That's How It Happened

I ate last night at the Hind's Head in Bray. It's Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck off-shoot, essentially a gastro-pub, with just a touch of the famed "molecular gastronomy" creeping into the menu. Between myself and the non-blonde we ate: soused herrings with beetroot and onion, a quail's egg salad, a steak with bearnaise, a hammed duck leg on peas, two portions of triple cooked chips, a quaking pudding, and treacle tart with milk ice cream. Really straight-forward perfectly cooked dishes. It reminds my of the St John, because of its unfussiness. The great thing is, because Heston has been so profligate in his cookery writing, you can reproduce almost all these dishes by scouring back issues of the Times and the Guardian: cured mackerel, triple cooked chips, steak, quaking pudding, hammed duck (sort of); in fact everything Heston has ever published is archived here. Despite this wealth of recipes, I'm still keenly anticipating the inevitable Fat Duck Cookbook.