Savouries

Hardly any restaurants serve savouries any more. They are fossils from a time when dinner would regularly take four or five hours. Even though they are a minority taste now, customers still like to see them at the end of the menu, adding a sort of anchoring gravitas. Instead of having them after pudding, as is traditional, some people have them instead, particularly if they are in the middle of a good bottle of serious red wine, which would be humiliated by anything sweet.