1. Pie and Peas

1‘You wouldn’t think we were just five miles outside industrial Barnsley’ is said by someone every single time a group of people from Barnsley visits Cannon Hall. It became such a cliché among my friends that we would battle to be the first to say it when we saw any vision of outstanding natural beauty, including, but not limited to the Lake District, the Cornish coast, the central massif of Mont Blanc in the French Alps, and – my proudest moment – a safari lodge overlooking herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plains of the Masai Mara.

2‘Meat’ is sometimes generic in Barnsley. I once took Liz to Oakwell to watch Barnsley FC lose at home to Port Vale, and at half-time she went to the pie stall. ‘What kind of pies do you have?’ she asked. ‘Meat,’ came the reply. She just had some chips.

3Each of which, individually, has its own terroir, which has just as much impact in its contribution to the finished beer as the grapes in wine.

4I re-created this journey, with a barrel of beer brewed to a nineteenth-century Bass recipe in tow, for my 2009 book Hops & Glory. The voyage transforms the beer. When I opened some at a trade show in Delhi, it went down a storm with everyone, apart from one man, who stormed up to me and said, ‘Why are you trying to trick us? You claim this is beer, but it is obviously wine!’ before asking for a refill.

5Your aborted duck foetus should always be boiled, dipped in salt and eaten whole, washed down with cold beer, according to the Filipinos who consider it an everyday delicacy.

6The term was originally applied to Jesuits and to the Dutch and was affixed specifically to the French only during the Napoleonic Wars.

2. A Cheese Sandwich

1Elsewhere in Britain, where there are no caves, heavy stone farmhouses and barns designed to withstand British weather were a fine substitute for other styles of cheese.

2It’s a popular myth that wine and cheese are natural bedfellows, but even some wine writers grudgingly concede that it’s a struggle to find a pairing that enables both to shine. In Normandy and in Somerset – both famous cheese regions – cider is considered a superior match. Beer, too, with its carbonation, counteracts the fatty build-up of cheese, refreshing the palate and keeping the flavours alive. In the best pairings, they entwine around each other until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins, each greater than it is on its own.

3. Fish and Chips

1To be fair to the mean old bastard, his argument was given credence when, in the week the new campaign launched, with a new line I can guarantee you do not remember, a new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations was published which included ‘refreshes the parts’, describing it in roughly the same way Sir Frank did in that phone call. Although, thinking about it now, he probably made that happen somehow, just to make a point.

2Another time at Lowe, all the strategic planners went for a departmental away-day in Brighton. I suggested we went to the chippie on the pier for lunch. It was only when we arrived there and I joined the queue that I realized several of my colleagues had assumed I was joking.

3Or, as Edwina Currie put it a hundred years later, ‘I get very, very troubled at the number of people who are using food banks who think that it is fine to pay to feed their dog … but they never learn to cook, they never learn to manage and the moment they have got a bit of spare cash they are off getting another tattoo.’

4‘I’m born and bred in the city and it’s Caroline Street or Chip Alley, definitely not Chip Lane,’ he added.

4. Spag Bol

1Niacin and thiamin are essential B vitamins that are present in many different foods. However, they are very prone to being destroyed by modern food-processing techniques. The more your food goes through between its natural state and the state it reaches you in, the more likely its vitamins will have been destroyed. So manufacturers who heavily process their food add them back in as supplements.

2When I searched to see if there was any credible reference for this story, I discovered that in 2016 Campbell’s did re-create the century-old first soup recipe on which the company was founded, using only locally sourced tomatoes and no artificial additives. Employees described it as the best day they’d ever had working for the company, and the president of Campbell’s American division said the experiment was part of ‘rethinking who we are and how we want to show up in this world’.

5. Devonshire Cream Tea

1I don’t know why she was so shocked: a Google image search reveals that the sandwiches aren’t even cut diagonally.

2There are some of them I really don’t want to know, but not for that reason.

6. Going for a Curry

1My mate Steve was a vegetarian. He had to pay extra for his meals because of the inconvenience he caused. More than once he was handed the same meal as the rest of us and, when he reminded the catering staff that he was vegetarian, they simply scraped the meat off his plate and handed it back to him.

7. The Full English

1I won’t entertain any lazy, stereotypical jokes about whippets at this juncture. Mitzi was a whippet-Manchester terrier cross, which is entirely different.

8. The Main Event

1In the YouGov survey, while beef is the preference of 41 per cent of over-sixty-five-year-olds, with chicken coming a distant second at 23 per cent, eighteen-twenty-four-year-olds are twice as likely to prefer chicken as they are beef.

9. Crumble

1A recent in-depth report by the Grocer magazine showed that consumers were increasingly switching to ‘artisan’ bread because they were motivated by flavour, quality, stories, natural ingredients and a variety of styles. The authors went to several of the biggest mainstream brands in the market and asked how they planned to respond to this trend. Their reply? Cut the price and increase the advertising.