In his no-nonsense book Real Good Food (Fourth Estate, 1995), the cookery writer Nigel Slater puts in a plea for ‘the return of some of the great restaurant clichés of the past’. His list of highly unfashionable dishes rarely found on the menus of Britain’s trend-crazed superchefs (my phrase) includes duck à l’orange, chicken tarragon, beef Stroganoff and coq au vin. Few things, he argues, are
