Soup

Back in the frosty dawn of post-rationing when I first went to restaurants, a starter meant soup. Soup or melon with either dried ginger or ham. Possibly a grapefruit half weirdly grilled with demerara sugar. But soup was the thing. It was more than likely cream of tomato, cream of mushroom, or mulligatawny if you were in the sort of place frequented by old Empire hands. And there was something else called Brown Windsor. Brown Windsor soup has a mythic status today. It’s a sort of music-hall joke along with outside loos, washboards and Marcel waves.