Consuming Interest
Late Night Special
By LESLIE ADRIAN
TVERY1HING shuts down so early,' is a complaint made by tourists all over Britain, London included. There are even a few natives who occasionally want a night out unre- I've been looking around London to see what there is—apart from night clubs which have to stop serving you drinks at 2 a.m. and the early-morning pubs in Covent Garden which we are not supposed to know about.
Suppose the evening starts by going to a theatre. The Café Royal (Regent Street, WHI 2473) has started a 'playgoers' theatre dinner' for 25s., the object of which is to let you eat in comfort without gulping your meal down in time to rush to the theatre by 7.30. You can have half of the meal (hors d'oeuvre and main course) before the show and the other half afterwards. You may leave coats, briefcases, etc., in the restaurant's cloakroom so that you don't have to go through all that again at the theatre. The management will order a car or taxi and arrange to have you picked up after the show; they will provide flowers and take messages for you while you're in the restaurant or the theatre. After the theatre you'll have until about mid- night for a final course and coffee. If this is not enough you could have the whole meal before the theatre and let the Café Royal management book a table for you at the Hungaria (just the other side of Piccadilly Circus) where, after the show, you can have supper, see a cabaret and dance until 1.30 a.m.
The Soup Kitchen in Shoe Lane, EC4, stays open until 3 a.m. for the benefit of Fleet Street journalists and there are cafés of varying quality around Covent Garden and Billingsgate for the porters of these two markets. But I know of only two places where you can get a full meal all night now that the Lyons Corner Houses no longer stay open.
At the West London Air Terminal in Cromwell Road you can have the full range of the day- time menu. Service may be restricted to travellers and friends seeing them off but if you walk in with your accustomed air of owning the place you shouldn't meet too many problems.
Better still is the Kensington Palace Hotel, W8, which really does have an all-night service avail- able to anyone. You can have a 'special supper' for 9s. 6d. between 10.30 p.m. and 7 a.m. (soup or fruit juice or cereal, bacon and egg, kipper, spaghetti or ravioli and tea or coffee) or a full meal of, say, potted shrimps, steak and fruit salad or Camembert. I believe the hotel started its all-night service because of the erratic times at which its many airline crew guests arrive. If you feel like cooking your own blotting paper and haven't anything in the fridge try the machines outside some Express Dairies where you can get eggs, bacon, sausages, butter, cheese, milk or yoghourt. Take a supply of florins with you. This is the only coin the machine takes. The change comes with the goods you buy.
Boots, the chemists, at Piccadilly Circus are open all night and so are John Bell and Croyden at 50 Wigmore Street. If you can't find a taxi, London Transport's travel inquiry office, ABB 1234, will tell you about last (or first) tubes and all-night bus services. Men who've taken their girl friends home and who decide that it's not worth their going home can sleep it off in the Savoy Turkish Baths, 91 Jermyn Street, where they can stay till noon next day for the ludicrous charge of only 15s.
A mixture of strawberries and cheese sounds rather bizarre—a sort of feast for field-mice, but if you can get hold of the little cream cheeses from France it is an exquisite combination of flavours. loli-Creme, Fontainebleau, Creme Nantais, Chatnbourcy or any mild, unsalted cream cheese will do. Just pile the strawberries on top of the cheese (cut up if they are large) and sprinkle with castor sugar. A little cheese goes a long way. So do a very' few strawberries, which makes this a good pudding to serve early in the season when strawberries are expensive• A sybaritic refinement is to pour thick cream over the berries. Not the insipid white stuff (double or single) bottled by some of the big dairies, but rich, yellow cream—something not too easy to find unless you live in the country. I have found that an ideal match for the French cream cheese is Creme d'Isigny, a fresh cream imported from France. Both this and the cheeses can be bought from Roche Ltd. (14 Old Comp' ton Street, W1), and a thick, unpasteurised cream which would honour the finest fruits is sold by Wholefood Ltd. (112 Baker Street, WI).
This seems to be a good season for asparagus• Even that aristocrat of the breed asperge d'Argenteitil is costing less than the canned or frozen stuff. This pale giant asparagus from France is worth looking for. It can be eaten from tip to stalk (if it has been properly peeled) and two or three pieces make a generous helping. I think it is at its best served cold with a vinaigrette sauce (made with lemon juice, not vinegar), but that is merely a personal opinion.
Asperge d'Argenteuil is exceptionally brittle in its raw state, so the greengrocer may have a basket full of broken sticks which he's glad to sell cheaply. They don't look very pretty, and the tip may be missing, but in flavour there is nothing much to choose between the fractured pieces and the more elegant unbroken stalks.
However good the asparagus, it can be ruined by being boiled horizontally. The tip is pulped before the stem is cooked. It should be stood up- right in boiling water (slightly sweetened as well as salted) in a covered pan, so that the protruding tips are steamed, not boiled.
This is best accomplished in an asparagus pan (Madame Cadec sells these in her Greek Street shop for 35s. 6d.), but most of us can just about afford the asparagus let alone a special pan to cook it in (even if the pan can be used for broccoli as well). Our trick is to up-end the top part of the double boiler over the large lower pan, so that it sits on the stove looking like Tweedledee presenting arms. This gives the 'grass' plenty of headroom, but not enough space for it to slip down into the water.
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