I remember last August Bank Holiday Monday, after a particularly careless Creamfields, sitting atop a bale of hay, looking down on Wirral’s fields of gold, flaggan of ale in hand, looking for all the world like a walk-on in Cider With Rosie.

After two nights gurning to watery trance under the big tops of Daresbury, this was the perfect antedote. If a doctor had seen me (and, really, there were moments when it came close) this is exactly what he would have ordered. Continue reading →

Leeds Liverpool Canal. Or, lunch.

There are better ways to economise in the kitchen than sell your soul to Sainsburys’ ‘Feed Your Family for a Fiver’ Campaign. I don’t need to watch Economy Gastronomy either. Which pleases me no end, because it’s the kind of programme where the presenters talk to someone off camera, instead of talking to you. Which is hateful.

One of your five a day. And a burger.

I was speaking to a woman who, until recently, managed a landmark pub in Prenton (it doesn’t really matter which one. It could just as easily be your local). She ran it well, it was a successful business. But she had to leave. And why? She couldn’t stand the smell of the food.

“I’m a vegetarian, but don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the smell of meat,” she told me, “but this stuff, I don’t know what it was, it stunk. And it went on all day. The brewery shipped in crates of burgers and steaks every morning, and we just had to shift them.”

And shift them she did. But I’ll tell you what that smell was. It was the smell your local, dying.

Until recently, pubs in Birkenhead tended to fall into two categories. They were either soulless Setanta barns serving chemical froth and acid-coloured aggro-cocktails, or they were boarded up.

In a bid to stave off the inevitable, those around the suburbs started the ‘Burger and a pint for £3.50′, ‘Two meals for a Fiver!’ or ‘Curry-and-a-pint night’. You know the sort of thing I’m talking about.

But, if you’ve ever been temped by the hoardings, just stop to think about it. The economics just don’t stack up, do they? If you can’t even get a sandwich for £2.50 at lunchtime, what’s the chance that your two meals for a fiver after work are going to be, in any sense, worth the money?

And before you think I’m going to get all Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall on you, I’m not. This isn’t argument about animal husbandry, but about quality. Even if you don’t care about the welfare of the chicken/cow/pig in question, what price are you putting on your own health?

Ladies and Gents, dinner is served

So where does that sizzlin’ prime 10oz steak actually come from?

For a start, Wetherspoons have admitted to using meat from an animal known as a Zebu: a scrawny humped ox, common on the parched grasslands of India, the Philippines and sub Saharan Africa. Not the Aberdeen Angus you were, perhaps, hoping to be tucking into. Heck, not even a sturdy Hereford or Welsh Black. The fact is, your steak’s probably better travelled than you are.

The zebu, according to the English Beef and Lamb Executive, produces “meat with an overall poorer eating quality and more variability than that from British or European breeds”. If it ain’t a cow, however you slice it up, it ain’t 100 per cent prime beef. No matter what it says on the full-colour gatefold, laminated menu.

And what about those burgers? Dare you even think where they come from?

In the name of research, I went to the Halfway House, again in Prenton. And I tried one of their special-offer burgers. It was disgusting, obviously. I’d have been happy if it had been 100% prime Zebu. I’d have probably accepted 100% prime Zebra. But this unholy alliance of meat patty and mystery was a reformed, reheated, reinvented food stuff that, I swear, I’ll never abuse my innards with again. And the bun was shit, too.

And, in the manner of all those crap local paper food reviews, my partner plumped for the chicken.

Actually, it was chicken in a basket. And let’s put it this way: I can confirm it was a real basket.

The Food Standards Agency recently discovered ‘chicken’ breasts from Brazil and Thailand served in similar pub deals that were only 54 per cent chicken; the remaining mass was made of water, salts, sugar and “hydrolysed protein” – in other words, something unidentifiable, and definitely not Kosher: maybe pork, maybe cattle, maybe, who knows, stuff from that butchers in Royston Vasey.

You know what? Our mums are right. You get what you pay for.

Of course, since the smoking ban, it’s the pubs that have suffered the fatal disease, not us passive smokers. So you can understand their need to diversify. But approach a mega-brewery pub with caution, especially those flogging food for free (they make the money on the ale). And if you can’t do that, at the very least, ask ‘em where they get their meat from. And I don’t mean which supplier. I mean which country.

If they can’t tell you, don’t eat there.

The biggest irony is that, as the stench of nicotine, and the stains of the stubs are washed away,those who scrunched up their noses as an errant waft of a Silk Cut threatened their airspace are now, happily, gorging on meals of dubious provenance, and filling their stomachs with crap. And not in a passive way.

Give me a second hand Benson and Hedges any day.

Andrew Pimbley. And Asparagus

OK. So I just moaned about how Birkenhead is dying. Thought it was time to redress the balance. They used to call the Wirral ‘God’s golden Acre’. This low lying peninsula of land, warmed by the gulf stream, and washed by two rivers, enjoys a micro-climate to rival the best in Britain. Hardly surprising, then, that we’re also producing some of the UK’s most in-demand ingredients.

Nutty, peppery and packed with goodness, (if you believe everything you read in the Sunday supplements) (like I do) watercress is nature’s superfood. And the Wirral is producing the best in Britain at Peter Jones’ Wirral Watercress. Jones, whose Childer Thornton produce was recently praised in the Daily Telegraph, is the only British grower to produce his crop under glass. The result?  Daintier leaves, and a more delicate flavour than that rough as hedgerow stuff you get in chlorinated bags at the supermarket. Continue reading →