‘Do you fancy yourself an epicure?’ the Observer tantalised in 1968. ‘Does your eye stray and your mouth water when you come across the small ads for smoked eel and tinned quail and brandied apricots?’ If so, you were about to be consumed with envy, as Jane Grigson and wine correspondent Cyril Ray tackled some of the year’s strangest, most decadent and priciest foodstuffs in a gargantuan tasting session.
Exotic food in 1968, when olive oil was only just escaping from chemists’ shops, appears fairly tame through a 2024 lens. It was assumed ‘most readers know what smoked salmon and Greek honey and olives tasted like’, but the tasting table was piled with tinned soups and potted pâtés, plus ‘munches of cocktail nuts and Japanese rice crackers, forkfuls of tropical vegetables, swigs of fruit juice, spoonfuls of fruit in liqueurs… washed down with some suitable wines.’
What treats met with expert approval, and what ‘caused Cyril Ray to shake his head in great alarm and cry “bogus” and Jane Grigson to wrinkle her nose and pronounce “ordinary”’? Both enjoyed smoked stuff: duck, eel and mackerel.
Truffled luxury hit the mark: Grigson pronounced Fortnum & Mason’s truffled terrine de foie gras ‘very smooth, subtle and delicious’ and approved of a single tinned black truffle at 13 shillings and sixpence, declaring, ‘I would be jolly pleased if someone gave me that.’ The California kumquats in brandy – an eye-watering 27 shillings – were so successful with both, that Ray pleaded, ‘Let’s not mess about, let’s just eat kumquats.’
Messing about was the name of the game, though. Tinned soups made him near-apoplectic and cocktail nuts were ‘a confidence trick’. Grigson’s greatest ire was reserved for salted cherry blossom. ‘The nastiest thing I have ever tasted in my life,’ she pronounced. Both were game for the most challenging – tinned zaza insects and roasted bumblebees – though the bees got the Grigson ‘very ordinary’ thumbs-down. Ray had concerns other than mere tastiness: ‘Why haven’t the bees got wings? I bet real connoisseurs eat the wings.’
