I hope you all had a good Easter, whether that was at home with family and friends or travelling away somewhere. If the latter, then I trust it wasn’t affected by fuel shortages or new border restrictions meaning long queues through immigration. I used to travel a lot with work and I think my record was on one particularly bad Sunday evening arriving into Chicago O’Hare Airport when it took well over three hours to clear immigration!
I know many of you were on grandparenting duties over the Easter break, and an article in the paper this week reminded of me of one time we left our own daughters with my parents over a holiday period.
Having been on the market since 1828, Gentleman’s Relish is being discontinued by its manufacturer. For those of you who’ve never had it, Gentleman’s Relish was a Victorian recipe of anchovy fillets, rusk, butter and a secret selection of herbs and spices. It was commonly served on toast, and Nigella Lawson claimed it was one of the ten foods she couldn’t live without.
Similar to Nigella Lawson, my dad was also a great fan of the spread. My dad, bless him, had many great assets but culinary expertise wasn’t high on the list (although he did make an excellent “bubble and squeak”). He once used a whole industrial sized catering tin of tomato puree to make a bolognaise – there were many adjectives you could have used to describe the result but edible wasn’t one of them.
On this particular day, he was in charge of looking after our two daughters (who were about 8 & 6 yrs old at the time) and our niece who was a few years younger. He decided he was going to take them out for a picnic.
For our niece he made some cheese sandwiches. For our two daughters (as they were slightly older so had a more mature taste) he made his favourites that he could share with them. As such, they were treated to either Gentleman’s Relish and boiled egg or corned beef and mustard sandwiches.
The article in the paper had lots of people saying how sorry they were to see the relish disappear from sale – I know of two people who are glad to see the back of it! Our daughters were horrified that he would think it might also be their favourite and that they wouldn’t have preferred the cheese sandwiches. The next time they went to stay we were given strict instructions to “let grandad know no more Gentleman’s Relish!”.
Perhaps it’s an idea for the “Come Dine with Me” group to come up with a recipe using long lost foods from
childhood. Now if that included “Instant Whip” as dessert you can count me in…… As usual, Newsline contains lots of news about upcoming events including details of our Mid-Summer event to celebrate our 20th Anniversary. We hope to see many of you there.
Mike Freemantle, Chair