Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  Flags flutter over Burton as I leave. The ones at the brewery read ‘Coors’ and the ones at the church, perhaps defiantly, bear the Cross of St George. I cross the ‘Viking’ play area and see the two pavement cyclists from earlier. They are eating Quavers and playing on a child’s swing. They present about the most pathetic picture of British manhood imaginable. You would have to say that their fellow cyclists, the two Mormon paramilitaries, at least have some sense of purpose and energy on their side. And optimism, I think, as I pass them again later, deep in conversation with two women taking home their shopping from Aldi, both of them, as indicated by the red bindi dot on their forehead, incontrovertibly Hindu.

  In 1986, an Italian journalist called Carlo Petrini was horrified to see that a branch of McDonald’s had opened up at the foot of the Spanish Steps. This was the final outrage, a crass symbol of cheap greasy commercialism in the heart of one of the world’s great cities of food. Petrini set up the Slow Food movement, now a global if grassroots concern, encouraging us to care more about quality, tradition and pleasure in food. The movement has now expanded to take on other aspects of our crowded, pressurised, noisy lives. At a Slow Food festival in Orvieto, several mayors set into motion the Cittaslow project, a drive – a very slow, scenic drive – to make urban life healthier, more environmentally sustainable and more enriching. The world now has several Slow Towns, from Katoomba, City of Blue Mountains in Australia, to Sokndal in Rogaland, Norway. The very first designated Slow Town in the UK was already a gem: pretty, charming, civilised and with every corner crammed with the most delicious food and drink imaginable, from its bistros to its B&Bs, from its sausage shops to its saloon bars. John Betjeman called it either England’s loveliest small town or finest small town or possibly the perfect small town. No one seems to quite agree what he actually said. But no matter, Ludlow may be all three.

  Ludlow sits in a lazy bend of the river Teme in that quietly bustling – if that makes sense – chunk of Middle England that is practically Wales. It’s a curiously, attractively enigmatic and independent bit of the country: the Marches, as it’s known, once almost a devolved kingdom. Except they had lords, not kings, busily building garrisons and mottes and baileys and markets in the rolling landscape between the mountains of Wales and the gentler inclines and river valleys of Middle England.

  Still, on any given day, Ludlow’s intricate maze of little streets is crammed with vans bringing delicious quirky things to be arranged alluringly in the windows of one of a hundred small shops. Tucked away though it may be, Ludlow has always had stuff on its plate in every sense of the phrase. It’s been said that more has been written about Ludlow’s history than any other English town. Ludlow has history like Burton has yeast. If you could make a tasty spread out of excess and leftover history, Ludlow could have a Marmite of its own. It has featured in scores of folk tales and ballads, such as Fulk Fitzwarin, mooted sometimes as the source of the Robin Hood legend. It has castles and churches in one of which, St Laurence’s, is buried the poet A.E. Housman. Housman mentioned Ludlow in many of the poems in A Shropshire Lad. One of them, ‘When I Came Last To Ludlow’, is pure Housman: chilly, nostalgic, achingly sad.

  When I came last to Ludlow

  Amidst the moonlight pale,

  Two friends kept step beside me,

  Two honest lads and hale.

  Now Dick lies long in the churchyard,

  And Ned lies long in jail,

  And I come home to Ludlow

  Amidst the moonlight pale.

  Ludlow has five hundred listed buildings and, unlike many towns, knocks down its monstrosities rather than its treasures. The ugly 1887 Market Hall was described by Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘Ludlow’s bad luck…There is nothing that could be said in favour of its fiery brick or useless Elizabethan detail.’ Ludlow agreed. It was demolished in 1986, and today they put their excellent market stalls there. You can’t eat architecture or history, and I had come for the food, for a sybaritic dirty weekend of indulgence and sensual gratification in what has been called the gastronomic capital of England. The screaming red-faced chefs of NW1 and Soho’s sizzling kitchens may disagree, but the very best of English food has moved out to the country, where it lives quietly in the heart of Middle England.

  It started in the mid-1990s. Before this, according to food writer Graham Moss, if you were in Ludlow and wanted a really nice meal, ‘you had two options: drive as far as, say, Cheltenham, or stay put and cook it yourself. The most popular restaurant in town was a fabulously old-fashioned place in Broad Street called de Greys, which rambled lengthily through the ground floor of one of Ludlow’s fine Tudor houses … Everything about de Greys was stuck in the 1950s. The waitresses wore black frocks and white pinnies; the plat du jour alternated Welsh rarebit with sardines on toast. It was forever teatime at de Greys. To go there was like taking up temporary residence inside a poem by John Betjeman.’

  During my time in Ludlow, I dropped in at de Grey’s and whether it was the iced fruit granita or the croque monsieur or possibly even the white pinnies and the black frocks I don’t know, but I found it a lovely place to let Sunday’s hangover evaporate whilst doing the Jimmy Porter Look Back in Anger routine of gutting and filleting the papers. But I take Moss’s point. De Grey’s may be charmingly recherché but it will wait a while for its Michelin star. And for most of the past decade Ludlow had more of those twinkling, lusted-after baubles than anywhere else in Britain.

  Shaun Hill’s first job was cooking in the café at London Zoo. He then worked at several London restaurants before taking a prestigious post at the Michelin-starred restaurant at the Gidleigh Park Hotel in Devon. When in 1994 he announced he was moving to rural Shropshire to open a new restaurant, foodies thought he was mad. The AA Guide even compared the move to a racing driver giving up Formula One to drive a bus. But it was the opening of Hill’s little Ludlow restaurant that sparked the town’s rise to gastronomic legend. The Merchant House was an old Jacobean building at the northern end of town in what was once the tanning district. It was small: only eight tables with Hill in the kitchen and wife Anya front of house. The feel was that of a domestic kitchen rather than first-class restaurant. Hill even did his own washing up. But first class it was. The charm and verve and lack of pretension, coupled with the dazzling food, had journalists drooling and raving. The Merchant House got its star in the very first year and put Ludlow on the culinary map.

  The Merchant House was joined over the next few years by two other restaurants in what would become Ludlow’s big three. Claude Bosi’s Hibiscus was more classically French whilst Chris and Judy Bradley’s Mr Underhill’s at Dinham Weir was the only one to offer rooms. Unusually, all of them were friends. In fact, one visiting US writer was stunned to see Hill lunching at Hibiscus. Ludlow has that kind of cosiness. Two of the big three are now gone. Hill now runs the Walnut Tree in Abergavenny and is largely responsible for the Welsh town now rivalling Ludlow as gastro-capital UK. Bosi moved the Hibiscus to London although he still runs a pub, the Bell Inn, at nearby Leominster.

  So I booked myself into Mr Underhill’s, always the best appointed of the lot, nestling on the broad river Teme at Dinham Weir beneath the eleventh-century castle. Apparently it was like Fawlty Towers before the Bradleys got hold of it. It is nothing like that now. As I sit and sip my gin and tonic on the riverside terrace, I watch the smart black-clad staff come and go with their kir royales and chenin blancs, and the lady I take to be Judy Bradley, wife of chef Chris, benign and magisterial and overseeing. The crowd of people this weekend are nicely mixed. There are elegant country-set ladies, businessmen, starched-shirted boys meeting potential in-laws, a gay couple, what might be a very sophisticated hen party and a man who seems to be deliberately testing Ludlow’s reputation for restaurant informality with his blue replica football top, scruffy jeans and unkempt rope of a ginger ponytail. If Judy disapproves, she is too polite to say so.

  Still, I suppose you want to know about the food. It was extraordinary
. First comes what looks like a tiny ice-cream cone containing not Mr Whippy but a soufflé of marinated salmon. I regard salmon, along with oysters and caviar, as possibly the most overrated food in the world, but this is exquisite. The next course is an architectural triumph. It comes in the form of a white, shallow, minimal dish. At its centre is a sort of inkwell and in that inkwell is a small puddle of game consommé to be eaten with the longest, thinnest spoon I have ever seen. It is no more than a sip. But what a sip.

  The rest is equally delicious and what the Bradleys describe as modern Scottish, Anglo-Mediterranean and modern British: ‘ingredient-driven and nothing too radical’. This means nothing to be inhaled, no bacon and egg ice cream or starters served on toothbrushes. It’s not dull, though. The duck-liver custard with quince confit and five-spice glaze inhabits a strange, almost disturbing no-man’s-land somewhere between offal and dessert and shouldn’t work but, oh boy, it does. I didn’t spot anything Scottish myself, though apparently the Highland parfait with shortbread is ‘to die for’. That certainly goes for the roasted slow-cooked shoulder of Marches lamb with red-wine jus, mint oil and mustard-scented creamy celeriac. I can still taste it now. A woman at an adjoining table, however, merely picks and prods it and Judy sails over, radiating concern.

  ‘Aren’t you enjoying that, madam?’ she asks, bending low and solicitous.

  ‘It’s rather undercooked for me,’ says the diner.

  Judy explains patiently that the lamb is served slightly pink at Mr Underhill’s, as of course it should be everywhere in the world.

  ‘Well, I don’t really like meat,’ adds the diner, making a prissy little face. Now at this point, for all I know, Judy would have loved to say, as I did, ‘Well, why didn’t you say so, you silly, fussy sod? Hang on, I’ll see if we can do you a baked potato.’ What she actually says is, ‘Oh, you really should have mentioned it. The food is quite important to us here.’ There is just the gentlest irony in the latter. Everyone else seems to be loving it. The man in the ponytail wears the look of a dog that has just eaten a pound of sausages in a comic: dazed, sated, slightly drugged.

  Back in my little room across the road I sip a large, peaty whisky and muse, in my own slightly dazed and drugged state, on Middle England’s new obsession with food. It’s not all a good thing. Does the world need another celebrity chef? Only if they’re less like Gordon Ramsay and more like Nigel Slater, whose recipe for a bacon sandwich includes the instruction, ‘must be on white plastic bread with tomato ketchup. Best eaten whilst slightly drunk.’

  The room has a fridge, a tacit acknowledgement by Mr Underhill’s that while you’re in Ludlow you will have become so food-crazed, so droolingly comestible-bamboozled, that you’ll have trawled the town’s delis as certain hollow-eyed men haunt Hamburg’s Reeperbahn and Bangkok’s Patpong district, and returned to your room not with Thai sticks and good-time girls but with goat’s cheese and marinated olives.

  There are four family-owned butchers each with their own specialities and all with tempting, defiantly non-vegetarian fare. There is game and fresh venison from the nearby Mortimer Forest, pork pies and pasties, black pudding and its even more disturbing cousin white pudding. And for those whose palates have become so jaded that regular animals will no longer do, you can buy meat from rare-breed animals, which is probably not as immoral as it sounds but makes me feel uncomfortable that they might sell you Javan rhinoburgers or unicorn pâté.

  If you can live by bread alone, or even if you just fancy some fancy bread with your grilled ocelot, there are bakers by the dozen and nary a Mother’s Pride loaf in sight. No, in Ludlow, it’s more likely to be slow-rising sourdoughs, plaits or dark beer and walnut loaves made with Hobson’s Old Henry. There’s a dedicated cheese deli called the Mousetrap, a gourmet chocolate shop called, skilfully, the Chocolate Gourmet, and the Marches Little Beer Shoppe clinks with ciders and perries and porters that will make you feel, as you slip into oblivion, that you are not a drunk but an adventurer. It’s a nice thought, one that encourages me to have, oh go on, another small one before slipping into the aforesaid and well-fed oblivion.

  I rise the next day if not bright and early then bright and early enough by fifteen minutes. You can tell a lot about a traveller I think by the way he or she approaches the tricky subject of the hotel breakfast. Being a raffish man of the world I often eschew this repast altogether on the grounds that, if it’s been a late night, fifteen minutes on the pillow or in the shower is worth all the croissants in the world. But when I do make it down for breakfast – and in somewhere like Mr Underhill’s I certainly do – I make sure I arrive fifteen minutes before the cut-off. Any earlier is way too keen and too much like hard work, any later and you’re being rude to the staff who have been up since six, will hate you and may put their finger in your egg yolk.

  None of the smart, elegant young staff here would do this, I’m certain. Their manners and their sense of aesthetics would forbid it. Instead they bring me what is a masterpiece of culinary elegance and design itself: the full English breakfast. Like a little black dress or the London Tube map, the full English breakfast is unimprovable in its purest form, which, ideally, should involve the following at least:

  A fried egg comprising a corona of pale white flesh crisped and gently brown at its outer rim and cradling at its centre an orb of gold which trembles like a molten teardrop awaiting the puncturing kiss of …

  A triangle or three of fried bread, crunchy but yielding and just greasy enough to smack of forbidden pleasures. Close by should be …

  A brace of mushrooms that have darkened and aged in smoking-hot butter until their fresh young skin has gained laughter lines and a creased W.H. Auden complexion …

  A disc of black pudding as thick and inviting as a stack of old vinyl singles …

  A plump, self-satisfied, glistening sausage flecked with green herbs …

  Two rashers of bacon, fat and pink and lolling against each like tongues in a lazy, post-coital French kiss and …

  Controversially, I know, a viscous dollop of baked beans, deep red and saltily oleaginous from having been sizzled in the corner of the pan where the bacon and sausage came from.

  Somerset Maugham famously remarked, ‘To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.’ This is normally cited as evidence by those seeking to malign English food. Perhaps innocently, I prefer to think of it as simply a tribute to what is maybe England’s greatest culinary achievement. Eat breakfast thrice a day and you’ll be well fed, if sluggish. An even more perceptive literary discussion of the FEB comes in Julian Barnes’ History of the World in 10½ Chapters. The final chapter is a witty and poignant musing on the afterlife and, in particular, Heaven. A new arrival is learning to his delight that Heaven is a kind of holiday camp where you can have whatever you want and the choice is unlimited, from sexual partners to home furnishings to food. Feeling a little silly but childishly delighted, the new arrival picks his daily menu: full English breakfast for every meal. Heaven’s representative notes this down impassively. ‘Aren’t you shocked?’ asks the new guest. ‘No,’ replies Heaven’s staff member. ‘It’s what everyone asks for.’

  The full English breakfast is simply irresistible, either when rising bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to greet a busy day or when lurching into the morning with a dense throbbing magenta cloud of a hangover lingering like a storm front over the frontal lobe. Put it this way: have you ever heard anyone say, first thing in the morning, ‘I could murder a continental breakfast’? The very smell of an FEB, sizzling in a sunlit kitchen on a bright, crisp morning, has been the undoing of many a vegetarian.

  Well breakfasted, I prepare to leave Mr Underhill’s. Though every seam of me, both flesh and fabric, is groaning, Judy Bradley offers me two home-made cookies with my bill: ‘Just in case you get lost…you are going into Wales after all.’

  Judy knows I am going into Wales – just – because I have asked her directions to my next destination. I guessed she would have
heard of it. If you call your hotel Mr Underhill’s (the pseudonym Bilbo Baggins uses when he goes adventuring in The Hobbit), I fancy you were once a cheeseclothy, hippyish sort of person who would have heard of the hill I was headed for and the 1970s concept album named after it. Moreover, the sort who would approve of pastoral lyricism, folk tunes, English romantic music, gentle psychedelia and the idyll of rural isolation and inspiration that has struck a chord in English musicians of every stamp from Elgar to Nick Drake, Vaughan Williams to Pink Floyd.

  Food is the food of love in Ludlow. But music has been the food of love for Middle Englanders since a young Warwickshire buck called William Shakespeare first used that chiming phrase in Twelfth Night. It was time to pack our guitars and our cellos, our manuscripts and Rizla papers, and to start ‘getting it together in the country’.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Land Without Music

  Every nationality has its way of identifying, outfoxing and humiliating outsiders. With the French and the Chinese it’s the food: things that sweat and smell, putting things on the menu that you find on the bottom of old plant pots and eating the bits of the animal that even the animal thinks are its worst features. With the Americans it’s stupidly complicated sports rules, and with the Germans, traditionally, it’s been completely unjustified military invasion.

  With us, it’s language. The only good reason to pronounce Worcester ‘Wuster’ is that it gives bar staff a chance to snigger at American tourists when they ask for the sauce in their tomato juice. We can be so insular and protective that we have even invented linguistic mantraps and trapdoors for lesser members of our own tribe. All those Featherstonehaughs (Fanshaws), Belvoirs (Beavers) and Cholmondleys (Chumleys) are really there to act as a kind of password into rarified social strata. If you know the pronunciation, you’re in. It works the same way as saying ‘I’m a friend of Big Dave’s’ in certain after-hours Bermondsey drinking clubs. The shutter slides shut, the bolt slides off and you’re in.