The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Table talk
Eating out with children is made bearable with the help of an electronic nanny
Michael Deacon at The Hundred of Ashendon
WHEN THE FIRST ipad was advertised on TV in 2010, I was certain it would be a flop. After all, what was the point of it? We already had laptops, and we already had smartphones. This so-called ‘tablet’ looked like an awkward amalgam of the two – a laptop without a keyboard, and a phone that couldn’t make phone calls. Who could possibly need such a thing? The answer would soon become very clear. Parents.
Go to any restaurant on a Saturday or Sunday lunchtime, and you’ll see tables of adults chatting and drinking merrily away – while their children sit glued to their ipads. Everyone is happy: the children liberated from the boredom of their parents’ company, and the parents rediscovering what it’s like to eat a meal uninterrupted by yells of ‘MUUUUUM, CHARLIE JUST PULLED MY HAIR! MUUUUUM!’
What a glorious boon to family life the ipad is. An electronic nanny, keeping your monstrous brats silently occupied wherever you take them. And nowhere is the nanny more appreciated than in a restaurant. The moment you hand your children their ipads and headphones, you bring joy into the hearts of staff and other diners alike. The room glows with gratitude. It beams with relief. Order yourself a drink. You’ve earned it. You’ve done your good deed for the day.
Of course, it may be argued that two hours’ solid gawping at Team Umizoomi is in some way bad for your children. That it will stunt their intellectual
development, and reduce them to a drugged and drooling passivity. In fact, the very opposite is true. TV is just about the best teacher your little wretches can get. At the age of three, my son could point at a shape on the screen and chirp, ‘Look, Dada! A trapezium!’
‘That’s nice, dear,’ I would murmur with an encouraging smile, while hastily googling ‘trapezium’ to find out what on earth it was. ‘A quadrilateral,’ reported Google, ‘with at least one pair of parallel sides.’ Dear Lord. The boy was right. At an age at which I could barely have identified a triangle, he knew what a trapezium was. And whence had he gleaned this information? Certainly not his dunce of a father. He’d got it from that venerable sage and mentor, television. Which is now on hand to instruct and enrich him everywhere he goes, thanks to the magic of the slender glass oblong in Mummy’s handbag.
The Victorians believed that children should be seen and not heard. They would have loved the ipad. How they must have kicked themselves for not inventing it.
The electronic nanny certainly earned its keep at this week’s restaurant. I was with four adults (my wife, father-in-law, brother-in-law and sister-in-law) and three children (my son, who’s four, and his two cousins, 10 and eight). All three children spent the entire meal staring at their respective ipads. We barely heard a peep out of them. Which was no doubt a relief to everyone else, because the restaurant – The Hundred of Ashendon, in Buckinghamshire – is a cosy, family-run country inn that prides itself on its peaceful atmosphere.
It prides itself on its food, too: Michelin gave it a Bib Gourmand (an award for good food at moderate prices) in both 2016 and 2017. The menu changes daily, with many ingredients sourced from ‘the hundred’ (an Old English term for the local area).
I started with the potted duck: cool, thick and rich, served with two slices of toast and complemented by strips of pickled red cabbage, sweet and tangy. My brother-in-law’s garlic soup didn’t taste tremendously garlicky, but my father-in-law’s salt cod was great, ringingly fresh.
My main was feather blade beef, with braised chicory and pickled walnut. The feather blade is a cut from the cow’s shoulder, and mine – a squat little block of it – was beautifully, meltingly soft, falling apart at the merest glance from my fork. Blushing, swooning, helplessly overcome. I also
My feather blade beef was meltingly soft, falling apart at the merest glance of my fork
liked my sister-in-law’s witch sole, slim and crispy, with roast cauliflower and sea purslane (a leaf with a salty, nutty quality).
I loved my pudding: lemon posset, with an extra layer of cream on top. Pure swirling dreaminess, as clean and bright as spring air. My wife had the rhubarb Eton mess. A bit smaller, neater and, well, less messy than most, but still good. It’s a child’s pudding, really, but I don’t mean that in a bad way: there’s just something about Eton mess that is innocent, and greedy, and silly, like all the classic puddings of childhood, a gleeful carefree overload of sweetness, maximum sugar and maximum cream.
For a country inn, the range of beers isn’t the biggest, and visually The Hundred isn’t the most memorable. Personally I like my country inns as cluttered with as much eccentric paraphernalia as possible, every square inch of wall and ceiling jostling with tools, tankards, trophies and Lord knows what. It adds to the cosiness. Apart from the head of a cow jutting from a wall, the Hundred feels a bit bare.
Still, those Bibs Gourmand were well earned. And you won’t eat anywhere more relaxed. God bless Apple.