Consuming Interest

Travel by Night

By LESLIE ADRIAN Last week, for an ITV divertissement, those high-pressure cooks, the Cradocks, devoured the 800-odd miles from London to Nice in sixteen hours in a Rolls. They left London at 5 a.m., crossed by air ferry and drove up to the Casino in Nice at 9 p.m., with Mrs. Cradock in such tiara-ed splendour that French onlookers were asking if she were not a star of the silent screen.

Even if I had a Rolls, I doubt whether I would have the stamina for this kind of endurance test, but John Antill, the photographer, who makes two or three business and pleasure trips to Spain and Italy every year, tells me he has at last found a way of getting to the sun with maximum speed and minimum fatigue. I think his system sounds worth trying.

The secret• is to travel by night : a rest after work, then dinner and the drive to the Channel to catch either a late plane or the last boat ferry. This, he finds, is much less tiring than rising at dawn. I am inclined to agree, for I find one has a slow recovery rate after those very early morning drives and must spend extra time stopping for frequent morale-raising refreshments.

Clear of the customs, Mr. Antill drives all night with one halt at an overnight garage with a snack bar. 'Many of the newer ones in France also have rooms to let and, if I am very tired after this first night without sleep, I go to bed for an hour or so,' he tells me.

He stops again at 8 a.m., books into an hotel and sleeps till 2 p.m., when he lunches well and spends an hour or so seeing local sights. At 4 p.m. he goes to bed again and sleeps till 7, then he has a quick dinner and starts the all-night drive.

`The big advantage is that traffic is negligible and you can keep up a high average speed for hours on end. Even the transport lorries do not slow you up a great deal because they are so well lit. You don't suffer from the heat and hotel rooms are never a problem as you are book- ing in when everyone else is booking out.'

In this way Mr. Antill has almost equalled the Cradocks's performance. In a 'souped-up' Ford Prefect he left Perpignan at 5.30 p.m, one evening and arrived in Boulogne in time to catch a boat at 11.30 p.m. the next night, a distance of just over 700 miles.

* * * The over-the-counter service of spit-roasted chicken is a new development in the catering trade. With the current low prices of small roasters and the introduction of American auto- matic spits to this country, chicken houses and barbecue bars are springing up all over London.

One of the most enterprising is the Dover Buttery in Dover Street, where the proprietors have made an arrangement with the telephone subscriber at CHIswick 2536 to have messages passed on. In letters on the dial, this spells out CHICKEN and between the hours of 12 midday and 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. and 11.30 p.m. you can dial CHICKEN, and a three-pound bird, ready for the table and either hot or cold, will be delivered to addresses within four miles of Dover Street. The hot birds are wrapped for in- sulation in tinfoil and then in greaseproof bags: the vans have heated containers. The charge is 18s. 6d., and the service has proved so successful that the firm have now extended the menu and Will supply a complete meal, including grilled sole and scampi.

In Chelsea there is a new chicken house in Milner Street. The proprietor, Mrs. Lloyd- Bostock, supplies two-pound nine-week roasters from her own farm in Sussex, and the over-the- counter charge for the spit-roasted bird is 12s. 6d. They will deliver free in the immediate vicinity. In the restaurant, a meal of half a chicken with bacon and bread-sauce costs 8s., and I have found it remarkably good.

Lyons Corner Houses now run a chicken- roasting service, and charge 15s. for a two- pound bird in a plastic bag, and I notice that 'Gardner's Supermarket in- Kensington will roast chickens you buy there free.

In all cases I have found the quality of spit- roasted chickens reasonably good. The birds have been tender; occasionally they have been a little flavourless, probably because these were not open-range birds. With regard to prices, I think you are paying fairly heavily for service when you consider that the average retail price of a roaster today is 3s. 6d. a pound.

* The jam jar is one simple item in the kitchen cupboard which, so far, seems to have escaped the eye of the scientific-packaging expert. To be precise, it is the jain-jar cover which needs some improvement. In my cupboard at the moment I have jars with three different types of lid, and two of them are fiddling and complicated to open. One, a Hartley's jar, is of flexible metal. To open it you must find a pin to pierce the top. As I do not like winkles, I do not keep pins in the kitchen, so a separate journey must be made to the work- box. After the pin-piercing you raise the flanged edges of the lid. The snag about this type—apart from the pin operation—is that you must care- fully rebend the edges each time you replace the lid or it will fall off.

Type two, in this case on a Chivers' jar, re- quires the use of a teaspoon to level up the metal flaps which hold the lid to the rim. When you are opening a pound jar, this is not too difficult —provided you do not get hold of a soft-silver spoon by mistake—but if, as I do, you prefer the two-pound size, you will find it a feat of strength to lever the flap up.

The third type, used on Robertson's jam, is a simple reinforced-paper cover and seems to be entirely satisfactory and easy to open. I find the top is durable enough to last the life of a jar of jam. These are presumably cheaper to produce and fit than the complicated metal lids, and I can- not- understand why they should not be more generally used.

One other container I should also like to see redesigned is the antiquated Colman's mustard tin with its difficult-to-open lid.