Potage is for Peasants?

I detected a briefly raised eyebrow last night when I announced the main part of our evening meal was to be a soup. Had that meant some powdery packet jobbie I could understand the doubt, likewise had I been using tins (though Heinz tomato is a slightly perverse glory of our national cuisine). But this was a very hearty mushroom (a packet of dried porcini and a paper bag of supermarket white 'shrooms) and veg deal, incorporating homemade stock. Nothing was left in the pan, so it can't have been too bad.

Perhaps the problem is that we tend to see such fare as only a starter. Or that both our Dear Leader (ever present) and Sternest Critic (home for Easter) know I (like any half reasonable home cook) sometimes play the potage card to use up things not at the throwing out stage, but past their peak. It is an aid to frugality then, but also can be a delight: the two need not be incompatible.

One of the best things I ate in my distant youth was the sorrel and potato soup dished up by my exchange buddy Patrick Mulot's mum in Montfort L'Amaury (I spent three weeks with them after he had been three weeks with us). No need for truffle oil etc, it was perfectly balanced, filling, smooth, delicious. They were far from rich, and I seem to think we ate it twice a week at least, but no matter.

Likewise the table d'hote dinner menu at small French restaurants and hotels will always include a soup, generally vegetable, that you know is the chef cooking to a budget (it doesn't hurt that the crisply crusted bread on the table accompanies it to perfection).

But both those would be starters.

Is it a fear of appearing to be poor peasants that relegates soup to a supporting role? I have read restaurant reviewers who would go further: they hint soup is not worthy of their taste buds, or inclusion in a starry meal, consigning several thousand years of creative cookery to culinary oblivion in a few arch words. How sad. How shallow.

I was then delighted that the tasting evening menu last Thursday at Mitton Hall featured soup. The carnivore list had French onion with gruyere crouton, and the vegetarians (Dear Leader played that role, and designated driver. My stay in the Gulag will hopefully be short) enjoyed a take on Jane Grigson's 1970s-classic curried parsnip soup. Both were excellent (the parsnip particularly so), and I admired the chef for having the courage to offer superbly realised simplicity.

By way of contrast, on a press trip to Michelin-starred restaurants in South West France I tasted a spoonful of soup made with ground ivy (not tree ivy, that's poisonous). It was part of another taster menu by a well-regarded (particularly by himself) chef scaling new culinary heights. Someone should have pushed him off, it was foul. Fine new soups may yet be discovered, but will any of them be as excellent as that sorrel and potato plateful Patrick's mum surely learned from her mother and on back to Parmentier's introduction of the spud into the French diet? Potage may be for peasants, but it satisfies. So no eyebrow should be raised when it's promoted to the main event.

Foams, Flutes and Filling Up

Yesterday we had as a separate course a plain green salad fresh from the garden. Except that it wasn't green or plain. Plenty of green in there, but with oak-leaf and other lettuce varieties included it had brown and purple too.

There can be few simpler or more perfect combinations than fresh lettuce and a sharp vinaigrette, the crispness of well-grown lettuce resisting any descent into sogginess. Yet which name chef these days would have the courage or humility to put them together without further adornment?

This prompts the further question, what do we actually want when eating out? Are we in a restaurant to be amazed at innovation, dazzled by technique, or to enjoy really good food perfectly prepared? There are other reasons for going to specific restaurants: fashion, being seen, bumping into the rich and famous and watching them assault their wife, to name but three.

Not forgetting the fuel aspect of the whole thing. Except plenty of chefs plainly do. On my recent Michelin-starred tour of Midi-Provence I only felt really replete at breakfast - nobody buggers about with that - and after the last meal of the trip, which also happened to be by far the best, and after lunch at an un-starred place. Though I am undoubtedly a bloody peasant, I am not solely concerned with filling up. But it should be part of the deal, part of the chef's skill and judgement. Diners should be satisfied with the standard, freshness, interest, tastes, combinations, contrasts, variety and volume of food.

Missing out quantity in a main meal seems like an orchestra without the brass and the percussion. Personally I can do without the flute (it's just a personal prejudice) which I'd equate to the stupid foams decorating cheffy dishes these days. I'd not be sad never to hear another twittering flute piece for the rest of my life, or to forego those foams forever.

And in case that seems to have nothing to do with austerity cooking, our massive homegrown lettuce and vinaigrette course maybe cost us 15p for the oil, vinegar and mustard.

Even Austerity Cooks Need a Break

Last night with wife returning home extremely fed up with work, and having said to SC that post exams we would take him out to his favourite restaurant, we went to East is East in Preston centre. And I was happy to suggest it, as even austerity cooks need a break.

It is not a curry house, it is a restaurant, and a very good one. Their menu features the Anglo-Indian stuff like Baltis (sadly on the list as Balti's) and so on, but with plenty of more exotic dishes - lamb's brains and lamb's trotters (their designation) in the Punjabi specialities section.

We go to East is East for several reasons. The service is always impeccable without being intrusive. The surroundings are many notches above the too frequent cod Raj stuff found elsewhere. For three of us last night, with a decent tip, it cost £75 (just poppadoms etc as starters, a curry each, one rice, one saag aloo, two naan breads about 45cm x 25cm, one fizzy water, one jug of iced tap water). The naan breads are the best I have ever come across, giant moist things with the perfect blend of crispy bubbly bits and soft doughyness. The rest of the food is always excellent. And from the cook's point of view, or this cook's anyway, 'Indian' food is the hardest to replicate in the home kitchen.

I can make French food (maybe spending so much time there helps) that I hope would please a Frenchman; my Italian stuff is (pizzas apart) as good as we'd get (sometimes better says he immodestly) as we'd be served at our local trattoria. When we eat Chinese food locally at least we feel hung over next day even if not a drop has passed our lips, maybe from the MSG, and the things I make are often slightly more adventurous than sweet and sour pork etc beloved of the mainstream Chinese restaurant (we have yet to try a highly recommended one near my wife's office, frequented by crowds of Chinese students studying at her university). But I have never come close to making curries anywhere near as good as East is East's, or a few other places we occasionally use.

Perhaps that is the spices and herbs they use (fresh fenugreek leaves in my chicken dish yesterday) not always being in a very English kitchen cupboard. The time and care taken to make the base of so many curries is another factor. We have no tandoori oven for the naan breads of course, and re-heated supermarket jobbies are universally poor. This is the only food where I have been at all tempted to buy ready-made, but I resisted the temptation on principle and because I'm a bit mean. So for a proper curry of the East is East sort, we will still have to make our way to East is East.