Henry Jeffreys | The Spectator columnists & writers

The great breakfast dilemma: should baked beans be part of a full English?

A popular pastime in Britain is to post one’s breakfast on social media for strangers to pass judgment on bacon crispiness, egg doneness and whether baked beans are a vital component or just spoil the whole thing. Felicity Cloake is a writer after my own heart: she is not a fan of beans with her full English. ‘I object to the way they encroach on everything,’ she writes in Red Sauce Brown Sauce, and then quotes Alan Partridge on the importance of ‘distance between the eggs and the beans. I may want to mix them, but I want that to be my decision. Use a sausage as a breakwater.’ Or, as one pseudonymous contributor remarked on the London Review of Breakfasts blog: Beans are to the cooked breakfast as the Dutch Mercenary Forces were to the Royal Netherlands Indies Army.

How to make a royally good Dubonnet cocktail

The Platinum Jubilee celebrations look like boom time for the drinks industry, with various whisky, gin and port brands all releasing special commemorative bottles. But there’s one curious omission: Dubonnet, a liqueur that is said to be the Queen’s favourite. According to a spokesman from parent company Pernod Ricard, there’s nothing planned to celebrate 70 years on the throne of its most famous fan. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a flurry of activity. I picture the Dubonnet promotional department as two old Frenchmen asleep by a telex machine in the back of a dusty café in Béziers. But then again, who needs le marketing when you’ve got the Queen? Say the word ‘Dubonnet’ and immediately you think of the royal family, just as the words ‘Harveys Bristol Cream’ will conjure up images of vicars.

‘To a wine lover, it was like taking a call from God’ – remembering Anthony Barton

In 2014 I received a mystery phone call. It came from a French number but the voice sounded like a patrician Englishman from another age. It was a voice that you can imagine following into battle: 'Hello, it’s Anthony Barton here'. You might not know the name but to a wine lover, it was like taking a call from God. Barton, who died this week at 91, was the man behind Châteaux Léoville Barton and Langoa Barton, and his family were Bordeaux aristocracy. I was writing a book about the history of the British and wine, and had sent a message to the information at Langoa Barton email expecting at best to hear back from a PR representative, as had happened at Lynch-Bages. Instead, Anthony phoned me out of the blue. He told me that he was intrigued by my book and indeed had read something I’d written in the Spectator on fluffing a blind wine tasting that had greatly amused him.

More than one bad apple: the sorry demise of English cider

Can you imagine if, in the 20th century, wine producers in France had switched from a product made (almost) entirely from grapes to something that was essentially grape-flavoured alcoholic sugar water? It’s inconceivable. In fact, they did just the opposite. To stamp out the growth of ersatz wines, the appellation contrôlée system was created, which, for all its faults, provides a guarantee that a particular wine will be made from grapes from a certain area. But there was no such regulation in England. After the second world war, large-scale cider-makers in the West Country began lowering the amount of fruit in their products, specifically characterful bittersweet cider apples, and making up the rest with dessert apples and sugar.

Table Talk

With Henry Jeffreys

26 min listen

Table Talk

With Henry Jeffreys

26 min listen

Henry Jeffreys is features editor of Masters of Malt, and author of The Cocktail Dictionary. On the podcast, he tells Lara and Livvy about living like the Goodfellas in Leeds, being 'portly' at university, and enjoying his mum's apple and bramble pie.

Why Florence’s ‘wine windows’ are making a comeback

Stroll around Florence and you’ll notice little ornate openings embedded in the walls of Renaissance palazzos. They look like doorways for tiny people, though they would have to be quite athletic tiny people, as the openings are three feet off the ground. But they’re not entrances for Tuscan pixies — they’re for selling wine. There are more than 150 buchette del vino dotted around the city and they date back to the 17th century. You’d knock on the door, hand over some money and a bottle, and the mysterious person behind the wall would fill it full of wine. It wouldn’t have been just any old plonk either; the great merchant houses of the city like Frescobaldi, Ricasoli and Antinori, who still make some of Tuscany’s best wines, would sell in this way.

Is this the end of the wine bottle?

Picture the world before the invention of the bottle: if you wanted a nice glass of claret at home, you’d have to send a boy round to the tavern to fill up a jug — unless you were rich enough to have a whole barrel in your cellar. Around 1630, a new tougher glass was invented in England which, when combined with the cork, meant that wine could be transported and stored safely and inertly. We owe the amazing variety of wine available to us at the touch of a button to this invention. What’s peculiar is how little has changed in 400 years. For most of us, buying wine still means buying a bottle. This is bananas, because most wine is drunk within hours of being purchased, and the glass bottle then discarded. It’s not as if there aren’t alternatives.

Tips for Christmas tipples

It’s telling that perhaps the best wine book of last year, Amber Revolution by Simon Woolf, was self-published, though you’d never guess from the quality of the design, photography or editing. Wine books are a tough slog for publishers unless they’re written by one of the big four: Clarke, Johnson, Robinson and Spurrier (sounds like a firm of provincial solicitors). Hugh Johnson wrote the first World Atlas of Wine in 1971. Since the 1998 edition he has been, in his words, ‘progressively passing the baton’ to Jancis Robinson. It’s astonishing how much has changed; early editions were little more than France, Germany, Italy, sherry and port. Now this eighth edition (Mitchell Beazley, £50) contains maps of Croatia, Lebanon, Virginia and — a contender for the birthplace of wine — Georgia (the country, that is).

Home bars

When I mention to people that I have written a book about home bars, the most common response is, ‘my parents/grandparents/swinging uncle used to have one of those globe cocktail cabinets’. The other thing they mention is Only Fools and Horses. For years, having a bar in your home was seen as the height of bad taste. It’s a far cry from the home bar’s 1950s heyday. After the second world war, people were spending more time at home, but still wanted to lead the cocktail lifestyle. It was the suburban American dream: after a hard day’s work, drive home in your shiny new Chevrolet, put Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers on your state-of-the-art hi-fi while your wife knocks you up a martini at your home bar.

Is it possible to talk about wine without sounding like a prat?

There are only two British television wine presenters taxi drivers have heard of, Jilly Goolden and Oz Clarke. Who can forget their double act on Food & Drink in the 1980s and ’90s? Since then innumerable cooks have become household names but there have never been any other wine celebrities who pass the cabbie test. As a child I assumed that Oz was Johnny to Jilly’s Fanny Cradock, looking on in awe as she came up with outlandish wine descriptions. He says in his new book, Red & White: ‘people used to think we were married’. But later I discovered that Oz is a wine expert of startling erudition and eloquence. I’ve tasted with him a few times and his knowledge and recall are astonishing. He’s written a lot of books, some excellent like New Classic Wines, but others that didn’t have the full Clarke spark.

How to infuriate the French

Fine wine rarely makes it into the public consciousness, but one event in 1976 has proved of perennial interest: the so-called Judgment of Paris. It heralded the arrival of wine from the New World, but also tapped into popular prejudice. Who can resist French wine snobs being made to look foolish? So these memoirs by Steven Spurrier, the man behind that notorious tasting, have been keenly anticipated. It was a glass of 1908 Cockburns port that Spurrier tried at the age of 13 that sparked a lifelong interest in wine. Rather than go to university, as expected, he worked in the cellars of a wine merchant, Christopher’s, in Soho. In his early twenties he inherited £250,000 (the equivalent of £5 million today) when the family gravel business was sold.

In praise of bangers

I was collecting my daughter from school when my path was blocked by an enormous black Range Rover sitting in the middle of the road. As I squeezed past, one tyre on the pavement, I opened my window and asked, as gently as I could: ‘Why don’t you drive on your side of the road?’ The woman looked down from on high and said: ‘Why are you driving a banger?’ I’ve been trying to come up with a clever response ever since. I’d never thought of my car as a banger before. It’s a nearly 20-year-old Ford Focus, in excellent condition for its age with just a touch of rust on the boot lid. But by modern standards I suppose it is. Nearly everyone else on the road seems to have a new Range Rover like the charming lady from school, a Mini or a shiny German car.

Deathly prose

‘Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect... Reading is love in action.’ Those are the words of the bestselling author Matt Haig and though I wouldn’t put it quite like that, I too feel that there is something inherently good about reading. Daniel Kalder has no such illusions. His latest book Dictator Literature (published in the US as The Infernal Library) looks at the dark side of the written word. It’s a study of what the great and not so great dictators of modern times read and wrote. In lesser hands this would be a romp (romp isn’t quite the right word, is it?) through Mein Kampf, Lenin’s What is to be Done? and Mao’s Little Red Book, but Kalder is nothing if not thorough. He’s read everything from Stalin’s lyric poetry to Saddam’s Hussein’s romantic fiction.

University Challenge

One programme that still shines out as a beacon of intellectual rigour among the sea of dross on television is University Challenge. As always, teams of four students from Britain’s best universities battle it out for the series championship. Rather than assuming the viewer is an idiot, like most factual programmes, it works on the basis that we have a shared culture. There are always questions on kings and queens of England, Shakespeare and classical music. Even if the viewer doesn’t know the answer — and the questions are often fiendishly hard — the producers expect us to understand the question, except when it’s about quantum physics. The top teams are usually spectacularly good on high culture but struggle with more contemporary arts.

In vino veritas

Taste has a well-noted ability to evoke memory, so it is curious how infrequently most wine writers mine their pasts for inspiration. You wouldn’t think that some had ever fallen in love, read a novel or even got drunk. Instead they obsess over scores, sulphur and diurnal temperature variation. Thank heavens for Nina Caplan, who brings a bit of hinterland to this often dry subject in her weekly New Statesman column. Characteristically, The Wandering Vine, her first book, is about much more than wine. It’s a heady blend of travel, literature, memoir, history and what I can only describe as psychogeography, though don’t let that put you off. The publishers have given the book a whimsical cover, which is misleading, because this is not a lightweight read.

Smoked salmon

I’m just about old enough to remember when smoked salmon was a rare treat. Then, around 1986 or 1987, suddenly it was everywhere. There were smoked salmon sandwiches at M&S, it was stuffed into lurid-looking canapés with cream cheese, and Christmas became a riot of salty fish. For me, smoked salmon is as emblematic of the 1980s as red Porsches, huge mobile phones and the Pet Shop Boys. But it’s almost always a disappointment, that acrid taste only palatable with lots of lemon juice and butter. I’d much rather have potted shrimp. It’s a far cry from how Scottish smoked salmon is supposed to be. It was first produced, not in Scotland but in London by Jewish immigrants in the late 19th century. They took the Eastern European way of smoking fish and applied it to Scottish salmon from Billingsgate Market.

Soho drinking clubs

When someone says ‘Let’s go for a drink at my club’, what do you imagine? A grand St James’s establishment like Boodle’s or White’s, or perhaps a media hangout such as the Groucho or Soho House? What you probably don’t think of is an unmarked door and a flight of rickety stairs. Yet through unpromising-looking doorways in and around Soho are little clubs where you can take a break from the 21st century. Places such as the Phoenix beneath the Phoenix theatre on Charing Cross Road, Gerry’s on Dean Street and the Academy on Lexington Street are relics of a time (Gerry’s has been going since 1955) when pubs had to close after lunch and not open again until the evening. People needed somewhere to drink in the afternoon and after 11 p.

Kentish wine

As a wine bore, holidays abroad are a battle with the family to cram in as many vineyard visits as possible when all they want to do is go to the beach. But it’s only recently that I have begun to take advantage of the riches on my doorstep. I wonder how many Londoners realise that half an hour from St Pancras is one of the world’s most dynamic wine regions — Kent. My previous reluctance might have something to do with the weather. As you leave London on the M20, there always seems to be a moment of sunshine that lights up the countryside before it starts to rain again. No matter. While many wine regions can be ugly — the Médoc is a drained swamp — Kent is lovely, even in the drizzle. Rather than a monoculture of vines, there’s a varied landscape of rolling hills, woods, fruit orchards (it is, after all, the ‘garden of England’), and occasional vineyards.

Until the election is over, anti-social media is best avoided

On Tuesday morning I was thinking to myself how oddly pleasant social media seemed. Then Theresa May dropped her election bomb. Immediately the posts started appearing: ‘Tory scum’ and ‘Tories launch coup’, then came the memes and I thought: I can’t take another two months of this. I’d only just tentatively returned to Twitter and Facebook following Brexit and Trump; now I find myself wanting to suspend my accounts again. I think back nostalgically to general elections of yesteryear. I vaguely remember some fellow students being pleased about Blair winning in 1997 but most of us were more excited about seeing Teenage Fanclub at Leeds Metropolitan University. The polls of 2001 and 2005 passed by without me noticing.

Anti-social media

Flunking the interview

I still get a hot flush of embarrassment when I recall my first interview. It was for a summer job at Selfridges in London when I was 17. The lady from personnel asked me how my friends would describe me. Maybe it was the heat or nerves but all I could think of was the funeral oration by John Hannah’s character in Four Weddings and a Funeral where he describes his deceased partner, played by Simon Callow, as ‘so very fat and very rude’. So I did something you should never ever do in an interview: I tried to be funny. ‘Rude — my friends would describe me as rude,’ I replied. I didn’t get the job. People from my background are meant to sail through such interviews. Supposedly, public school pupils are not only given an excellent academic education but also career guidance, and are drilled in interview technique so that they float through life on a cushion of money and privilege.

Wetherspoons

Of all the stories I’ve heard about the fallout from Brexit — families divided, work jeopardised, friendships ended — the saddest was someone on Facebook who declared that he would never again visit a Wetherspoons because the proprietor, Tim Martin, pushed for a Leave vote. This seemed to me the definition of cutting your nose off to spite your face; imagine turning down cheap beer because of the EU! But it also disrupts one of the fundamentals of a liberal society: that you do business even with those whom you disagree. Voltaire marvelled at this concept on his visit to the London Stock Exchange: ‘Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt.

Notes on... Champagne

The British are notoriously cheap when it comes to wine; the average bottle price is around £6. On one wine, however, we’re happy to spend five times that: champagne. We love champagne, and champagne producers love us: Britain is their biggest export market and it’s only getting bigger: up by 4.5 per cent last year. In fact, champagne as a dry sparkling wine was created specifically for us. Until the mid-19th century, most production from the Champagne region was still red wine. French connoisseurs thought the fizzy stuff rather vulgar. Bertin du Rocheret, a wine merchant, compared it to ‘beer, chocolate and whipped cream’. It would have been a rich yellow wine fortified with brandy; a sort of sparkling sweet sherry, beloved by Russians in particular.

Downwardly mobile

Last year, I found a pair of trainers in our communal recycling bin: Nike Air Max in black and grey size 10, very smart and hardly worn. I’d been wearing them a week when the teenager who lives in the flat below pointed at them and laughed. He told me that he’d discarded them because they were scuffed. This is where I’ve got to, I thought: wearing trainers that I found in a bin on a council estate. Such foraging isn’t un-usual for us. The sideboard in our kitchen, the bookshelf in the hall and the big mirror in our bedroom were all found on our street. I worry that we might be dropping out of the middle class entirely. Our daughter, who goes to the local primary school, now has a strong south London accent. Particularly impressive is her version of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, which consists entirely of glottal stops.

The Tour de France

On Saturday at Mont St Michel, the 103rd edition of the Tour de France begins, and the favourite to win is again British. As a long-term cycling fan, even typing those words gives me a frisson. When I started watching in the 1980s there were few British riders to cheer on — and none challenging for overall victory. Bradley Wiggins became the first Briton to win in 2012. He was followed by Chris Froome in 2013 and 2015. The French haven’t won since 1985. Britain is now a cycling superpower and cycling has become a popular sport. So why aren’t I celebrating? The problem is the lingering doubt that none of this is real. There’s no reason to question Froome’s performances, except that there are few champions who we can confidently say never took drugs.

Is Lewisham really so ’orrible?

When we said we were thinking of moving to Lewisham four years ago, the locals in our pub in Bethnal Green thought we were mad. ‘It’s fuckin’ ’orrible,’ one of them said. Coming from people who’d lived all their lives in the East End, this was worrying. Nevertheless, swayed by a cheap ex-council flat, we moved to a hill that runs between Blackheath and Lewisham station. A good way to imagine Lewisham town centre is as the village in Asterix, surrounded on all sides by the forces of gentrification. Hither Green, Ladywell, Forest Hill and Brockley have delicatessens and artisan bakeries. Deptford has hipsters whereas Blackheath is proper posh, the Hampstead of the south. Even grimy old Catford has a gastropub. But Lewisham central resists.

Beware the Lycra louts

Spring is here and the air is alive with the sound of sweaty manmade materials rubbing together, as middle-aged cyclists fill every road, dressed head to toe in Lycra. They whizz along, jumping red lights, weaving in and out of the path of trucks, screaming at pedestrians and taxi drivers; barely evading death three times a morning. Lycra isn’t just a fabric; it’s a state of mind. At work, these often portly, always angry, red-faced individuals might be mild-mannered middle managers who work in marketing. But in their cycling kit they are superheroes who happen to swear a lot. The double Olympic champion Laura Trott was once asked to help with a safety campaign which involved riding around the capital to highlight the dangers cyclists face on the roads.

The horse from hell

There were moments while reading this sprawling, ambitious novel when I thought I was reading a masterpiece. But at other times, it felt as if the author was convinced that she was writing one. The Sport of Kings is the story of the Forge family of Kentucky. They’re a brutal lot. In the opening scene, John Henry Forge ties his son Henry to a post and whips him. A black employee, Filip, caught with John Henry’s wife, is lynched. As well as violence, John Henry instils a fierce sense of destiny in his son. Against his father’s wishes, Henry turns the family farm over to raising racehorses. Through some severe inbreeding, Henry creates the horse from hell, the aptly named Hellsmouth, an immensely strong but fragile filly.

Downtown Los Angeles

There’s a certain kind of Englishman who falls hard for Los Angeles. Men such as Graham Nash, who swapped the Hollies and rainy Manchester for Joni Mitchell, David Crosby and Laurel Canyon. The LA of beaches, semi-rural hills and freeways can work wonders on an English heart. But the city has another side — a place most Angelenos never venture. Downtown. The old heart of the city is a vision of how LA might have turned out. It has skyscrapers, art deco buildings and even an underground railway. It feels like Chicago, except that even on a Saturday afternoon, many streets are deserted. Some of those gorgeous pre-war buildings are dilapidated or boarded up. The shops sell cheap jewellery and Mexican food. There’s destitution on every corner.

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