COINCIDENCE?

COINCIDENCE?


A few years ago the Independent Newspaper published a letter I sent that was in response to an article about Gastro-pubs. The letter is reproduced below:

Letters to the Editor,
The Independent,
E.14.

15th October 2003.

Your feature about Gastro-pubs sparked off a few memories. When `I took my first pub in 1962, I inherited a cook who’d worked there during the war. Kit her name was. If only there were more like her in pubs today.

We only served food lunchtimes, we had an upstairs restaurant but served the same food in the bar. Everything was delivered daily from local tradesmen, butcher, baker, fish,monger, greengrocer all from the sadly missed Angel Lane market in Stratford, E.15. There was no freezers or micro waves in those days. No specialised frozen food companies with their pre-packed ready portioned meals, even the fridge we had was a huge wooden affair that just about kept the food cool.

But Kit made the loveliest pies and puddings, her fish and chips made with skate and plaice fresh from the market was the best I’ve tasted, better even that Whitby’s finest and her scotch eggs made you realise why they were once considered delicacies instead of something to be avoided at all costs.

Although I realised that my beer sales were subsidising the food side I stuck it out for about three years before pulling the plug on the restaurant. Customers then didn’t want to pay for the food, it was so cheap in the shops that they objected to realistic prices. Lots of patrons never looked at the menu just the prices, our most popular seller, especially with the reporters from the Stratford Express opposite the pub, was Shepherds pie which at 8d (eight old pennies) was a bargain so. sadly, I closed and earned a fortune out of the disco that replaced it.

Then, as now, money is all that seemed to count.

It’s sad how we lose that which we most love for the sake of a few pounds.

I generally welcome the Gastro-pubs as pubs, in general, have become unpleasant with their emphasis on events to promote heavy drinking amongst women as well as men, the sooner there’s no pubs the better.

But the food these new bar sell does, at the moment, depend a bit on novelty with the emphasis on fashion rather than flavour and tasteability, it has to be Mediterranean, Pacific rim, Californian, New European or have one of these ‘buzz’ words attached to it, it will soon pall and God forbid that we ever gp back to ‘Pub Grub’ like Scampi in the basket or frozen whitebait, there will be a demand for more ‘old fashioned’ food which will filter down from top restaurants like St Johns of Smithfield and I think the traditional Sunday roast is still everyone's’ favourite.

By the way I used to go into the ‘Crown’ you referred to with my Dad in the fifties. It was ultra respectable then, on the edge of Victoria Park, quite middle class for the area - to use an Americanism ‘what goes around comes around’.

Sincerely,

Eddie Johnson.

The Independent I’m pleased to say published the letter in full. My sister, who still lives in Wanstead, East London, asked me to drop the newspaper in to her, which I did. After I left her house to drive back to Long Melford she had a delivery of Calor Gas, she was chatting to the delivery man about how the area had changed and he mentioned that he used to go into the ‘Two Puddings’ some years previous. He was a man in his forties, ‘as a matter of fact’ he went on to say ‘my Nan worked there during the war. right up till the mid sixties’. Doreen was astonished and so was he when she showed him the letter in the newspaper, Kit was his grandmother! To read about her from 40 years ago. Sadly his Nan, or Kit as I knew her had died some years previous but his Grandfather was still alive and was pleased to see the recognition of Kit as a great cook so many years later.

Remarkable what?

Eddie Johnson.