11:45am Tuesday 9th February 2010
From a meal that’s worse than the weather to breakfast fit for a king and some cracking fish and chips.
FOR all that I know, it may have been by far the greatest butternut squash soup the world has ever seen. It may have been pretty canny, anyway.
It’s just the terrible feeling that if this were as good as butternut squash soup gets – effete, effeminate, anodyne – then you’d want to spend the rest of your days starting a meal with prawn cocktail from the back of the freezer.
The Boss agreed, warmed rather more efficiently to the theme than the soup had done. It was like a humanist funeral, she said, there was just something – “that rumour of sure and certain hope” – which was missing.
It was hard to see where all this was going, though the phrase about “hell” and “handcart” came to mind.
I don’t want to keep on twisting, any more than I want an indifferent lunch, or to be disappointed. It’s far easier to write an enthusiastic column, no matter what more sadistic readers prefer, and the positive ones tend to be longer, anyway.
At this rate this one will once again have to be filled up with coarse limericks about Battersby Junction.
It’s just that the sign in the foyer to the Bradley Burn Farm Shop promised “Better than the weather”, and it wasn’t all that bad a day.
Bradley Burn’s off the A689 near Wolsingham, in Weardale. Folk have farmed that way at least since Roger of Bradley in 1189. The Stephenson family have had it since the Thirties.
There’s a caravan site, a farm trail, little notices with headings such as “The greatness of grass” and useful information about phosphate indexes and the like. The shop looks bright and attractive, great mounds of fresh vegetables appealingly by the entrance, lots of locally-sourced produce and lots of choice.
In truth, the menu almost represents a farmers’ co-operative, origins identified throughout the dale and beyond. Much of the baking is done in-house.
Among the problems, at least in our small corner, was that the tables were too close together, so that the chairs kept on backing one into the other like truculent trucks in a Thomas the Tank engine story. (The shop sells the agricultural equivalent, Tractor Ted.) Another problem, though emphatically not their fault, was that they stock bottled beers from some of the region’s micro-breweries and we were en route not just to an At Your Service column, but in a Methodist church, to boot.
There’s something in the Acts of the Apostles about folk being taken for drunk when they were simply speaking in tongues. It wasn’t worth risking the opposite.
So it was Sunday lunch. From a short blackboard, the Boss had the turkey, which was okay but lacked all the customary accompaniments.
She thought the single roast potato “rubbish”, left the mash in a thoroughly miserable heap – they’re Bradley Burn potatoes – wondered why the vegetables had raised such great expectations at the entrance and been so utterly perfunctory on the plate.
Then they brought a jug of allpurpose gravy to suit both the turkey and the beef and horseradish pie.
“There should be a law against it,”
she said.
Though much heartened by a hint of horseradish, the pie wasn’t memorable, either, the pastry pallid. The spud really was hard work, mashochism almost, the final blow when they’d run out of custard for the advertised apple crumble.
It was still only half past one and pretty quiet, for heaven’s sake. They could have made ten gallons of the stuff in the time that it took to fetch the replacement ice cream.
A mug of coffee was £1.50, the bill – including a single, soulless diet cola that could have lost nothing in the translation – was £28.
So it’s another querulous column, another not likely to be top of the farm. Would that it were otherwise, but on this evidence Bradley doesn’t burn, it barely smoulders.
LAST week’s John North column recorded a most convivial couple of hours in the pub with George Romaine, the affectionately remembered Tyne Tees Television singer whose 80th birthday was yesterday.
We went to the Bay Horse at Heighington, between Bishop Auckland and Darlington, where huge and lightly-battered portions of Whitby cod with good chips (£6.95) may enthusiastically be recommended by us both. Two or three well-kept real ales, too.
A7AM start for Wallsend, too, where the Metro station has signs in English and Latin. It may never have done 1,700 years ago.
Thus Platform 1 becomes Saggitus 1. There’s also a bilingual sign to the bus station but – O tempores, O mores – I forget it. O-level Latin was in my case very ordinary indeed.
Steamily condensed across the road from the station is Toni and Jake’s Cafe, where a first-rate bacon sandwich and two large cups of good, strong coffee (£4.25, the lot) proved so relaxing that it was possible to write half the At Your Service column before leaving.
The Roman Wall becomes increasingly a tourist destination of choice.
At the end of it, Toni and Jake’s is the place to stop.
DISCUSSING Tex-Mex food a couple of columns back – and not over-impressed that time, either – we talked of the 49th parallel and were only 1,800 miles out. That’s the Canadian border, as Phil Atkinson in British Columbia – but born and raised in Witton Park – points out.
It also gives him chance to unearth the joke – “one of my myriad ways of drawing sidelong glances from my long-suffering family” – about how the cook makes huevos rancheros. “He tex eggs and mex omelettes.” They’re not from County Durham, Phil explains.
….and finally, the bairns wondered if we’d heard about the ram-raid on the local bakery.
They needed the dough.
TAYLOR’S, makers for many years of the world’s best pork pies, has opened a cafe. Though not yet characterised by the queues that snake outside the shop in Darlington town centre, it does a great all-day breakfast.
The day’s take-out specials included pie, peas and gravy (£1.99), or the same with chips for £2.49. The temptation to order allday breakfast with pie, or pies, was reluctantly resisted.
The cafe’s in Lingfield Way, one of those oddly intimidating industrial estates now spreading across the town’s eastern extremity – close to Orange and others of similarly upward mobility. It’s a big place, next to pie production central. It also offers fish and chips, a Taylor’s first, though most menu items begin with the word “roasties”.
Coffee’s from one of those fancy machines with Italian names.
Breakfast’s either a Magnificent Seven (£4.49) or a Famous Five, 50p cheaper – opening offer, seven for the price of five and free coffee, too. As might be supposed, the black pudding was world class, the sausages and bacon very good, the rest fine. The Boss thought her three-rasher bacon butty with mushrooms and tomatoes one of the best she’d ever eaten.
Afterwards we bought a couple of pies anyway. Emergency rations. It was what caterers now like to call food-to-go. Set up for the shift, we went.
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