If there's one thing that sorts the wheat from the chaff pub-grub-wise, it is the quality of a Yorkshire pud.
Now don't get me wrong, Mrs Eats and I are big fans of dear old Aunt Bessie and her "ready-in-four-minutes" alternatives . . . but only when we're cooking our own dinner.
Half the point of going out to eat is to experience the real McCoy. I mean, why buy a dog if you can bark yourself? And why fork out for a pub meal if you can be chewed to whip up a Yorkshire pudding "Chez Eats"?
What I'm trying to say is that far too many pubs these days seem to rely on the pre-packed pud. Over the years the missus and I have developed keen "pudometers" that can judge in an instant whether the Yorkies on our plates are authentic or not.
Of course, our more pedantic readers will no doubt be reaching for their green ink already to write and tell us that no Yorkshire pudding is a true Yorkshire pudding unless it's either A: made by a Tyke or B: served up in Yorkshire. But we're not that fussy.
Yorkshire's nice but it's sometimes too far for the Eatsmobile to travel, especially on a winter's day with the frost nipping at the carburettor.
Last Sunday we opted - instead -for Northumberland and a trip out along the Morpeth to Cambo road. It was a bright promising morning so we decided to stop off at the Dyke Neuk country pub and sit in their sun-filled conservatory which looks out over fields at the back.
In fact we're told that if you sit out on the terrace at dusk - preferably in the summer time of course - you might be lucky enough to see a Barn Owl out hunting. But back to the Yorkshire pudding story. Both Mrs Eats and I went for the Sunday lunch option (£6.95 for one course, £8.50 for two) . . . I chose lamb and She Who Must Be Fed had the pork.
Both came with the kind of Yorkshire pudding any Yorkshireman (or woman) would be proud to plate up.
You could tell immediately it was real because it looked, as a much more imaginative Sunday newspaper columnist than me put it recently, "like the thing you would expect swiftly to recoil from if you lifted the coverlet on the pram inhabited by the love-child of Jimmy Savile and, somehow, Henry Kissinger". He obviously doesn't like Yorkshires, but we love 'em.
I know what he means though. It was kind of squashed up and a bit ugly looking, not nice, round and regular-shaped like Bessie's offerings, bless her (how does she get them like that without machinery?)
The Yorkshires though turned out to be the stars of an otherwise not startling meal. Both servings of meat were a bit too thinly cut and the vegetables . . . carrots, peas and a mere suggestion of cabbage, as though they'd been a bit embarrassed about serving it up, were uninspiring. Worst of all, the food was lukewarm rather than piping hot, as if it had been standing around on the side waiting for an overworked waitress to come along. Although she wasn't overly busy as the place was hardly full.
Still, the pudding wasn't bad. We turned our backs on the chocolate "lumpy bumpy" (sounded a bit like rumpy pumpy and we didn't want Mrs Eats to get one of her headaches) and the lemon or hot treacle pudding and had the sticky toffee instead . . . mainly because on the menu it carried a curious, if not totally convincing, celebrity endorsement.
"This is Madonna's favourite pudding." Genuinely interested, we asked the waitress whether this was true and whether Mrs Eats might develop Madonna's figure if she ordered it, but she didn't know.
Further enquiries after our visit revealed that it is indeed the Material Girl's choice every time she visits London's posh Ivy restaurant. But as far as I know she's never been to the Dyke Neuk. She should give it a whirl . . . it turned out to be the highlight of the meal.
