About The Observer

I spent the weekend with my parents, who still insist on reading the analogue papers of a Sunday morning. I don’t know whether the medium affects the message all that much, but two verbal nuggets caught my eye, both of them related to food.

One is Jay Rayner’s appropriation of a phrase – via his late mother Claire, and ultimately from Bernard Levin – to describe someone who has no faith, but accepts his cultural inheritance through the medium of food: “Pantry Jew”. And from the Reverend Richard Coles, pointing out how every diner’s background and memory is subtly different, making any notion of culinary authenticity fuzzy to say the least: “Nostalgia is bespoke”.