Bread and cheese

One of the smaller things wrong with the modern world is that, despite the amount of time and energy expended by and on behalf of foodies, it is quite difficult to get decent bread and cheese - or even cheese and biscuits (rather easier, with biscuits being products which stand fairly well) - in public places.

The bread on offer is usually poor, that noticed at reference 1 being a rare & honourable exception.

The biscuits are usually over complicated, with something sensible, simple & suitable like Jacob's Cream Crackers not usually being an option.

The cheese varies, is often quite good, but is often marred either by being served direct from the refrigerator or by being served in far too large a quantity. I don't need fattening up, particularly at the end of an already fattening meal. Nor do I need variety, to mix up all kinds of different flavours on the palette: one piece of good cheese is quite enough - so choice from the menu good, variety on the plate bad.

A different sort of problem is the difficulty cooks have serving cheese without all kinds of stuff: fruit, vegetables, crisps, pickles - the list goes on. They do not seem to be able to restrain the urge to try to tell the world how creative they are.

So on Sunday we put our local 'Marquis of Granby' to the test, this being the pub which once served the finest hot sausage rolls - sausage rolls made with quite decent white rolls and very decent pork sausages from the late lamented Porky White - by asking for bread and cheese for dessert, to be served without any trimmings.

Given the lack of warning, they rose to the occasion rather well. Two or three large wedges of a quite acceptable cheddar cheese, perhaps a total of a couple of ounces - so more than I wanted, but not grossly more. And not refrigerated. Then several pieces of warm toast, made from white bread which looked to have come from a small bloomer of some sort. Presumably toasted because the bread was either of poor quality in the first place or stale or both. Then several small, rectangular brown biscuits, complete with red bits - red bits which might have been cranberries, a fruit which has managed to acquire healthy associations despite its rather odd taste and despite its being bad for my warfarin, but which last problem I had taken on enough white wine to ignore. The sort of biscuits which can probably be bought at reference 2. And no trimmings whatsoever.

Towards the end of a Sunday lunchtime shift, I thought that this was a valiant and imaginative effort.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/winters-tale.html.

Reference 2: http://www.granarydeli.co.uk/.