Please forgive the short intermission caused by a mission to Louisiana. I arrived safely back at Heathrow but unfortunately my suitcase did not, it’s enough to make you doubt the joys of air-travel. A couple of days later and according to the mighty computer the suitcase has landed, perhaps one day soon I will get my clothes back. To start our attack on the deep south we spent two days on Avery Island near Lafayette, which is home to Tabasco® pepper sauce and the McIlhenny dynasty – it’s an amazing place, ancient trees draped with Spanish Moss; a prosperous salt mine;  elegantly decorated wood-panelled mansions with fine Turkey carpets; huge sheds with towering stacks of oak barrels each filled with crushed peppers and salt – maturing for three years, an implausibly long time for a mass market product.

The recipe for Tabasco sauce is deceptively simple, it contains peppers, salt and vinegar, with two crucial added ingredients time and the skill. Every day another 700,000 bottles of sauce roll off the production line. What is more impressive is that this is a 200 year old family business. The saying “clogs to clogs in two generations” is often proved correct in Britain where each successive generation tends to squander the fortune accumulated by the one before. In contrast the McIlhenny clan have been making sauce for a dozen generations, and each has handed on the business in a stronger position. Some serious wealth has been accumulated and all from a single product, because despite the introduction of line extensions like the Habanero; Chipotle; and Pepper & Garlic sauces the original  little red bottle still rules the roost.

Each year a member of the family evaluates the 40 acres of peppers grown on Avery Island to select elite plants that will provide the seeds for the growers around the world – predominantly in Mexico and South America, but the McIlhenny’s are running trials as far away as South Africa. The peppers are picked by hand when each is perfectly ripe (an important bit of quality control) then they are mashed and packed into old, oak, whiskey barrels with salt and allowed to ferment before being sealed up for the long maturation process. After about three years it’s time to taste the mash, the top is knocked off the barrel and a teaspoonful extracted. The tasting etiquette is bizarre – you pop the chilli paste on your tongue and after about 5 seconds spit it out, by then (for all but the most hardened chilli-heads) the fire will have made the snot shoot out of your nose and your tear ducts go into overdrive. When the man with the iron tongue and the experience judges the paste to be ready it’s simply a matter of adding vinegar and stirring for 28 days before straining off the seeds and bottling the sauce. Tabasco sauce is a triumphant example of doing a simple thing very well, as is so often the case consistency is everything.

Charles Campion

Last week saw the final episode of a Cook’s Tour of Spain.… and before you start to mumble about “yet more gastro-travelogue”, and “must be great for the film crew” it should be noted that this series was surprisingly good. When Thomasina Miers and her sidekick Guy Grieve made their earlier programme “Wild Gourmets” for Channel Four the whole elaborate “living off the land” concept rather fell apart, foraging is a very seasonal business and you would need a couple of years to make such programmes without cheating.

The Spanish venture was much more successful. For once the researchers had managed to find some real and authentic cooks, food producers and fishermen. The elements of the programme shot in Spain were charming and informative. The other side to the format – cooking dems shot in a British kitchen – was also well done. At no point was anything dumbed down to the level of frozen mashed potato. Guy had a different role this time out, he was to be on hand at all times in case anything needed shooting and in the last episode he dutifully nailed a chamois. The animal made its way to the grill after we had seen both the kill and the gralloching in the open air – and to think that Jamie agonised over whether to show a sheep being killed!

All the recipes featured seemed accessible and interesting whether it was the light fluffy meatballs made by the matriarch of a saffron growing family or the technique for cooking beans over an open fire by stringing the whole pods on a wire, (something I shall certainly be trying this autumn). A dish of baked onions – cut a cross in the top of each and add slivers of garlic; splosh on plenty of oil; add some jamon and some blue cheese; bake in a hot oven – looked simple, honest, authentic and appetising. You could almost catch the  smell of it wafting from the screen. Thomasina has good Spanish and the happy knack of seeming interested in the local cooking techniques and styles – that enthusiasm brought the best out of the Spaniards and made the series most enjoyable. Cook’s Tour proved that cookery programmes do not have to be either gimmick laden or hardcore reality television. Sometimes they can succeed by being well made, informative and entertaining.

Charles Campion

While writing April’s monthly ingredients piece for the Evening Standard I ended up chatting with an amiable fishmonger in Barnes and the topic was wild salmon. The Scottish wild fish are becoming more numerous as the season progresses and he was saying that the price had moved from £55 per kilo to £50 and back to £55 in the last fortnight. To the home cook that means wild salmon will cost about £12 a head for a decent sized hunk and for the margin conscious restaurateur that translates as a price to the punter of £30 plus vat – over £35 a portion. Can a piece of fish ever be worth that kind of money? Surprisingly the answer is yes. When compared with the lean, toned flesh of a wild salmon the farmed variety is very much second best and how expensive something is depends very much on your viewpoint. By chance a rugby trip to the South West of France over Easter meant that I found myself wandering around the covered market in Biarritz. There were several fishmongers with magnificent displays and all proudly showing off wild Atlantic salmon from the nearby river Adour. And the price? 120€ per kilo – which by my maths means the French shoppers were paying around £100 a kilo for wild salmon. What struck me most keenly was a pang of jealousy, I wished that Britain had the kind of food culture where cooks would happily pay a king’s ransom for something that was truly excellent. You have to speculate that most Londoners would think the Barnes Fish Shop £55 a kilo for a piece of fish a bridge to far, so whatever would they would make of the £100 a kilo Biarritz price tag?

Some chefs have the culinary equivalent of perfect pitch, and often it is not the manner of their cooking so much as the way they put a menu together that makes for delighted diners. The skills on show at Theo Randall’s restaurant in the Intercontinental Hotel are exemplary but his menu planning is even better. Randall’s was the venue for the most recent meeting of the Tabasco Club – a loose association of hardened trouble makers that recruits its members from the restaurant business and the wine trade. It was the perfect Spring lunch:

Insalata di granchio – fresh Devon crab with Florence fennel, mixed Italian leaves, Tabasco aioli and bruschetta, very fresh crab, a perfect match with the crunchy slivers of fennel.

Cappelletti di vitello – delicate egg-yellow pasta with a rich veal and pancetta stuffing sauced with nothing more complicated than melted butter – delicious.

Costata di agnello – subtitled “wood roast spring rack of lamb with slow cooked peas, broad beans, mint and violet artichokes. Salsa d’erbe” Two double lamb chops perfectly cooked, pink and tender atop a splendid mound of peas, beans and artichokes (all the veg fresh and flown in from Puglia) with a chopped herb and mint salsa. I cannot wait until we have fresh English broad beans and peas, then I shall recreate this dish myself.

Amalfi Lemon tart - this was absolutely jaw-dropping, delicate pastry and a bright orange, quivering, lemony bit. Judging by the colour the filling must have been made using eggs with particularly orange yolks. It tasted remarkable – the perfect balance between sweet and sharp. A candidate for “Best-ever” status, which is all the more impressive as there are a great many magnificent lemon tarts out there.

Charles Campion

Barnes Fish Shop, 18 Barnes High Street, SW13 (020 8876 1297)

Theo Randall, Intercontinental,1 Hamilton Place, W1 (020 7409 3131)