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Alex talked about pretentious restaurants the other day, and last night, I had the opposite experience.

Out of work at ten pm, and went to meet the girlfriend, who was still slaving over a hot palimpsest in the Archaeology Department, or whatever it is she does in there. Stopped off for a pint. Or two. And a couple of whiskies. Forgot it was Sunday and all the restaurants close early. The only place open was a take-away pizza place that had an adjoining Italian bistro. I’ve had their pizzas before when it’s  am and I’m drunk, but I was more than a little dubious about using them for a sit-down meal.

I needn’t have worried. My pizza con funghi e pollo had deliciously light, fluffy dough, presumably made fresh that day, and the chicken had come off a real bird, probably one that had actually seen a field at some point. Jehane’s pasta came with salmon that had been oak-smoked over whisky-barrel chips. It was proper food, simple and filling and tasting good.

Then there was the complimentary sambuca and biscotti. And it all came to under twenty quid with drinks. I tipped.

We base so many of our shared cultural experiences around food, and then we get hung up on what the food is supposed to look like, or whether it has a French name. We go out for dinner to celebrate birthdays and weddings, and then we spend half the time worrying about napkin etiquette, or whether we’re using the right fork. We make glorious spreads for Christmas and Thanksgiving, which means that one of the family has to miss all the fun because they’re spending four hours fretting in the kitchen. We make food a central component of our lives, and then we forget to enjoy ourselves.

One of the best meals I’ve ever had was a cheap can of stewed steak, with half an Oxo cube crumbled into it, warmed over a Trangia stove outside a tent on the North Yorkshire Moors. It was cold and windy and I’d spent the day trudging pointlessly over moorland in pursuit of some badge or other, and what I wanted was something warm and comforting. Calling it a carbonade wouldn’t have helped.

Proper food is supposed to taste nice and keep you alive until the next meal. The rest is all details.

That said, it can be fun sometimes to experiment with the details, and mess with the twiddly bits. This sort of experimentation should be performed in the spirit of play. If it goes wrong, you laugh, and send for takeaway instead. At the worst you’ll have learned something, and maybe you can make it go better next time.

Okay, at worst you can burn your kitchen down, but I’m not about to let tedious facts get in the way of my carefully constructed argument.