Eating Owt: Radio Times

OUR guest was late, having carefully been directed to Scruton and gone to Scorton instead. Doubtless it is a common mistake, and beneficial because on the car radio whilst relocating he'd heard something about a meeting to discuss Christianity and cannibalism.

"To be followed by a finger buffet," the advertisement had added.

Scruton is five or six miles west of Northallerton, a bit out of the way though the Wensleydale Railway used to find it easily enough, home to one of the precious few parish churches dedicated to St Radegund (a French nun said to have combined beauty and piety) and to the Coore Arms, named after a former squire. Scorton is elsewhere.

It was Saturday lunchtime, match day, and we found the pub greatly agreeable from the moment of warm welcome by a big daft dog called Max and a landlord called Keith Cole who unapologetically supported Queens Park Rangers.

QPR had recently lost at home to Vauxhall Motors, or Fred's Fish Shop, or some such minnow. It was because the pitch was too small, said Keith.

The bar was warmed by a handsome coal stove, hung with pictures of old footballers, decorated with a joy-to-the-world Christmas tree and one or two vaguely piratical carvings, immaculately kept and inescapably empty.

Clinton Stephen, the chef, specially donned his whites - red and whites, probably, since he's one of the 99 per cent of all known Britons who supports Manchester United - and not only cooked and waited on but found by request the Arsenal match (12.15 kick off) on the radio.

It was a mistake; they were playing Man United.

We ate in the roomy restaurant out the back, the tomato soup - creamy, herby, good value at £2.50 - a lone and singly appreciated starter.

The steak and kidney pie was excellent, rich gravy, lovely light short crust, a real pie chart topper. Chips didn't look home-made but were, and much the better for such domesticity.

The Boss considered her haddock to be very good also, sensitively cooked and not half burned to death. Manchester United had won; Clinton tried commendably to remember that the customer is always right, even if they support the Arsenal.

It was all accompanied by a nice pint of cask-conditioned John Smith's - there's Tetley's, too - and by the cans of ginger beer - the lost soul was a Methodist minister - which they'd gone out of their way to find.

Back in the still deserted bar, we drank good coffee by the fire, so comfortable that we almost missed the kick off at Northallerton. If a case of kill or Coore, as an ambivalent cannibal might say, find Scruton every time.

l The Coore Arms, Scruton, Northallerton (01609 748215.) Meals 12-2pm and from 5 30pm, except Mondays. No problem for the disabled.

THE radio with the match on, it should be stressed, was a matter between consenting adults in private. The next day we tuned in for Sunday lunch to Caf Poco in Wolsingham and were ineluctably accompanied by Radio Two.

Caf Poco, Italian for "tiny", is almost entirely admirable. Run by the Lomas family, who once had La Stalla in Newcastle, it sells everything from fresh pasta to home made cakes and at this time of the rolling year, Christmas trees as well.

The cooking is refreshing, the atmosphere vibrantly jolly and distinctively different, three course Sunday lunch (£8.95) a happy mix of traditional and more improbable choices. On Sunday evenings there's tapas.

The Boss's tomato and mozzarella salad, for example, was considered the best in years, her salmon simply and successfully presented and cooked.

We'd begun with an Italian Christmas concoction, long name shortly forgotten, but broadly delicious pigs' trotter sausages - sourced from Jesmond - served with what almost amounted to risotto.

"Peasant food," said The Boss, but approvingly, as in peasant change. Half roasted to death in recent weeks, we followed with a salmon and pasta dish and with a French apple torte (the initials of which spell fat) and two spoons.

So there's this delightful little place in Wolsingham Market Place and all the time they're not just playing Radio Two but what appeared to be Geriatrics' Corner, a show so sure of its target audience that they not only announced that Edmondo Ross was 92 that very day but probably expected them to break into a walking frame cha-cha in salute.

They played Mr Wonderful and St Teresa of the Roses and something called Billy Billy Bayou Watch How You Go, a song probably made famous by King Harold.

Aurally it was reminiscent of an old folks' home, where the television assaults the infirm whether they want to watch it or not.

This, at any rate, was Two much by a long chalk. The rest is silence.

GOODNESS knows it wasn't before time, but The Bridge in Durham - beneath the railway arches - has much changed for the better. A Cajun chicken baguette with particularly well dressed leaves was good value at £2.95. Nicely turned out for Christmas, too.

Confit corner

THE word "confit", said last week's column, was one of those foody terms which suddenly seem to have arrived from outer space - "like a sort of culinary crop circle".

Several readers disagreed. David Jacklin from Darlington found confit recipes both in Elizabeth David's French Country Cooking - circa 1951, he suspects - and in his 1960 New Larouse Gastronomique. "Confit: meat of pork, goose, duck turkey, etc., cooked in its own fat to prevent it coming into contact with the air."

Andrew Tucker from the University of Durham geography department came across confit - pronounced konfi -in Collins' 21st Century Dictionary, published in 2000. It was defined as a preserve, with an example of "a preserve of duck".

Marjorie Nicholson's dictionary may be older, since it describes "confit" as obsolete and the same as "comfit" - "a sweetbread, a sugar coated seed or almond."

Presumably as in liquorice comfits, otherwise torpedoes, in the days when every corner had a shop. Does anyone still sell them, and are they still twopence a quarter?

Robin Smith, manager of the Ramside Hall Hotel near Durham, agrees with the theory that such terms seem suddenly to appear from nowhere. "Confit is like coulis," says Robin. "No one really knows what a coulis is."

We told him that coulis was a dam, and that the late Lonnie Donegan had a number one hit about it, but that's a joke that only the over 50s could possibly understand.

ONLY the inexorably attentive will have followed the direct line these past six weeks from the Costa Coffee outlet in Ottakar's Darlington bookshop to former Newcastle United chairman Lord Westwood. It runs and runs, nonetheless.

Lord Westwood, said by old jokers to swap his eye patch when the Magpies were doing badly, was also a director of Hornby, the toy train people.

Many years ago, says John Briggs - who supplies a photograph as improbable proof - Hornby took over Tri-ang and brought out a red liveried GWR "Hall" class locomotive called Lord Westwood, with one of the cab windows blacked out in its search for authenticity.

We only met him once, at a Newcastle lunch in 1977 to mark a tie-up between the Gosforth Park Hotel and the Selfridge in London, the John North column indignantly observing that a room at the Selfridge cost £21.

Like the chap at the Coore Arms, the Selfridge's head chef was also a Queens Park Rangers nut, but his name was Erich Himowicsz.

...and finally, since space will sadly not allow the joke which Brenda Boyd kindly sent about the prawn again Christian, another from the bairns' Christmas cracker collection.

Why do cows have bells?

Because their horns don't work.

We broadcast again on Christmas Eve.