Friday's Formal Hall and The Beauty of British Food

Most people say that beauty is only skin deep, and I agree, to a certain extent. Food for example can be very beautiful to look at, but taste dreadful; too much or not enough seasoning can make all the difference. Other times, food might look drab and grey, but when you take a mouthful, the taste is sublime.

Below is a montage of Thursday’s Connoisseurs meal. All three dishes looked great, tasted great, and smelled great.

Next, we have a montage of Friday’s Formal Hall. After the momentous effort of Thursday’s Connoisseurs Dinner, Friday’s Formal needed to be ‘low maintenance’. With this in mind, we chose to serve soup, roast beef, and quince. Nice and easy, but not overly exciting.

The two sets of photographs are very different. Thursday’s food was very pretty and complex, whilst Friday’s offering was much simpler and plain. However, which meal was the real beauty pageant winner?

Take Friday’s soup for instance, nothing speaks British more than the garden pea. When correctly made pea soup is wonderful, especially on a cold winter’s day, full of wholesome, fresh, and vibrant flavour. Good soup always makes me feel like I’m eating something inherently healthy and good for my body.

And what about the roast beef dinner? Well-made roast potatoes and rich gravy smoothed on slices of rare roast beef! Few meals can be as memorable as a good Sunday roast with family and friends.

Now let us take a minute to look at the quince. In seventeenth century English cookery books there were more recipes for quince than any other orchard fruit. In recent times, the quince has fallen out of favour, replaced by our taste for everything apple and pear. Once, the humble quince was prized throughout Western Asia, and the seeds were carried, tenderly, to Europe and across the oceans to the New World. On Friday, we resurrected the humble quince and gave it centre stage next to homemade chestnut ice cream.

In summary, Thursday’s food was, without a doubt, beautiful, modern, stylish, and very well presented. However, Friday’s food, if you happen to look beneath the skin, held a more natural beauty, one based on tradition and not style.