Quinoa and kale? Just give me pie and chips... Some bear necessities...

AFeW weeks ago, when the snow was halfway to my hip and Tesco had run out of everything but Mini eggs and black pudding, I made my way to the local butcher.

It’s a traditional sort of place, a shop straight out of the old school selling piles of juicy, un-mucked-about-with sausages, chops the size of your fist, and steak pies so popular the queue is snaking down the street come hogmanay morning.

It was a steak pie I plumped for at the counter that cold Saturday, and we ate it that night with chips and peas excavated from the freezer, accompanied by a cheap bottle of red. If Wogan had been on the box, it really could have been 1985.

Perhaps it’s my advancing years, or maybe it’s the induction of the word ‘courgetti’ into the general lexicon (spiralised courgettes are not, and never will be, a reasonable substitute for pasta), but, oh, how I hanker for the nostalgic comfort food of my youth. Rice pudding. Beans on toast. A cloud of mashed potatoes with thick, meaty gravy. A beefy casserole that sticks to your ribs and tastes twice as good the day after. Sunday roast with all the trimmings.

In a world awash with quinoa and kale chips, with food that neither looks nor tastes like actual food, I yearn for the days when recipes were simple, shopping could be bought from small, local stores instead of frenetic supermarkets the size of the Starship enterprise, and no one looked down on you because instead of buying unsweetened hemp milk, you bought actual milk.

I can’t be the only one. This week the BBC announced it was bringing back a plethora of old cooking shows on iPlayer. Fanny Cradock, Delia Smith, Keith Floyd – the sort of cooks (and they were cooks, not chefs) that understood that food was a pleasure and an indulgence, that nothing required a foam or a jus or something called a goji berry in order to pass muster on the family dinner table. I imagine viewing figures will be high. Not least because so many food shows on TV nowadays are either fiendishly complex or irritatingly ‘clean’, with the notable exception of Nigella Lawson (inset), who elevated herself to heroine status in my eyes when she used her spiraliser to make chips and promptly dunked them in the fryer. Film director Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie, took to social media this week to chart his baking adventures as he attempted to bake his own rowies, sparked by a nostalgia from his school days in Scotland. ‘Spent great swathes of my youth in a flat in Cornhill Court eating mince and tatties, drinking orange squash, coats on beds to keep warm, ‘snowballs’ at Christmas,’ he tweeted.

SOUNDS like heaven. It’s not that I want rowies for breakfast and mince for tea every day. But I abhor the phrase ‘clean eating’, not least because it suggests that everything else is dirty.

I’m aware there are plenty of preservative-laden nasties out there, and that there was oodles of ghastly food in the 1970s and 1980s that even the most dedicated of competitive eaters would have balked at, but still I feel something has been lost in our quest to be ‘clean’. Our tastebuds want real food, not cardboard-esque approximations.

And every once in a while, we all deserve a steak pie with chips.