Joanna Blythman
24 Aug 2010
I’m always attracted to retro food, things like beef stroganoff, quiche and macaroni cheese.
They hark back to the 1960s, to shiny red Minis and Twiggy, back in the days when she had style (that is, before she sold out to M and S). Of course, these classics are much traduced, tarnished by their association with supermarket ready meals and school dinners. But when you get them nicely made, they do have a broad and enduring appeal.
I always go out of my way, whenever possible, to visit Falko Burkert’s bakery in Edinburgh to stock up the freezer with bread that’s worth eating. It’s one of the few places you can find a hand-crafted loaf made with decent flour and without the usual array of chemical “improvers”, bread that has been allowed to rise slowly and patiently in the time-honoured way. But when I’m there, I can’t help my eye straying to that iconic 60s’ favourite, Black Forest gateau. Not one of those nasty industrial lookalikes supplied to the slothful sections of the catering trade, but the proper German confection, feather-light layers of chocolate sponge moistened with kirsch and studded with black cherries. It does slip down a treat. Mind you, my latest obsession is the “peacock eye”– a shortbread base with a ring of gentle, squidgy marzipan encircling a tart raspberry jam centre. Give me that over a cloying cup cake any day.
The vogue for vintage food is very much in evidence at a new bar-come-restaurant in Glasgow, The Drake: cottage pie, cauliflower au gratin, coleslaw, macaroni, coq au vin, ploughman’s, bread and butter pudding, melba toast, crumble. It’s ever-so-slightly-fancier upstairs dining room will open soon, but the theme of the food remains humble. The prices, though sadly not at 1960s levels, are manageably low and yet there is a modern concern for provenance. So the bread – not as good as Falko’s but still above average – is organic. The eggs are free-range. When you get cheese, it’s Keen’s cheddar, that celebrated English territorial. The piccalilli is home-made, not Crosse and Blackwell’s. There is a choice of fine, loose-leaf teas. This emphasis on ingredient quality is very welcome at this price level.
The starters stray less down memory lane than the main courses. There was a generous, straightforward smoked fish and shellfish plate. It included an oyster, a pile of warm, succulent mussels and clams, two plump, shell-on North Atlantic prawns with an unusually good flavour and a curl of smoked salmon. I don’t eat the latter, unless I’m convinced it isn’t farmed, but the rest went down a treat with a nice aioli that tasted home-made. Warm, rare roast beef of extreme tenderness made another full-proportioned starter, anointed with a creamy horseradish dressing. The only bum note here was a surfeit of bossy red onion.
With the main courses, it was back to the 1960s with a vengeance, although it has to be said that everyone around us seemed to be tucking into an appetising-looking “two duck dinner” consisting of confit and roast breast. But it was good to be reminded what you can do with a cottage pie if you make it right. Here, expensive minced sirloin had been braised slowly with turnip, celery, bay and onion and enriched, not with Bisto, but with lots of red wine and a rich beef gravy. It could have done without the prissy Fanny Cradock-esque rosettes of mash on the top: a well-browned, fork-ridged top would have been more to the point. The quiche was delightfully decadent: short, friable pastry encasing tender ham in a rich, nicely sloppy, creamy egg custard. The “blood” coleslaw made with red cabbage wasn’t bad either.
We toiled over the heavy, claggy dark chocolate tart. An apple and rhubarb crumble had a pleasant fruit layer, swamped by a rather desiccated, over-baked topping, but it was lifted by a mellow, milky custard. I hope the man at the next table who bagged the last portion of bread and butter pudding enjoyed it and didn’t feel me giving him the evil eye. My heart was set on it. It felt like theft.
7.5/10