It’s a very exciting menu, chef . . . but we’ll have the usual, please

Celebrity chefs on every channel are running themselves ragged to find new recipes. Gone are the days when aubergines and avocados seemed exotic — any dish on telly seems stale if it doesn’t include two ingredients previously unknown to domestic science.

in recent weeks, we’ve watched Hairy biker Dave Myers baking biblical flatbreads on the Saharan sands, rick Stein cooking freshly killed wallaby in tasmania and Jock Zonfrillo roasting chicken in a volcanic spring on a Pacific island.

Heston blumenthal wouldn’t flinch from using nuclear waste to fry his breakfast, and he’s shown us how to prepare every kind of meat except human flesh.

Sometimes, as he ushers his unsuspecting diners into his pop-up restaurants, he makes me think of demon barber Sweeney todd, sizing up customers for his steak pies. Perhaps that’s Heston’s next series.

but these sensation seekers are missing the point. british diners fantasise about new tastes . . . but we end up ordering the same as always.

One amused waiter at an indian restaurant told the timeshift documentary Spicing Up Britain (bbC4) that many customers would study the menu for ten minutes or more, in agonies of indecision on every visit — before requesting exactly the same meal, every time.

it’s a hangover from the blitz, when wartime food rationing and mass population shifts meant millions were obliged to eat at factory restaurants and national canteens, lining up elbow-to-elbow at long wooden trestle tables.

there was no a la carte menu, and boiled cabbage was usually the speciality of the house, but the british appreciate an absence of choice. We get enough excitement in our lives with the weather — we don’t need unpredictable dinners.

When the war ended, we retained our fondness for mass catering. the nationalised chain of 2,000 british restaurants served half a million people a day, and no wonder when it was 4d for a main course and 2d for pudding: that’s 2½p for a full meal.

When rationing was over, cafes provided the same welcome lack of choice by offering egg and chips, sausage and chips, or egg, sausage and chips. the story was told, in best timeshift style, with lots of newsreel clips and ancient tV ads.

rebecca Front’s mumsy voiceover seemed forever on the verge of warning we’d better eat up our peas or there wouldn’t be any afters.

the producers’ mistake was to offer too much variety. in a crammed second half, they attempted to explain how the british palate had expanded to accept French, indian and Chinese cuisine.

So many bowls of bhuna, plates of prawn balls and buttered baguettes flashed before us that i began to feel travel sick.

the show would have done better to stay with the original innovators of UK eateries, those italian immigrants who brought coffee and ice cream to the Welsh valleys in the Forties.

Within 20 years, they had progressed to prawn cocktails at mock tudor pubs and spaghetti in Soho trattorias. Very adventurous. Frank and Aldo berni perfected a pub-grub-bynumbers technique. their slogan promised: ‘A complete meal for around £1.’ Now there’s a real challenge for Heston to tackle.

but the medal for sheer ingenuity with food went to Caroline Catz, who plays Di Helen Morton in DCI

Banks (itV). After chasing a suspect through a covered market, she nabbed him at a fishmonger’s stall by knocking him out cold with a bag of frozen cockles. She doesn’t muck about with her food.

And it was Morton who solved the murder of an estonian beautician in the yorkshire Dales. the clues weren’t hard to spot, since every scrap of evidence pointed to one man, a wrong ’un called Jason McCready.

Who was running a vice ring from the beauty parlour? McCready, said the girls. Who terrorised a council estate? McCready’s son, said the neighbours. And what was that speeding by on the crucial CCtV footage? Why, Sarge, it’s McCready’s car.

Making an intuitive leap of deduction, the police arrested Jason McCready. they didn’t have much choice. Quite right — that’s how we like things.