An anniversary is a time for celebration, and I don't think we could have chosen a better venue for our 80th anniversary gourmet dinner than The Alderley Edge Hotel. Eighty members and guests attended the dinner on 31 October 2013.
Our menu included some unusual touches, and we enjoyed wines from the Burgundy and Bordeaux regions of France which were presented by Richard Bampfield M.W. It was especially interesting to have the opportunity to compare two wines from Ch. Sociando - their second wine from a good year (La Demoiselle de Sociando 2010) and their first wine from a not-so-good year (Chateau Sociando Mallet 2007). We felt the score was a draw.
The first course - chicken with a foie gras and truffle mousse - got the meal off to a rather shaky start as the mousse was served at an inappropriate temperature. Some thought the taste rather insipid.
All was forgiven when we got to the hand dived scallop with its beautiful presentation of cucumber and apple pieces, and an oyster and caviar emulsion. This was an appealing blend of taste and texture.
The main course was the star, and when it was served it seemed to shout "Eat me!" before we had even picked up our knives and forks. The pavé of beef and roasted salsify shared the plate with a wonderful piece of ox cheek, the joue of French restaurants. Where does all this lovely meat go? Cattle have two of them, but we rarely get a chance to eat them. Why? Perhaps dogs and cats get them: lucky people.
The cheese course offered us the second mousse of the meal, this time made with Brie.
It tasted good, but the presentation was not appealing.
There was a nice touch when we got to the dessert, as our deconstructed plum tart harked back to the mirabelles of the first meeting of the Society in 1933.
As we have come to expect from the Alderley Edge Hotel, the service was excellent.
An anniversary is also a time for reflection.
In the 1930s haute cuisine reigned supreme. Fine dining, as we now refer to it, was always a French experience, as it was for the Society's first meeting and for the two planning dinners that preceded it. Partridges and pheasants, or should I say perdreaux et faisans, featured in the menus, from which we can deduce that these meals took place in Autumn. Seasons mattered then: there were no game birds in May, and no fresh raspberries in January, and few freezers anywhere.
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the first menus were being discussed. There was one point for discussion concerning the placing of the cheese before or after the dessert.. Should it come before because it was a French meal, or after because we were eating it in England? A nice solution was to do it one way, and then the other, and on the third occasion to leave out cheese altogether and serve a savoury instead.
The wines served at the planning meetings are just names to drool over: 1920 Ch. Lafite, 1914 Ch. Beychevelle, and a 1908 Warre port. I was amused by the phrase "a glass of cold water with the fish".... Perhaps we should to this more often.
I hope our founders would delight in our present day menus. I am sure they would be impressed by the way our courses are presented. All that silver service, all that disruption of our conversations, and the dangers of our food going cold - all this has been swept aside and the look of our food matters as well as its taste. I like to think that André Simon and A.J. Symons would approve wholeheartedly of how we do things today.
Josephine Jackson