Ten Things You Should Know About Croutons

1. Edward VII's personal coat of arms included three croutons on a field of lobster bisque and a courtesan rampant.
2. Worldwide there are more than 500 deaths every year caused by poorly prepared croutons - if the poison sack is not carefully removed the residue is potentially fatal.
3. No two croutons are ever alike, thanks to their unique crystal structure.
4. Al Capone is once said to have killed a rival by bludgeoning him with a particularly large crouton.
5. If you are ever lost, and have a crouton on you, point it at the sun and the greasy side is due west.
6. During the Parliamentary expenses scandal three MPs were found to have claimed simultaneously for croutons in London and at their constituency addresses.
7. Crouton is derived from the Ancient Greek root Crotos, meaning soggy and pointless.
8. During the French Revolution loyalty to the King was secretly signalled by keeping a small crouton in ones ear.
9. A crouton was found by Howard Carter in King Tut's tomb, and it was still edible. But Carter was very hungry with all that digging.
10. It was once rumoured that the EU crouton mountain was so big and dense that Brussels reputedly feared creating a man-made black hole. But then some people will believe any rubbish they are told if it's brazen and bigoted enough. 

Ten More Things You Didn't Know About Soup

1. Donald John Eric Richard Kevin Trump has promised to ban Potage de Crecy 'for being too French.' You can find good in everyone.
2. According to a non-existant law not passed in 1143 it is legal to shoot a Welshman eating Cawl in Chester on Mayday, provided you use an 1143 bow - the arrow can be manufactured anytime up to noon.
3. Similarly in Berwick you may of an evening bludgeon a Scot eating Cullen Skink while playing the bagpipes and doing Scottish country dancing. This is not legal, but no jury in the land would convict you.
4. The extreme flatulence from eating a traditional Mayan soup made from chick peas, haricot beans, garlic, butter beans, string beans, chili and more garlic is said to kill one in seven European travellers who try it. But on the plus side, it gets two in seven American tourists.
5. It is a little known fact that there is actually no word for soup in English.
6. Hillary Clinton once mispoke about eating soup while under sniper fire in Bosnia. It was avocado dip in Atlanta at a formal ball, a mistake any of us could make.
7. Bill Clinton was telling the truth when he said 'I did not have soup with that woman.' It was sex.
8. The Chinese serve several soups during a banquet. At Mao's 50th birthday celebrations so many were presented to the guests that six foreign diplomats drowned trying to maintain protocol.
9. Stalin once tried to solve the USSR's food crisis by planting soup in the frozen tundra. It failed, but he invented Vichysoise.
10. In 1964 Elizabeth Taylor enjoyed a bowl of mushroom soup so much that she married it. The marriage lasted longer than any of her other 17.

Ten Things You Didn't Know About Soup

1. The Incas worshipped a god of soup.
2. Marie-Antoinette's famous dictum should rightly be translated as 'let them eat Bouillabaisse.'
3. The authentic Sicilian recipe for tomato soup includes no tomatoes.
4. Winston Churchill famously never once ate soup as an adult, saying life was too short to do so.
5. The greatest soup tragedy in history occurred in Belgium in 1834, when 17 people died eating particularly hot asparagus soup.
6. In Germany it is still illegal according to a 14th century law to put croutons in soup. This law is believed to have been brought in to protect the German dumpling industry.
7. As Dan Brown showed in his novel The Ninth Potage, the word soup is derived from an Aramaic term meaning endless dross, and that an ancient brotherhood dedicated to protecting the secret of the perfect broth is said to exist to this day in Penge.
8. The higher slopes of Everest are now littered with more than five million empty tins of beef bouillon, piled so high in certain places that they actually reach higher than the mountain peak itself.
9. For a bet the great sportsman CB Fry once ice skated for a week on a frozen plate of clam chowder. He won the bet, but lost his frost-bitten testicles in doing so.
10. Andy Warhol wished to sue Batchelors for infringement of his soup tin design until it was pointed out that he was being a self-regarding prat again.

New Miracle Diet (Honest)

I am, I confess, fascinated by the stream of often contradictory advice that nutritionists provide. Red meat is bad for you, but on the other hand red meat is good for you. Fat is the root of all evil, but perhaps fat is quite good for us. Coffee kills us, but coffee can be quite beneficial. It is I'm sure completely coincidental that the good for you side often comes from studies sponsored by those marketing an item. [Ha, a couple of years later and the experts who told us eggs are bad for us now say the opposite. Soft-boiled best, both eggs and (perhaps?) nutritional experts]

Elsewhere here I've put forward the very simple idea (and I don't pretend to be the first to do this) that diversity in what we consume is the likeliest way to eat healthily. Now I want to put forward the Pilkington Diet, not suggesting we all eat Pilkingtons, but expanding on the idea of range.

The government's 5-a-day regime (apparently the professional advice was 7, but they bottled it) is clearly short term. If we were to eat just a portion every day of the same five, say carrot, apple, rhubarb, lentils and lettuce, we would meet those guidelines, but it doesn't take a genius (thankfully) to see that it would be a very limited diet indeed, and we'd be missing out on lots of complicated things with big long names.

My solution is to use a number as arbitrary as the 10000 steps a day target about which my wife is obsessed. Why stop there? Let's make it two arbitrary numbers.

Arbitrary number the first: I aim to eat 30 different fruits, vegetables and nuts (30 combined, not of each) a week). Arbitrary number the second, I aim to eat 100 different f, v and n over the year.

In my book (unpublished, indeed unwritten) 'The Pilkington Diet - My Way to a Richer Lifestyle' (ambiguity of richer intended) I will set out the rules for combining the foods, and most importantly for establishing what a portion is. Here's an extract about portions: 'The amount of a portion varies according to numerous factors, but in most cases it can be taken as 2.7 tads, or in Imperial a smidge and a bit.' If I recall the official guidelines a portion is to do with spoonfuls of some sort. Heaped or level I can't remember.

Other than people with allergies foolish enough to ignore them, following the Pilkington Diet is unlikely to kill anybody, give them foul breath, or bore them rigid, except in counting and logging the different produce eaten.

Relais Routier as Touchstone

Much though I enjoy a wide variety of culinary cultures, like Brits many of my generation French remains the ne plus ultra. Of course French cooking covers another wide variety in itself: regional traditions; the haute cuisine of Escoffier and the like; cuisine bourgeoise; etc etc. But the sub-group to which I am drawn most is the cookery one finds (or at least used to find, my travels in France having been limited of late) in Relais Routier establishments.

The Relais Routier restaurant is a marvellously democratic institution. Along with the lorry drivers who form a significant percentage of their clientele you'll see lunch tables occupied by gendarmes, business travellers, maybe the local mayor being lashed up so he'll sign some permission or other; families en route to the coast, country or mountains. They're drawn to these places for several reasons, including that they offer great value for money; rapid turnover means the food is fresh; and the cooking is excellent (otherwise they fail and close). We counter these independent eateries with Little Chef. Worse, Little Chef after Heston Blumenthal stuck his mottie in.

I thought about Relais Routier yesterday because I cooked leeks vinaigrette, one of the great standbys of the RR buffet table. It's one of those dishes that needs no chefy spin. Good fresh leeks (in our case dug from the allotment an hour before they hit the pot) washed carefully of grit and dirt then boiled in salty water until tender; carefully drained, cooled (you can dip them in iced water to keep the green bits greener, but why bother when they get covered up anyway?), slit lengthwise and placed cut-side-up on a serving plate. Their surfaces are then given a liberal dose of chopped parsley followed by hard boiled egg grated over, and a very mustardy olive oil and red wine vinegar vinaigrette.

That buffet table would also include a regularly refilled dish of olives; cervelas or some similar charcuterie; lentil salad; tomato salad (made with tomatoes that taste of something more than water); potato salad; grated carrots squeezed until almost dry and mixed with herbs and salt; maybe salade nicoise. The list goes on, every entry on it both - relatively - cheap to make and delicious.

If a Man Is Tired of London PR....

I am on the mailing list of innumerable PR companies, the idea being there might, just occasionally, be something worth writing about to which they will alert me. The problem is, for every release of interest I have to wade through about 5000 that are a) badly written (ungrammatical, poor syntax, cliched...); b) utterly fatuous; c) tell me about another daft trend/food fashion in London.

A while back it was hot dogs served with champagne. The combination of fey, arch, look at my wad, and nauseating self-regard (aren't we so daring to break the boundaries? - no, no you're cocks who follow fashions as if they are the route to salvation, though that is actually the A47).

I love hot dogs, or good ones anyway. I love champagne. The two together, once in a while, are an interesting idea. But a restaurant - dozens apparently - based on the idea? You can feel the brainwaves washing over the place - 'Is anyone seeing me here eating hotdogs and drinking champagne?'

The best hot dogs (plural, they were big but good) I ever ate were in Buffalo New York, sold by an outfit called Ted's, part of a big chain I believe. We queued at the massive outdoor stall in our business suits, waiting behind construction workers, policemen, factory hands, it was like a foodie version of the Village People. Cooked over charcoal so they had a real hint of BBQ to them, served in a simple torpedo roll with masses of onions, sweet mustard and/or hot sauce, with crispily delicious onion rings as an unmissable side they were well worth the wait. Ted's is I think a third generation business, and will doubtless last for many more; those puerile hot dog and champagne bars in London are mostly closed by now I guess. Their owners and clientele will have moved on to the next big thing, or the next after that or the next after that. Sushi and chips? Pate de foie gras smoothies? (darling I've always loved them). Snake steaks with milk shakes and cup-cakes?

The most memorably badly written PR claptrap I was ever sent btw was from Fortnum's, or at least the apparently semi-literates then handling their PR. They informed me that, and I'll try to get their precise phrasing and punctuation right, however painful: 'The Scotch egg originated at Fortnum & Mason, in the 18th century which was specially created for their high end customers.' One for the scrapbook. Happily I have no hair to pull out.

Deposits in My Taste Bank

We breakfast like kings, though with a better conscience. Nearly every such meal includes a home-made smoothie to get a flying start on our intake of fruit and veg, and because is it thoroughly enjoyable. As I took the first sip of this morning's version I was transported back to the 1970s, or even the 1960s - time travel by food - as the flavour of Vimto coursed through my system.

I'm not sure what actually flavours Vimto (natural or otherwise), but I am reasonably certain it's not a combination of blueberries, banana, peach, plum, and grapes, with lime and satsuma juice, almond milk and yakult to render it more liquid. But those ingredients combined to a moment of adult Vimto awareness.

However grown up we feel, or our roles dictate we should feel, deposits made in ones childhood taste bank are central to our experience of the world of food, at whatever age. I will confess that the flavour of bubble gum, something I have not actually eaten/chewed for decades, is very important to my appreciation of one of life's greatest pleasures, beer - it is significant in Leffe, Chimay, any wheat beer, Traquair, and many others. 'Ah, bubble gum, we love bubble gum,' says my brain (which now I notice it, sounds a tad schizoid).

Similarly with wine. Many grapes and wines hold a hint of Bazooka Joe, but the one where it is/was front and centre is/was Beaujolais Nouveau. Whatever happened to wines en primeur? Whatever happened to the pleasure of Beaj Nouveau, once raced from France to England to minimise the delay between its readiness and our drinking? Some was as rough as a Mohicanned badger's arse, of course; but every year as we took our first sip of the stuff we'd note the bubble gum (and to be accurate, the bananas too) and as jolly advanced nine-year-olds whatever our true age, we'd smile.