Eating Owt: A Dog star in the making

The dog days are actually the period from July 3 to August 11 when the Dog Star rises and sets with the sun and not, as foolishly is sometimes supposed, when our four legged friends are more susceptible to hydrophobia.

(Voice of exasperated Eating Owt reader, sensing New Year and old tricks: You cannot be Sirius, man.)

It is merely a preamble, a walk around the block, before a piece on the Dog and Gun at Potto, in North Yorkshire. It was last Tuesday lunchtime and perfectly pleasant. Every Dog.

Potto is an attractive little place beneath the Cleveland Hills and a few miles south of the Teesside conurbation. Within 100 yards are a tiny, brick built church dedicated to St Mary, a medium sized village hall and, much the biggest of the three, the pub.

It was a bit redolent of that famous sketch by Barker, Corbett and Cleese, who's looking down upon whom.

The village name also intrigued Bill Bryson in Notes From a Small Island - it sounded like a scouring pad, he said -though not as much as Sockburn ("like a skin complaint") or Thornton-le-Beans, south of Northallerton, an English place name he thought so unbeatable that he begged to be buried there.

Now that he's Chancellor of Durham University, the old adventurer has probably moved upmarket and bagged a corner of the Cathedral instead.

Yet more greatly, however, the village is known for Preston's of Potto, named among Britain's three most recognisable haulage firms in a Sunday Times poll and not to be confused with Lotto Potto, a headline favoured by the Daily Star.

Founded in 1936, the family firm is now headed by Anne Preston, awarded the MBE in 1987 for services to haulage. It has 350 staff, 200 trucks, 600 trailers and wins Britain in Bloom awards, too.

The depot's out of the village, Preston's north end, on the site of the railway station where elderly trains chuffered between Whitby and Stockton. A sign on the original weighbridgeman's hut still insists that all coal deliveries must be paid for.

Preston's' fleet covers 15 million miles annually, may be seen anywhere in Britain, across most of Europe but never, ever, in Potto. They take an alternative route. People like Preston's.

We walked to the pub from Hutton Rudby, a five mile round trip in which gently to unfurl festive flagging. The staff were taking down Christmas: the sooner it starts, it seems, the sooner folk want it all swept away again.

Someone had left his bike in the bar, as if not trusting the local Neighbourhood Watch, the barmaid smiled nicely, three other people were lunching. A shelf was full of old cameras, with some appealing pictures on the walls, too.

Esmund and Jeanne Watson, who bought the pub for £500,000 exactly a year ago and have spent £100,000 on improvements, previously owned a photographic business in Middlesbrough.

Officially it's now a country inn, sometimes a gastropub, the restaurant on four levels. If anything, they've over-elaborated; tried too hard.

The lunchtime menu was sensibly short, reasonably priced and, as has become the fashion, served on different shaped plates like a sort of gastronomic road safety quiz.

The Boss reckoned that Britain once had a law requiring that all handkerchiefs must be square, not circular. Obviously not to be sniffed at, anyway.

So first courses were triangular. Forbidden yet again to have mussels, even Shetland mussels steamed in white wine, she had grilled goats cheese served on sun dried tomato bread. We began with a substantial smoked ham and Yorkshire black pudding terrine with lots of rocket leaves and a chutney which was a little too sweet for the job in hand. Still, a good start.

Square meals followed, though the shape of the plate is unlikely to hold the origin of the phrase. Three muscular pork and leek sausages came on Cox's apple mash with sage and onion gravy which threatened to overwhelm it and simply cooked fresh vegetables. The Boss had cod in lemon batter with minted mushy peas and big chips.

There were four of them, mega-chips, intersecting one another at right angles, like a noughts and crosses grid.

Then round to pudding and, get this, warm fig and port wine broth with caramelised figs and lemon curd ice cream. Since she's the pudding person and couldn't manage one, it served a dual purpose.

Remember California Syrup of Figs, prescribed in childhood for Every Known Ailment and swiftly efficacious for at least one of them? This worked similarly.

With two coffees, a pint of Black Sheep and a mineral water, the bill reached £34. It was a promising start to the year: a Dog star in the ascendant.

*The Dog and Gun, Potto, Northallerton, North Yorkshire (01642 700232). Open seven lunchtimes and evenings; function room and Sunday carvery. No smoking in all eating areas. Some rooms difficult for the disabled.

SIMILARLY recovering from the Christmas excess, the Stokesley Stockbroker reports that after having over-indulged in a Northallerton wine bar, he was wholly unable to find his Filofax. In the general melee which ensued, the constabulary was summoned. The poor Stockbroker was charged with being drunk and disorganised.

WHOEVER invented the handy phrase about being economical with the truth could have had in mind The Northern Echo of December 27, and the space where the Eating Owt column should have rested.

Mike Amos is away, it said, without adding with what, or with whom.

It was food poisoning, only the second case in 20 years of being omnivorous for all, the chief suspect a slice of corned beef pie.

The first attack came after eating cat fish, inexplicably known to Yorkshire folk as woof, at a fish and chip place in Scarborough. In truth it's not a bad average: as probably they say in John Smith's pubs, the woof with the smooth.

HAVING warmed up on the road to Potto, we doubled the distance the following day on the familiarly round route from Reeth, in Swaledale, up and over to the CB Inn at Langthwaite, in Arkengarthdale.

The road ran through frosted fields to Healaugh, holly wreathed yet, past the old Surrender lead mine and down to the ever-welcoming CB. Breathtaking in every sense.

The pub's familiar, too, a couple of enthusiastic earlier reviews laminated on the walls. The sea bass was excellent, the chicken Parisienne would have been better had the parmesan cheese taken French leave, but that wasn't the problem.

The problem was that, in an almost empty pub, we found ourselves effectively trapped in an enclave by a group of four who, throughout all our meals, talked in loud voices about illness, and its eventual outcome.

We had it from trauma to tumour, from cystitis to splenectomy, from death to diarrhoea.

We had it about themselves, their friends and their families, probably even next door's budgie, in such microbiological detail that lunch table became operating table and one or two of us needed intensive care. Dammit if these hideous people didn't even have a short stint on HMS Herpes.

Never mind the proposals, however welcome, to ban all smoking in places which serve food. Far rather have a room of 40 people exhaling Capstan Full Strength from every available orifice than four working their way through Black's Medical Dictionary, from angina to Zambuk.

Even the lady of this house, by no means the Squeamish Museum candidate that I am, felt almost overcome.

The Government should at once proscribe the discussion of medical matters where food is being served, offenders to be taken out the back and eviscerated with something very sharp and very slow acting.

None of this, of course, is the fault of the CB Inn. They just aren't going to frame this review alongside its siblings, are they?

JUST time for a quick one in passing the Langdon Beck Hotel, yon end of Teesdale, but further proof that under Glenn and Suzanne Matthews's guidance it really has become one of the most well kept and most welcoming country pubs in the region.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what's musical and can hold 36 gallons of beer.

A barrel organ, of course.

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