Luxury!

Luxury. What does that mean to you? What about -

We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence  a month, come home, and dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

Thank you, Monty Python and the Four Yorkshiremen. Hearing that recently and the response, Luxury! was the inspiration for today's column.

Funny how trends can change. Take a commodity now found in virtually every house in the land, used daily without a second thought. Yet for a good three centuries sugar was to be found only in the houses of the very wealthy. And white refined sugar would have been regarded as the crème de la crème. (It was packed into in large cone shaped moulds, had you ever wondered why Rio's Sugarloaf Mountain was so called.) At great feasts chefs would be instructed to use it copiously to flaunt the wealth of the host. That also explains why so many recipes from several hundred years ago combine meat and sweet stuff, which seems very odd to our tastes today. 

But the opposite journey, from peasant food to expensive delicacy, has happened too. Consider the oyster. In 1915 when T S Eliot wished to symbolise a dodgy part of town, he wrote of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/ And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells. Once a symbol of poverty, now 22 quid for 6 at Dean Banks's Dulse restaurant, by no means the dearest in town.

The laws of supply and demand obviously come into it, the overfishing of oysters having much to do with the price now. I suppose that also accounts for the ludicrous prices which the rarest caviar can fetch. A few years ago a kilo of some top marque sold for £20,000. But here's the rub. Who actually likes it? I don't mind it, but I'm with the Michael Caine character in the film Sleuth who observed that it tasted just like fish eggs.

Truffles? The whiff of death and decay does little for me, and I've yet to encounter truffle oil that isn't completely disgusting. And don't get me started on Wagyu beef and its many imitators. One can only congratulate the Japanese for one of the world's great con tricks. Good beef should have a marbling of fat.

Wagyu is just fat with a thin marbling of beef, and it tastes accordingly. In Kanazawa market I paid a fiver to sample not much more than a sliver. Thanks goodness I didn't waste more on a whole steak.

But I'm not totally impervious to the delights of the higher priced food stuffs. These days I suppose top class beef comes into that category. I'd rather have some good stuff once a month than low quality once a week. And the delights of the sea can certainly get my juices going. Not much from a decent fishmonger comes cheap. It certainly has to be a high day or a holiday to justify the purchase of Dover sole, turbot or halibut.

And that's before we get to crustacea. Crabs, strangely, aren't too dear if you buy them whole. I assume that's because they're so fiddly to prepare, which explains the inflated price in supermarket tubs. Many, I'm sure, will be astonished to learn that as late as the early 60s, Scottish fishermen would throw langoustines back over the side as there was no demand. As we all know, sadly they now fetch a premium price. Even more sad that about 80% of the catch ends up in markets in France or Spain.

The best till last? Well, yes, I love lobster, but subject to one or two caveats. The flesh will deteriorate very quickly after death. There is little point in buying a vacuum pack in the supermarket. L had never shared my enthusiasm until the day I went on a fish cookery course. The lobsters arrived freshly caught at 1130. We despatched and cooked them immediately, and we had one on our dinner table that evening. Bliss.

Let's throw this open for debate. What are your favourites? And are there any of the so called de luxe items which you just can't stand?