is no such thing as an ‘indifferent’ andouillette.

Usually served with a creamy mustard sauce and/or fried onions and mashed potatoes or chips, the andouillette is, on one level, the very essence of ‘acquired taste’. But that feels too passive, somehow. Can you ‘acquire’ a taste for a sausage that carries - at best - a bouquet of French barnyard, complete with ancient mud, sour wine, rat infested hay bale and goaty/porcine/ bovine layers of old animal?

What of a sausage that can also carry, as bad ones are said to - aside from those mild top notes - the scent of death magnetic? Of adrenalised, oinking slaughterhouse? Of a sausage that evokes imagery of a bleak Monday morning at an abattoir in a dilapidated Lyon outer suburb in 1972; hulking foreman from the Ardennes reeking of morning Calvados; two silent inbred brothers with glassy expressions opening buck fastening; of a small wizened man with a clipboard and a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth who never looks up; of the strange, near human eyes of many pigs; of the grim formality of staff meals in some small airless canteen presided over by a strapping Burgundian matron paddling out heaping portions of Coq au Vin atop overcooked buttered noodles; of the distant hum of generators and the pencil scratch of hastily filled lotto tickets by thick thumbed slaughter-men?

Closely associated with Troyes in the south of the Champagne region, the Andouillette’s spiritual home is Lyon, where it remains a staple of Bouchon culture alongside heavy, old school trenchermen dishes like Quenelles de Brochette and pot -au - feu - invariably washed down with ‘pots’ of cheap Beaujolais.

The Bouchon stable is hearty and unashamedly meaty. But the Andouillette retains its status as the most challenging dish in the Lyonnaise repertoire by dent not only of its distinctive aroma but also its appearance.

There’s trench warfare in those folded intestinal tracts.

A traditional ground sausage is, of course, an exercise in subterfuge; a means of disguising off cuts via obliteration of form, not only chopping but grinding - a mechanised obscurity. Likewise, in Sicily the Fritilla venders of Palermo offer scraps of veal offal, cartilage, skin and the like fried in lard and boiled with bay leaf, lemon and pepper. But the pan in which the stark scraps of meat are cooked remains shrouded. Covered with a large white cloth, each portion is surreptitiously, almost shamefully, ladled out- a rejection of traditional Italian pride and flare in favour of a ritualistic omertà.

By proxy, the andouillette is starkly unhidden. The sausage is not fully encased. The entwined filling is shown - proudly - at cross sections. There is no disguise. It’s the anti sausage, in this regard. If/when concealment comes it will be in the form of sauce. In the nineteen fifties the brilliantly grotesque catering phrase ‘napping’ was used for the swaddling of a dish - often an indifferently cooked piece of meat or fish of dubious provenance- in a plentiful ladle of sauce. The andouillette is, too, often ‘napped’ in a thick bath of creamy mustard spiked sauce.

A few weeks ago I ordered one online. It was sent vacuum packed from France. Looking back, with the scant benefit of three weeks hindsight, I see this as the height of idiocy; the very pinnacle of culinary hubris - akin to ordering a plastic four litre brace of Cretan Retsina for home consumption on a cold English December night. Of course an Andouillette doesn’t travel. Of course you need to be sitting at a routier or a Bouchon or a brasserie for it to make any sense.

What the fuck was I thinking?

I want it, was what I was thinking. It was the middle of a heatwave. I was delirious. I didn’t just want it, I had to have it. I had fevered visions of drinking cold rose as I leisurely fried it to be accompanied by a simple scoop of mash, some fried onions mixed with wholegrain mustard, a splash of white wine bubbling down, little spoon of cream to finish.

Somewhere, deep down, I realised that this was a fool’s errand. The first andouillette I ordered went missing, omen like, lost in the bowls of some depot. The second arrived on a very hot Wednesday. It was packed in some kind of silver contraption, presumably designed to keep it cool but it was, assuredly, not cool. It held the faintest whisper of chill. Not to worry, I thought. The best before date is sometime mid July. I’ll put it in the fridge until it’s nice and cold and I will cook it in two days time.

As I started to grill it my wife looked up from the World Cup. ‘it smells like the Maze in 1974’….’just put the fucking extractor on!’….’it smells like a Frenchman I don’t know has come in the house shat in a Le Creuset, put an onion in it and cooked it’…she eventually left the room in disgust. She was right. It did smell obscene. I was starting to think I had found it - the fabled bad andouillette - the one that people report on in hushed tones of post traumatic disgust. This wasn’t just barnyard. This was near wicked: an abomination.

The taste was worse. As far from the plump, meaty, gutsy bistro ideal of Jonzac and elsewhere as it was possible to get. Most startlingly of all, it didn’t actually register as food.

I chocked down three hideous forkfuls….. the andouillette does not travel.

Exploring the ‘raw, red places all around the walls of London....the grim greyness of the streets’ The London Adventure or The Art of Wondering (1924) - the third in a loose autobiographical trio that started with Far Off Things (1922) - is a lyrical, meandering hymnal to the lesser trodden metropolis, or, as he memorably terms it: London Incognita.

Taking in Masonic lore, peculiar hidden pubs, the drab prosaic horror of new build suburbs, trees that evoke dread and wonder; crumbling churches and the food, drink and cultural morays of lesser travelled Holloway backstreets (he has a real thing for Holloway and Camden Town), The London Adventure is also a (perhaps, the) foundational work of early psychogeography, less working guidebook in the mode of, say, The London Nobody Knows by Geoffrey Fletcher (1962) or Len Deighton’s London Dossier (1967) and more akin to the playful, verbose, cog twisting world of Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital (2002) (and on which Machen’s London Adventure was a firm influence)

In his speculative fiction Machen, of course, played with geography and the soul of place, conjuring worlds both domestically cramped - creaking Victorian boarding houses, reeking pubs, teetering shops - and often juxtaposing them with the sweeping beauty, dread and mystery of the pastoral- the Welsh hills and valleys of his birthplace in Monmouthshire, in paticular. Novels such as The Hill of Dreams (1907) or The Great God Pan (1894) were rich in such imagery, layering tension with hallucinatory imagery to great effect.

A foundational influence on early - mid twentieth century American weird fiction, horror and fantasy (not least the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith), Machen was also a journalist in his early career, and The London Adventure frequently references his experiences navigating the dank, foggy Victorian streets to attend to any number of bizarre incidents and peculiar characters.

An early anecdote places us firmly in Machen territory. He describes an interview conducted with a brass founder for, as he breezily tells us, an assignment regarding a poltergeist. On Matchen asking whether brass is still cast ‘in the old way?’ The worker responds that, yes, it is cast as it has always been cast (that is ‘…as it were when the columns of brass were made gloriously for the Temple of King Solomon’) Immediately recognising somewhat unsubtle Masonic code, Machen responds that he does indeed know the name of ‘the man that did that casting’ to which the brass founder fixes him with a stare and asks outright whether Machen himself is ‘of the square’.

What follows is a gloriously eccentric few pages that spiral, in fleet footed prose - studious and unfiltered; verbose to the point of comedy; mildly snobbish- around the topic of late nineteenth century Freemasonry; specifically his concern that while arcane rituals are still performed in the ‘rawest, reddest modern suburb…these vile red stones transformed into living philosophical stones’ how disappointing that the majority of modern practitioners are sorely under read in the arcane mystery roots of their solemn practice.

His train of thought is monetarily derailed by a full five pages on the imagined daily labour, domestic routine and diet of an imagined family who, he posits, may inhabit one of the modest Camden Town/Holloway borderland townhouses near to where he is interviewing the brassfather, going into evocative detail as he plots the ‘eggs but no bacon’ and cake and wine that is ‘apt to get somewhat dry and flat and weary’ before he, finally, reaches a treatise on the unknowable ways of poltergeists, nonchalantly asking a clergyman whether he actually saw the ‘ashtray - or whatever it was - shoot off of the mantelpiece’ (to which the clergyman responds ‘do you see the ball at Lord’s all through its course, from the moment that it touches the bat to the moment it touches the ground?’)

This is typical of Machen: a free flowing meander that takes in arcane knowledge, a profound fascination with everyday routine and a peculiar encounter leading to the uncovering of a potentially dangerous or sinister mystery. Every facet of his fiction, then, is also laid bare in his journalese: that precise sense of the fantastic, tempered by mildly cynical yet open intellect, a willingness to lift the veil but not flail wildly at what lies underneath - this is what permeates The London Adventure.

It’s an aesthetic sentiment he shares with one of his most well known acolytes, the late Fall vocalist and lyricist Mark E. Smith. A long standing member of the Machen Society, Smith took lyrical inspiration from Machen; specifically the idea that it is so often the odder corners of the everyday, rather than the camper, more grandiose horrors of the more purple literary imaginations - that pierce through. As he put it in his (recommended) memoir Renegade (2008)

‘‘The society’s monthly newsletters included excerpts from Machen’s unpublished diaries, the source of much of his work. It’s like another world..he goes to all these places, like, ‘this is where the working class hang out, this is where the dandies hang out… I went in this pub, a bloke comes in with a knife in his back’…the real occult’s in the pubs of the East End. In the stinking boats of the Thames, not in Egypt. It’s on your doorstep mate. Strikes a chord with me”

Indeed, the scale of the ‘doorstep’ as painted in A London Adventure feels near impenetrable; the vastness and mystery of the teeming 1920’s metropolis a living entity that, by dent of its nature and scale, is unknowable in the round.

At one point Machen recollects interviewing a fireman in Wandsworth, talking of the bravery and steadfast sacrifice of his profession etc etc, before stopping to express a more honest interest and awe at the scale of Wandsworth itself; how it appears infinite; how he could traverse unknown and ‘unconjunctured regions’ at the end of any street in the area; and how that relates to early childhood memories of the terrible December rains and the ‘dread, threatening, druidical rocks…forever and ever, amen…it sounds farcical that I could read something of this into a little expedition to find a fireman in his little villa beyond Wimbledon Common’

Not all is mystery, of course. Machen is wonderfully acidic in a stinging, prescient passage on the formulaic approach of the outer London boroughs of the time re: urban planning, bemoaning the lack care and attention and facilities, in a way that recalls remarkably similar articles on under-serviced new builds and estates in the present day. He describes a forlorn unfinished development of half a dozen houses put up in 1860 in Enfield Wash, flanked by cabbage patches, and imagines a cornershop ready to service untold hundreds in ‘pickles, tea, cooked meat and candles’ before morosely reflecting that ‘Alas! There was a corner….and nothing but a corner’

But though brilliantly verbose and perceptive, one also gets the sense that Machen wasn’t above poking fun at himself. At one point he relays a conversation he had with a friend about Edgar Allen Poe (by proxy himself, of course…)

‘Yes’ he said ‘Edgar Allen Poe is wonderful, amazing; there has never been anyone like him. But, somehow, one is, now and then, inclined to laugh’

Though born in England, Nicolas Freeling seldom wrote about it. As a telling dialogue in his taut, quietly disturbing 1962 novel Because of the Cats (jazz; sixties suburban Amsterdam; booze; sex; mild occultism) had it ‘….his whole idea was to write about Europe in a European idiom….something that has European flavour and inflexion’. Freeling was writing about himself, of course. His beat was resolute from the start - deep Europe.

Best remembered for the masterful creation of Inspector Piet Van Der Valk, his Van Der Valk novels followed the eponymous detective - sardonic, stoic, ludicrously Dutch, (semi) bon vivant - investigating murders, kidnappings and the like while attending to a complex home life centred around his marriage to the beautiful Arlette (French, equally sardonic, superb cook). Though the VDV is perhaps best known in the collective subconscious via the 1970’s Thames TV incarnation starring Barry Foster, the (brilliant) books were a modest cult success that continue to engender fanaticism amongst those who know: Freeling was every bit as good as Simenon or Chandler.

Van Der Valk hinged on the semi flirtatious interplay between the seedy post war Amsterdam underworld and subtly mannered Netherlands police and political apparatchik; his Henri Castang books, meanwhile, evoked the Gitanes clouded, Calvados breathed fug of municipal France in all its (in)glorious character: gamblers, boozers, prostitutes and permanently befuddled police inhabiting a shady morning till midnight hades of betting shops, Andouillette reeking brasseries and early doors bars.

Freeling’s novels were fundamentally quiet. But though tense (the violence, when it came, was invariably more effective for the build up) his books were underpinned by the domestic and, therefore, culinary rhythm of Northern European life. Room temperature jenever poured to the brim of short tuliped glasses, Dutch fashion, and taken with a cold glass of Amstel; sliced Gouda carefully wrapped in greaseproof paper; soused herring and boiled potatoes; stiff mayonnaise; fronds of dill; scotch poured four fingers deep and without shame or ceremony from brown office sideboards; blue steaks running just warm blood into creamy Dauphinoise or Pommes Anna; heaping portions of choucroute; garlic boiling sausage washed down with ‘pints’ of sharp young Riesling. The brasserie food of the North countries, then; fine, unsentimental eating rendered with the keen eye of the serious writer - but also the serious cook.

Before his writing took off, Freeling carved a living as a cook in kitchens through Paris, London, Strasbourg and Brighton and less glamorous provincial settings. Plying his trade in the fifties amidst the phlegmatic alcoholic chefs, lascivious homosexual waiters, former Algerian boxers, matronly bookkeepers and jaded cellar-men who made up the quasi militaristic and semi hidden society of hotel kitchens and slow restaurants, his culinary life came to an abrupt and insalubrious end after his 1959 arrest in Amsterdam for stealing from a hotel kitchen.

Jailed for four weeks, he became obsessed with the mannerisms and ways of a particular Dutch police officer and started writing a detective story on wrappers of soap that he’d been assigned to pack in prison. After his short sentence he was deported to England and began writing seriously, publishing multiple Van Der Valk novels throughout the sixties.

Fiction aside, though, he wrote two books about food and memories of his culinary life - both unique; both quietly masterful - Kitchen Book (1970) and Cook Book (1972).

The former was essentially a culinary autobiography. Built around anecdotal sketches, Freeling draws the reader into a world of deep - sometimes near overwhelming - eccentricity. See the English hotel where a display tank holds tired, louse ridden trout, lunching salesmen occasionally pouring a dry Martini into the muddy water to ‘slow their reaction’; the millionaire property speculator who lives in a hotel, calls his wife ‘daughter’ and sends down to the kitchen every other day an austere instruction for a specific protein - ‘duck’ ‘lobster’ ‘mutton’ - with the single word ‘CURRY’ underlined in block capitals (on receipt of said ‘curry’ the pair would then send a ‘tip’ to the cook in the form of their favourite drink ‘a large glass - full - of Gordon’s Gin and Rose’s Lime Juice, mixed half and half’)

See, also, the Brighton hotel staffed in the ‘plonge’ (scullery next to the kitchen where the larger copper pans were washed) by a man called ‘Scruffy’ who would sidle up to Freeling and wistfully utter the words ‘motorboat going…’ (‘…I was startled. ‘Where to?’…a rhythmic howl, like that of a rag and bone man, began and developed ‘motorboat goo-ing. A-ny more for a lovely ride out? -’s lovely on the water’. He turned, munched at me, and added ‘bring yer own ‘ores’’).

Meet ’Mr Hawkes’ - titular midnight manager of the same Brighton hotel - bedecked in stained suit and faded ‘sulphur yellow carnation’, always standing a safe distance from meaningful work and permanently sucking on a mint to ‘disguise the gin’ as he rattled change in his trouser pockets while balancing precariously on his heels; meet, too, the Midlands manager of the nineteen fifties ‘American themed’ Hotel California - the corpulent Mr Kutchik- possessor of a ‘cross face of a baby that wants to belch, but can’t quite make it’.

Indeed, far from the romanticised, wine dreg bohemian squalor of Down and Out in Paris and London or - later - the studied, equally romantic machismo of Anthony Bourdain, the Kitchen Book mise en place is primarily one of apathy, confusion, suburban ambition (‘know what I’d like?- to have a big neon, a blue one, fountain playing, fountain in gold, see - that’s the thing’) that - in its cumulative effect, reads akin to a culinary Spinal Tap, replete with all the thwarted ambition, absurdity and killer dialogue.

Cook Book is a more serious affair. Freeling’s idea was to write a cook book sans recipe, in the traditional sense at least. Detailed instructions are mostly in place, but by no means front and centre. Rather you have to commit to reading each chapter in full to find them. Chapter titles sometimes give the reader an indication as to what dishes they contain, bracketed- Serve it Right for Being so Dear (Shepard’s Pie; raw salad; boiled ham); Where the Fish is Turned Over (Bouillabaisse; Rouille) - but sometimes not (Fie You Greasy Lout). Regardless, the format is the same. Some epistemology but little in the way of romantic scene setting; he’s the anti Elizabeth David in this regard.

Solidly unsentimental, like Van Der Valk himself, Freeling often wades into bracingly cynical waters, sometimes to the point of complete absurdity. On allergies, for example, he asserts that ‘people easily develop fads, begin to imagine that such and such does not agree with them, and launch into ardent proselytising…for normally constituted person’s there are very few things which are at all indigestible, let alone harmful in any sense’

He’s not entirely un-lyrical. The introductory passage in his chapter on Boulanger potatoes and Gratin Dauphinois contain tribute to Proust’s powers of deep, alchemical culinary evocation - namely his portrait of François the cook, Freeling waxing that the pages of food description are akin to a ‘holy writ, a Song of Soloman…in which prosaic objects of nourishment reflect the unchanging beauty of the French countryside, and resound with the sonorities of those huge horizons’. Likewise, Freeling’s (brilliant) assertion that a cook is trained but a ‘rotisseur? A rotisseur is born’ offer evidence to a more lyrical bent. But mostly he simply gets on with it.

The idea of the professional cook as being - by necessity - ‘passionate’ would probably be unseemly, if not anathema to Freeling. He wanted things done quietly and well. The cook just is; the cook just does. On garlic in a lamb gigot, he upholds that the flavour is so classic ‘as to be banal…but unfailingly delicious’; the wine he wants is ‘Beaujolais out of a jug’. He loves the quieter - the yet more banal, but often perfect- dishes of the lowlands, too. It’s a confident cook indeed who, in the early 1970’s, forsook the sensorial oblivion of Mediterranean France; the heady, anis and rosemary scented dishes buxom with fresh virgin olive oil and clear eyed fish for….Dutch Pea Soup.

Freeling loved the plain nourishment of lowlands staples. And pea soup was, to use the titles of one of the best Van Der Valk novels the ‘King of The Rainy Country’ - a national dish until, as he witheringly puts it, ‘that became chips with tinned apple sauce’. Amidst brilliant meandering tangents, he describes a painstaking three day process - at the end of which you should arrive at rib sticking perfection. He’s also enamoured of the Leiden Stamp-Pot, another heavy duty Dutch one pot involving cheap cuts of beef, a few herbs and stock. Regardless of how humble the dish, however, he believed in the cook ‘standing back’ - not as self satisfied artisan but as workman ‘…..deliberately…with detachment… to distance the object and get it in perspective…an instinctive gesture’.

Indeed, his idiosyncratic food writing did exactly that: with vivid, uncanny flair.