Snares and Pitfalls of Menu Writing

In the dim, dark days of long ago when windows meant glazed openings you looked out of, I used to hand write my menus. Interrupted at the wrong moment I wrote, I found out later, ‘crab salad with marinated customers’ instead of ‘cucumbers’, something which I would like to have done to a few, then spitted them and roast over a slow flame. But more of that later.

This sort of picturesque boob is less likely to happen in updating a file in a PC, but the increasingly polyglot character of cooking in Britain, even when its horizons are only European, can flummox those toiling over the keyboard even if they are literate enough otherwise. I must be one of the few people who regret the arrival of the spellchecker, not because it’s helpful with menu-speak, but because it steals my thunder: the one area of human endeavour in which I really shine, and can thus generate awe and respect from my staff (perhaps we’d better forget the awe bit), is menu spelling, and not just in English, but French and Italian too. There’s no point in being falsely modest about this because it’s not much of a claim, coming into the category of knack, about on a par with being able to ride a penny-farthing (what dat?). And it has absolutely no market value at all. However, it does mean that I’m better at it than anyone else around me, which occasionally (about twice a day) can be useful.