Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this before, but many years ago when I worked Mondays at the Bath Hotel in Cambridge as ‘relief chef’ (a massive exaggeration of my capabilities), the manager said to me, ‘If they’ve got a full plate and it looks good you can get away with murder.’ I wasn’t trying to get away with murder, and his idea of a good looking plate was one strewn with handfuls of cress, which even then I thought was a bad idea, but even so I could see the guy sort of had a point.
Now, for one reason or another I have lately eaten sandwiches in a couple of Costas. (I had my reasons). The presentation, let’s call it that, is varied, sometimes on a plate, sometimes on a paper bag, which is not exactly stylish, but even so I thought the sandwiches themselves looked pretty decent, mostly because of the melted cheese on top.
But what was inside tasted pretty awful. Yes, we eat with our eyes, but we don’t completely eat with our eyes. Once the food gets into your mouth a quite different sense takes over.
Which brings me to toad in the hole. Now, I like to think I make a fairly decent Yorkshire pudding. I learned how by watching my mother make them at least twice a week. She never actually taught me how to do it, that would have been far too metrosexual: I just watched and absorbed.
My mother never made toad in the hole, but since I like both sausages and Yorkshire pudding I thought I was on reasonably safe ground making it. And I more or less was. The sausages were from the local butcher, my batter was up to my usual standard but when it was cooked it didn’t look pretty, even if it tasted just fine.
I had a couple more attempts without any great visual improvement
And then I started hunting around online and you know, ALL the toad in the hole looked fairly ugly, whether it was the BBC:
Tesco:
or even dear Jamie Oliver:
I don’t hold this against any of them, and of course I understand there’s more to food than it being photogenic. Thanks to Instagram everybody and their uncle thinks they’re a food photographer but I recall an occasion when I was being a ‘real’ food journalist and I went up to Yorkshire for the Daily Telegraph to interview some people who made soup (the company name long forgotten), and I was there with a real food photographer, whose name, I’m sorry, also escapes me. The day went well, the soup people were very hospitable, the interview went well, and by the end of the afternoon I’d got everything I needed and went off to my hotel (yes, the Telegraph was paying). But the photographer and his assistant toiled on,adjusting the composition, changing lighting, rearranging props and garnishes, photographing soup from all angles and showing no sign of letting up. They looked like they might be there for the rest of the night.
I can’t immediately lay hands on a copy of the article but I do have a Polaroid that I was allowed to take away as a souvenir. This:
