The dog and I are planning a grand re-entry into society when the restrictions associated with this current lockdown, endured as it is through a miserable, grey spring - the spring flowers are there but the sun makes only rare appearances, the skies are the colour of battleships and the gusty winds are chill - and as soon as we may, we will be off for a very civilised few days staying at Fishmore Hall in Ludlow returning for a birthday weekend dining or lunching with the appropriate number of dear old friends on successive days at Opheem, Purnell’s and Simpsons. Prior to that in late April, as outdoor dining becomes possible, it’s off to the Craft for dining around the fire pit. Reserved already too is lunch at The Wilderness and the year, or what is left of it, lies spread ahead of us.
The birthday weekend will not only be special because of where I shall be eating but also because of where I will be staying with my canine best friend - the finally refurbished and newly reopened (having closed in 2002) Grand Hotel in Colmore Circus. It’s wonderfully dog friendly and a splendidly short distance from Purnell’s and Opheem so there is no great amount of travelling to be done after an evening of gastronomic self-indulgence. And it does seem to me that staying at Birmingham’s great historic hotel as it reopens really should be quite exciting. Some of the publicity photographs seem to suggest that the hotel will once more be correctly named ‘The Grand’.
In Blog 16 I wrote a piece about a banquet at The Grand in 1896, 17 years after the hotel first opened in 1879, after obtaining a menu for the event. And very grand it was too. Sadly I have still not come across anyone offering Nesselrode pudding, invented by Carrème himself in 1814, but one lives in hope.
I have obtained another The Grand menu from a later age to give us an idea of what was ‘in’ in Birmingham cuisine in 1937, just two years before the start of the Second World War was to set back British cuisine for at least two generations. The menu with a pleasantly Art Deco illustration on the front cover of a smartly dressed waiter holding aloft a tray with two cocktail glasses and a blue bottle and colourful gay balloons and streamers is for the rather unlikely sounding Building Trades Exchange And Club dinner held on Monday 15 February 1937 so we might expect that the attendees were well off financially and probably middle class parvenus in the main with the money but not necessarily the tastes for 1930s fine dining.
So what were they served? The menu is headed Diner with one N though whether or not our builders thought it was a spelling mistake or appreciated the sophistication of having a menu in French even if they could not be sure what food was to be served to them, we may only guess.
Hors D’oeuvres riche Saumon fumé
Consommé Brunoise Royale Crème à la Reine
Saumon Poché Sauce Hollandaise
Concombre
Supréme de la Volaille Jeanette
Sorbet au Champagne Fine
Selle d’agneau rôti Sauce menthe
Petits pois au beurre
Pommes nouvelles
Poire glacé Beatrice
Mignardises
Dessert
Café Moka
We may conclude from this that one thing was for sure - the organising committee of the Building Trades Exchange and Clubs might have been prepared to have the menu in French but they were determined to stick with very British cuisine - smoked salmon, vegetable soup (albeit a classic Escoffier dish), poached salmon, jellied chicken (possibly a little more exotic than the rest of the menu for the 1930s English building company director), roast lamb with mint sauce, peas and new potatoes, a pear ice cream and petits fours.
What stands out for me here is that soup, which we rarely receive in fine dining restaurants now, occupies its deserved place on the menu. Of course, the Roux Brothers insisted on always including soup in the menu when they opened Le Gavroche in 1967 (though now the next generation has taken over there I see no soup on any of its present day menus including its alluring Menu Exceptionnel) and then at the Waterfront Inn and I would rather like to see magical soups as courses again here in our Birmingham restaurants. One can see that our Japanese-, Peruvian- and Scandinavian-inspired young chefs might see soup as a thing of a bygone age but there’s room there for someone to revive a happy course in a modern idiom.
Well, we will see what the post-COVID era brings with it and how our chefs have been using their time to evolve and enhance our local gastronomy. Meanwhile I look forward to my first stay at The Grand.
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| No soup for this gavroche. |
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