Years ago, when we were catering for Lloyd Rees’s 90th birthday, the menu included pot-au-feu, one of his favourite dishes. I decided that oxtail would be one of the meats in it, and so ordered 25 boned oxtails from our butcher. To my surprise, he said he’d never boned an oxtail, so I ended up behind the counter, proudly showing the butchers how to do their job! I always remember the story from years ago of a young apprentice innocently asking his chef, ‘And what do they do