For shame!

I don't know what makes me sadder in this article - the behaviour of the animal rights terrorists or the final capitulation of the restaurant. Members of an animal rights group threw bricks through the windows at Midsummer House, attacked their conservatory with glass-etching fluid, used paint stripper on the doors and spray-painted the building with slogans in protest at the restaurant's use of foie gras. Chef Daniel Clifford has, after consultation with police, reluctantly responded by taking foie gras off the menu. Yet another let-down for diners in Cambridge, in a week which has also seen Bruno's Brasserie announce its closure.

I bang on at length about foie gras here. It's delicious, it's been around since the ancient Egyptians, and it is not necessarily a cruel product. I recommend a trip to any of the small farms in the Dordogne which practise gavage, or force-feeding, if you are worried or curious about the animal welfare issue. I visited such a farm a few years before I started Gastronomy Domine, and saw happy, fat birds who often line up to be fed at mealtimes. Prices for the terroir-raised French stuff are much higher than those for the mass-produced Chinese product, which I do have reservations about: reservations which stop me from buying cheap foie gras. I'm perfectly happy to eat it and serve it to my friends otherwise; foie gras is a tremendous delicacy.

A quick Google (I'm not doing these guys the favour of linking to their site) for the people responsible for the awful vandalism at Midsummer House reveals a horrible level of sophistry (their basic conceit is that the fatty liver is a diseased liver, and that therefore Midsummer House is selling diseased meat) and a pretty transparent credo - they've got several banners up saying "Ban foie gras! Go veggie!" Violent, militant vegetarians are a group that have always bemused me utterly. It's all very well softly denying your canine teeth exist and lovingly stroking a chicken, but when you do this at the same time as buzzing a brick through a restaurant window at 7pm, you've got a problem.

They're denying the little person on the reading side of the menu a choice. If enough people are buying foie gras in shops and eating it in restaurants to make it a commercially viable product in this country (which it is; Selfridges have stopped selling it because of the animal terrorist threat, but you'll still find it in the food halls at Fortnums and Harrods, as well as at a myriad smaller delis and, of course, on a bazillion restaurant tables), then this looks a lot to me like those diners have weighed the moral case and come out on the side of a nice, juicy foie. For god's sake - you can buy the stuff at Costco, which suggests to me that the demand is out there. It's Midsummer House's great tragedy that the restaurant's charming position, off the roads, in the middle of an approximately unpoliceable common, make it a much easier target for criminals wanting to make a violent point. Commiserations to Midsummer House, and I hope that foie gras makes its way quietly back onto the menu when the fuss has died down.

If you know anything about the attack on Midsummer House, which the staff discovered on Sunday morning, you can contact police on 0845 456 4564 or call Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111.

Roast garlic and a jar of infused honey

I managed to get my hands on a couple of bulbs of fat, golden, oak-smoked garlic this weekend. (Cambridgeshire readers should head straight over to the River Farm Smokery in Bottisham for more smoked goodies.) It's beautifully pungent stuff; years ago, I bought a plait of smoked garlic for my parents, who ended up having to keep it in the garage to prevent the whole house from taking on a smoky, garlicky taint. If you've not tried smoked garlic before, it's pretty easy to imagine, but the reality is always a little startling. This is a fiercely flavoursome product. You can make a little go a long way, but I really like to use whole cloves of it in casseroles or around roast dishes. Much of this bulb found itself being used in a roast lamb dish with beans - just follow this recipe and add about eight whole cloves of smoked garlic in place of the chopped fresh stuff - you'll need a couple of extra cloves to stuff into the skin of the lamb as well.

When garlic is smoked, its cloves soften a little and turn a lovely buttery yellow. The smoking process forces some of the natural sugars in the garlic cloves to bead on the surface of the clove, under the papery skin, becoming sticky, tacky and sweet. You can use these cloves wherever you'd use raw garlic; the whole bulb is also exceptionally good roasted. Try making roast garlic and fresh tomato pasta with a smoked bulb for great depth of flavour. I really like the roast cloves popped out of their skins and spread on a good crusty bread, sprinkled with a little salt. The squashed, roast cloves are also fantastic stirred into mashed potatoes.

Smoked garlic and honey are two flavours which, for me, seem to have been invented for each other. I kept five cloves of the garlic back to make a jar of smoked garlic honey baste. To make your own, you'll need a jar of honey (mine is some of our local wildflower honey - anything with a delicate, flowery flavour will do, though; try clover, orange blossom or lime blossom honey) and five unblemished cloves of smoked garlic. Empty the jar of honey into a saucepan and warm it with a jam thermometer in the pan until it reaches 100° C. Put the whole garlic cloves at the bottom of a sterilised jar and pour the hot honey over them, then cover and refrigerate. The garlic will start to give its smoky fragrance up to the honey almost immediately, and the honey will have a noticeable flavour after a day or so, but for best results the jar should be left for around a month before using. Brush the infused honey over meats before roasting or grilling, use as a surprisingly delicious dressing for baked apples, or spread on some toast and nibble with a glass of whisky for a midnight snack.

Bruno's Brasserie, Cambridge

Update, 19 February 2008
Sadly, Bruno's is closing after this weekend, doubtless to be replaced by yet another branch of Starbucks or Subway. Thanks to Dan for the tip.

Update, 10 July 2007
A thousand apologies to Dan from the River Farm Smokery in Bottisham, who is, in fact, responsible for the very lovely smoked tomatoes mentioned below - I mistook them for the restaurant's own. Dan - I am still having dreams about those pigeon breasts you guys provided for the beer festival. Keep up the good work!

Cambridge isn't exactly buckling under the weight of good restaurants. It's odd; Cambridge is an affluent city, and the university gives it a really cosmopolitan feel which just isn't reflected in its restaurants. We groan under the weight of a million branches of Pizza Express and chains like Café Rouge and Chez Gerard, largely thanks to the enormous property prices in the city, which mean that independent restaurants are hard-pressed to afford a pitch. There are still a few happy standouts (the place I live next door to, 12 miles outside the city, is one of them; email me if you want more details). Midsummer House, with its two Michelin Stars, is a very fine restaurant in the centre of the city, although if you, like me, are mildly annoyed rather than amused by some of the twiddles, froth and frills associated with molecular gastronomy, a visit can be a pain in the wallet you might prefer not to bear. Over in Little Shelford, Sycamore House (only open from Wednesday to Saturday) is excellent - I'll post a complete review later this year.

Bruno's Brasserie (52 Mill Road, Cambridge, CB1 2AS, Tel: 01223 312702) has been a Cambridge standard for good French bistro food for some years now. The restaurant used to have a Michelin star, and I'll admit to being a little hornswoggled by some of the aesthetic changes they've made since losing it; the food remains very good, but the linen tablecloths and napkins have gone (to be replaced by nothing at all and sad paper squares), and the restaurant has repositioned itself as a 'restaurant and gallery'. Cambridge happens to have some good galleries, especially along King's Parade (check out Primavera when you're in town for some really interesting paintings, jewellery, pottery, glass and sculpture). Bruno's is not a gallery. It's a restaurant which displays local painters' work, sometimes pretty weak, for sale to diners. Acres of canvas does not necessarily make up for the lack of a tablecloth, especially when the paintings are a bit...you know. Still - on to the food and the wine.

Linen and questionable paintings aside, I really like Bruno's. It's one of the few good restaurants I've found which can cater easily for large groups, and in the past I've been to events where friends have rented out half of the restaurant. Service was prompt and excellent even when there were thirty of us. This is good French food with some accents from other cuisines, so starters include this Salade Lyonnaise with a perfectly poached egg alongside more exotic dishes like the mussels in a lime and coriander broth.

The wine list is thoughtful and well-chosen, and there's also a good cocktail list. The restaurant was very helpful with the wine when my friend celebrated a big birthday there, and allowed the pair of us to prop ourselves up at an empty table and taste a selection from the list. Three 'palate cleansers' are also on offer between courses: a champagne and vanilla sorbet, a very lovely passionfruit and lavender sorbet and a watermelon and vodka granita. These will cost you an extra £1.50, but they're worth every penny.

Main courses are built around really excellent cuts of meat. On previous visits I've enjoyed the belly pork (which is almost always on the menu). This beef fillet was cooked exactly medium rare (often a difficult task, for some reason, in British kitchens, many of which seem to only specialise in differing shades of grey). It sat on a crisp and delicate rosti, and was topped with a fierce and very tasty Roquefort butter - sometimes the restaurant also offers a foie gras butter. Those tomatoes you can see were a lovely surprise; they were smoked in the restaurant kitchen and served cold (although one of our dining companions said he would have found them much better if they'd been hot, like the rest of the dish).

I felt like revisiting my 1980s childhood and ordered the strawberry and almond shortcake. This was served with basil leaves and a basil coulis (basil is a lovely herb with strawberries). The fragile, friable shortbread was delicately spiked with almonds, and the strawberries were cheeringly sweet given this summer of no sunshine we've been having. This reminds me - if the rain does stop any time soon, ask for a table outdoors on the lovely terrace.

If you visit Bruno's, parking on one of Mill Road's side streets or at the Queen Anne car park on Parkside is always available. The restaurant is popular, so you should be sure to make a reservation.

Eat, Cambridge - Superfood salad

Places where you can eat well and inexpensively don't proliferate in Cambridge. Fortunately, there's a branch of Eat, a take-away sandwich, soup and salad shop I first discovered when working in London about five years ago.

At the time, I was working for an art dealer in Mayfair, and there was nowhere cheap to find lunch anywhere. I found an Eat concession in the (usually very expensive) food hall at Selfridge's, and ended up visiting daily for the excellent and very fresh food, which costs no more than a Marks and Spencer sandwich.

Eat opened a shop in Cambridge (on Petty Cury) a couple of years back, and it's always packed. Head upstairs and try to get a table by the window for a great view down Sidney Street while you eat your sandwich.

There's an emphasis on food that's healthy, with wheatless sandwiches scattered among the filled baguettes and chocolate bars, but no feeling that you should be eating the healthier options, or that eating healthily is a penance. Regular readers will be aware that a consumption of superfoods is not one of my priorities - this said, this Superfoods salad is one of the best thing Eat does, right up there with the hot sausage and mustard mash pie.

This salad is full of lightly steamed vegetables, which have been prepared carefully so they don't lose any of their crunch or their emerald green. There's calabrese broccoli in there, some fresh peas and broad beans, and butternut squash, which has been cooked to a perfect, toothsome softness and rolled in poppy seeds. Raw, sprouting seeds feature strongly, with a pinch of strongly flavoured, sprouting onion seeds scattered on top, and crisp baby beansprouts in the mix. A scoop of goat's cheese, some toasted seeds, raw, shredded beetroot, salad leaves and a sharp dressing made with lemon juice finish the salad.

Of course, I ruined the health-giving properties of the salad by drinking a diet cola with it. Still - yum. If you're near a branch, drop in and give them a try.

Beer or pudding?

Meantime Chocolate Beer, from the Greenwich brewery, is, they say, specifically aimed at women, who, according to those marketing it, drink alcopops in preference to beer. Nonsense. Some of the best nights (and worst mornings) of my life have been courtesy of the Cambridge Beer Festival, where both Mr Weasel and I have 'worked' (I use the term advisedly) as staff in previous years. One of the things that swung the choosing of our present house for me was its handy location next to a real-ale freehouse with a fantastic restaurant (nothing like having your Fenland ale within staggering distance - those who email me and appear reasonably sane will be told where it is, but I'm not publishing its name here for fear of people breaking into the house to steal my cake). Beer and I have a glorious, long and ultimately pretty intimate relationship. Girlie beers are not for me.

Or are they? A while ago, when Sainsbury's started stocking Meantime Chocolate Beer, I thought I would try an experimental bottle of the stuff. Damn me if they haven't come up with something grown-up, silky and both beery and chocolatey at the same time. I may be a real-ale bore, but this stuff, marketed to death and not out of a pump (it is, however, bottle-conditioned, which means that new beer and yeast is added to the finished beer in the bottle, making it finish its fermentation and develop fizz after the lid has been put on) is just magnificent. There's not a hint of sweetness to it; any chocolate flavour is the smooth, dark, dry taste you get from a very high cocoa-mass chocolate and not overpowering, and it combines beautifully with this extremely malty, quietly hoppy beer to make something quite disturbingly drinkable. A note of vanilla ties the malt and chocolate together. This is definitely not a novelty beer. If you're in Sainsbury's, pick up a bottle; I think you'll like it.

Now, clearly, buying only one bottle of beer would be the action of someone who wasn't thinking awfully hard. I was thinking hard. So I bought another. My second bottle was one of Liefmans' utterly gorgeous Kriek, or cherry beer, which comes wrapped in a pretty twizzle of printed paper.

Perhaps I do like girlie beers.

Liefmans Kriek is considered one of the very best cherry beers. (Kriek, by the way, is pronounced 'Creek', if ever you are in Belgium and struck with a terrible craving.) It's an unexpectedly sour drink which almost makes your mouth pucker; tart and fruity, but rounded and terribly, terribly delicious.

The beer is a deep, wine-red, with a pretty pink head. (No photograph in the glass, I'm afraid; I forgot to take one before I started drinking, and the glass has lipstick and fingerprints on it. Disaster.) It's unfiltered and unsweetened (important, this; lots of cherry beer is sweetened, and it's not anything like as good), and so full of cherries they almost dance in front of your eyes as you sip it. There's a hint of almond, possibly from the cherry stones. It's like a wonderful fruit juice. A wonderful fruit juice that makes you fall down and giggle.

Yeast. This week it's my number one microbe.