Cookery? It's a piece of cake

WE ARE informed by a multi-million pound quango called the Potato Council that four out of 10 young adults can’t cook a baked potato. That’s the notoriously difficult task of rolling a large potato in oil and salt and then baking it for 90 minutes in a hot oven. Difficult, it ain’t.

Neither, it appears, can they cook shepherd’s pie or fish cakes. When we look at this lack of culinary skills, we should go straight back to our schools, where what was once called domestic science or home economics is now relegated to .. well … nothingness. Let’s face it – knocking out a quick Shepherd’s Pie is hardly onerous, but remains a life skill which will stand you in good stead for many years. Especially if gravy is provided. And you’ve got a hot date on the go.

It gets worse. Children in schools in Wales have been told that they can no longer enjoy the delights of Marmite or tomato ketchup with their school meals. Apparently both contain levels of salt which will turn your children into statues of Lot overnight. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the land of swarthy thieves and benefits claimants, even sugar has been banned. Kids at Tonypandy Community College in Rhondda, South Wales, are barred from putting sugar in their tea or coffee, on instruction of the Welsh Assembly.

I will only say this. Tell a teenager that they can’t have sugar in their coffee and before you know what’s happening, they’ll be shovelling it in there like no-one’s business. Diabetes levels will be going through the roof. Seventeen-year-olds will be bouncing off the ceiling like Christopher Biggins at a Lionel Blair reunion.

WHILE WE’RE on the subject of food, a reader writes taking me to task over my assertion, of many moons ago, that a proper English breakfast can’t include toast and fried bread.

The issue arose, if I remember correctly, when Coronation Street’s Roy Cropper, of the famous Roy’s Rolls cafe, served up such an abundance of bread products on the same plate. And, to compound his failure, some mushrooms were noticeably absent from his fry-up offering.

My man writes: “As any connoisseur of English breakfasts will know, the fried bread is there to soak up the tomato juices, whereas one round of the obligatory two rounds of toast lives under the egg or eggs (fried on one side with runny yolks, obviously, none of that American ‘over easy’ nonsense).

“The other round is used to mop the plate once all other comestibles have been dispatched, but before the mug or pot of tea is finished. Of course, both rounds of toast must be copiously coated with large quantities of butter and, ideally, everything except the toast and tea (and possibly the tomatoes) should have been fried in well-used lard, or beef dripping.”

Well, I’m not sure about this. I think there’s a slight problem of physics there. Can a round of fried bread, already loaded with oil or fat, retain the capability to soak up watery tomato juice? I think not. It just won’t mix. Opposites repel.

It makes far more sense to use the toast, in particular the unbuttered underside, to perform soaking duties. Perhaps we need a scientist to clarify the situation.

MUCH IS made of the way so-called England fans booed a player called Ashley Cole after he gave the ball away and set up a goal for the opposition at Wembley last week. The nation’s football writers seem confused: either this is a vile calumny against an honest professional, or a deserved rant against a man who represents all that is wrong with the modern game.

Mr Cole, it should be remembered, is the chap who said in his autobiography (incidentally one of the worst-selling sports books of recent years) that he nearly drove off the road and crashed his car on learning that his employers were only prepared to offer him the pittance of £55,000 a week – yes, a week - on his new contract.

I suspect that when the England fans booed Mr Cole, they weren’t just booing a player who’d played a crap ball cross his own box, they were booing a player who they seriously disliked, and that to whom any opportunity to give a verbal kicking was good enough.

THE REAL problem of the current banking crisis is not that all our savings in Iceland’s Christmas club have gone all Ashley Cole; it’s that the capitulation of the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS, the twin pillars of the Scottish economy, have had to be bailed out by the English parliament. This means that the Porridge Wogs have suffered a devastating blow to any notion that they might once stand alone “and be a nation again” as the song goes.

I take no pleasure in this. As far as I’m concerned, the quicker we cut them loose and let them drift off into the North Sea the better. Unfortunately, even the most rabid claymore-wielding Jock now knows which side his shortbread is buttered. Expect a dignified silence while they come to terms with the uncomfortable truth.

WE COME quickly to three loony toons of the Nanny State. In Bromsgrove, a man has been banned from fencing in his allotment with barbed wire in case he injures a passing thief. In Penzance, Cornwall, a gardener was hauled before the courts for having the temerity to have an old-fashioned scythe in his van. Meanwhile in Hackney, London, a market stall holder was fined £5,000 for selling fruit and veg in pounds and ounces even though the EU has long admitted that it isn’t remotely interested in imposing a ban on imperial measures. So under which law has she been fined?