The spine of the business
The Wednesday rewrite
The board is a function of the week. It is not a menu with specials bolted on: the whole of it is written on a Wednesday morning against what is actually in the cold room, and anything that cannot be filled from that is taken off until it can. This page is the mechanics of that, because it is the only part of the kitchen worth describing in advance.
What comes through the back door on a Tuesday
Three deliveries and a walk. Crates from the market garden at Trellech, which is the bulk of it. Fruit from an orchard above Penallt when there is fruit. Eggs from the smallholding on the Lydart road, which is also where the walk ends, because it is quicker to fetch them than to wait in. Then the box: whatever the grower has too much of that week, offered rather than ordered, at whatever it weighs.
Everything is weighed at the door and written on a sheet before it is put away. The sheet is not for the books, it is for Wednesday: by the time the board is written, the only thing that matters is how many kilos of each thing there are and how long they will hold. A crate of something that will not last the week becomes two lines rather than one.
Who writes the board, and who argues with it
There are two of us on the stove. Whoever is cooking that week writes the board, in pencil, on the back of the delivery sheet. The other one reads it through and says which lines cannot be prepped inside the hours there are, and that argument is what decides the board. Nobody is the arbiter of taste here. The arbiter is the clock and the size of the oven.
The board is then copied onto the wall by the pass in chalk, and onto the card by the till for the counter. Three copies, one hand, no printing, because a printed board is a board that has stopped being able to change on a Thursday.
What gets cut, and on what grounds
Cutting is the part that makes the rest work. Four grounds, in the order they get used.
It needs picking at service
nobody can leave the stove at half past seven
Anything finished with a leaf or a flower that has to come out of the beds while the room is full is cut on the Wednesday. It is a good dish and it is somebody else’s dish. With two of us on five tables, the walk up the slope is the thing that cannot be afforded.
It needs a box ordered in
the slot comes off instead
If a line can only be filled by ringing somebody on the Wednesday afternoon for a box to make the number up, the line comes off and the board runs on six. This is the rule that keeps the board honest, and it is the rule that is hardest to keep in a thin week.
The van has not been
the fish line waits for Thursday
The fish slot is left blank on the Wednesday and written on the Thursday morning, after the delivery, which is why it is the line most often struck out and written again. When it is gone it is rubbed out the same day rather than left up as a hope.
The oven is already spoken for
bread has first call, every time
One oven, two bakes, and a slow dish that wants six hours at a low heat. Where those collide, the bread wins, the slow dish gets the overnight, and the pudding becomes something cooked on the stove instead. The board tells you what the oven allowed.
The batch sheet we scale from
Recipes here are written for ten, because ten is what one pot holds. Scaling them for a Friday is done on a sheet like this one: a factor worked out once, then every line multiplied by it and rounded up to something the scales and jugs can actually do. The soup base below is the week’s standing example.
Done by hand, the sheet is one division and then five multiplications. The factor is the covers wanted divided by the covers the recipe feeds: thirty-four over ten is three point four. Then every line is multiplied by that factor and rounded up: two hundred and forty grams of barley becomes eight hundred and sixteen, written up as eight hundred and twenty; six onions become twenty point four, written up as twenty-one; one point eight litres of stock becomes six point one two, written up as six point one five; ninety millilitres of vinegar becomes three hundred and six, written up as three hundred and ten; sixty grams of butter becomes two hundred and four, written up as two hundred and five. At that size it is four pots rather than one, so the seasoning is checked pot by pot.
A guide for the prep list. It is a rounding sheet, not a recipe, and it has no opinion about whether the dish is any good at four times the size.
What Saturday night leaves behind
Sunday and Monday the kitchen is shut, so whatever is left at the end of Saturday service decides part of the following week. Bones go on for stock before the stove is turned off. Anything cooked goes into the two of us. Anything raw that will hold until Tuesday is weighed back onto the sheet, which is why the first line of a new board is sometimes the last line of the old one, written differently.
That is the whole cycle: weighed in on Tuesday, written on Wednesday, corrected on Thursday, rubbed out when it has gone, and weighed back in on Saturday night.
Back to the board