At The Bell Inn, Tim Hayward faces his fears: liver and Oxfordshire

Food freaks love to talk about the provenance of what we’re eating. We like nosh with a narrative. The more convoluted the better and the more twisted and extended the tale, the more we love to spin it out over a long drink.

Take, for example, the Gilda. It starts with the ancient history of olive production in southern France and Spain, although arguably, as a Basque speciality, it’s even older. The Basques gave us pintxos (aka tapas, which is what happens when you build a culture around bar snacks but know nothing of Twiglets or Scampi Fries). Some of these snacks come as bandilleros, on skewers, named after the little spears used in bullfighting. The best of these, currently fashionable in London restaurants, is the Gilda, a Gordal olive, an anchovy and a guindilla pepper, allegedly first nailed together in bar Casa Vallés in San Sebastián in the 1940s. They named it after Rita Hayworth’s character in Gilda, reputedly one of the few American movies permitted in Franco’s Spain.

See? It’s a great yarn. Plenty to get you through the first course, though what it doesn’t explain is how Gildas end up on the menu of a pub near Lechlade in the Cotswolds.

The Bell Inn is not one of those honeyed stone classics, gazing smugly out on to an immaculate Cotswold village green, with wide-enough parking bays for Range Rovers and a suspiciously unmuddied boot rack in the porch. It’s a worryingly authentic, low-ceilinged country boozer, wrapped around a small courtyard on the road that leaves Langford. It is not a busy road. Maybe nobody leaves Langford. Maybe they all left a long time ago. That would have been a mistake, because the pub, which was taken over by Peter Creed and Tom Noest in 2017, is an absolute keeper.

My visit to The Bell was based on several recommendations, though emphatically not that of Michelin’s website, which still seems to think you might only want to stay in a country pub while visiting more starred establishments nearby. This might suit you, I suppose, but if it does, we can’t be friends any more. If you can find it in your heart to prefer a 14-course menu de dégustation to buttermilk fried chicken with aioli, we honestly don’t have much in common.

You see, anyone can fry chicken. God knows, you’ll pass 20 great practitioners on your cab ride to dinner this very evening. But Noest and Creed have thought it through. You need brown chicken meat. Strong, well-worked leg muscle, which carries all the flavour. You need to know that buttermilk works as a marinade because of its lactic acid component, which can render tough meat perfectly palatable after something like 41.5 minutes, and then 30 seconds later effectively dissolves it into something that tastes like a sofa cushion inexplicably drenched in Heinz Cream of Chicken soup. At the point of perfection, they dredge it in homemade breadcrumbs, not bloody panko, and fry it at an unimaginably low temperature. Aioli accompanies it like Barenboim accompanied Du Pré: really rather well.

You’ll be aware of kohlrabi, the ugly turnip that comes in the Vegetable Delivery Box of Guilt and is still there at the end of the week. It is the shape of a Muppet’s head that was eventually considered just a little too disturbing to put on television and is the colour of gangrene. It does, however, have an incredibly subtle flavour, like an aniseedy radish, and a crisp texture and preternatural freshness. Sliced or grated to the finest ribbons, it combines felicitously with shredded white crab meat. The juices born of this union, seasoned with flakes of chilli, are then soaked up in breadcrumbs. As God is my witness, ladies and gentlemen, that is a starter. Understated, balanced, simple and frankly startling.

You know I can’t be trusted near a turbot. If flat fish ever get full legal rights, they’ll put an ankle tag on me that shrieks if I go within 500 metres of a fishmonger. I’m not proud of this. I had a difficult childhood. But wood-fired turbot brings subtle smokiness and caramelises all that lovely, sticky, gelatinous nonsense into a sort of fishy self-varnish. I had it with asparagus because it is seasonal and I am virtuous, and hollandaise because I am not.

As God is my witness, ladies and gentlemen, that is a starter. Understated, balanced, simple and frankly startling

I attended an appalling prep school in Oxford. A place that Evelyn Waugh wouldn’t have sufficient bile to disparage. I still remember the liver in the dining hall with the same uncontrollable panicked nausea as I do the words of the Latin grace. I swore I’d never enter the county again, nor eat liver, but The Bell cured me of both with calves’ liver and pancetta. There was absurdly smooth, butter-enhanced mash and an onion gravy so significant, so head and shoulders above its peers, that I’m campaigning for its entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

I was rolled, by charming and tolerant staff, to a room so commodious and well-appointed that I immediately became unconscious. I have referred to my notes, from which I’ve decoded something about the ludicrously reasonable price, a nice shower and a frightening picture of a dog.

In the morning, I sprang from bed like a particularly irritating lark and had one of my life’s Great Breakfasts. Lightly scrambled eggs on sourdough toast with far more butter than you people can handle, proper tea in a proper pot, orange juice as an antiscorbutic and what seemed to my untutored ear to be Purcell arias, played at a BPM rate just below my resting pulse.

I love the Cotswolds; I have forgiven them their Camerons. I love Oxfordshire. I forgive it for its liver and Latin but, above all, I love The Bell Inn, Langford. Benedictus, Benedicat, per Jesum Christum Dominum Nostrum.

Tim Hayward is the winner of best food writer at the Fortnum & Mason Food & Drink Awards 2022

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at [email protected]

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