And when the martinis are being made by Ben Pundole, one of the country’s best cocktail bartenders, you might say that the more the merrier is the guiding principle.And you’d be right – up to a point. In most cocktail recipes, such as those in The Bartender’s Bible, a standard work by Gary Regan (available on Amazon, £4), martinis are made using anything from 2 to 2.5 ounces of gin. In David A Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks (out of print), the greatest work on the subject, the recipes use proportions only. Nowhere else can I find mention of such hammeringly large measures.So, good thing or bad thing? I can only say that it takes a strong head to lock horns with one of Ben’s specials. I’d also point out that there are other ingredients in the drinks, especially in the fruit martinis in which Ben specialises – you’re not actually getting 10 ounces of alcohol. And I’d point out, finally, that with these martinis (as with all cocktails), the damage depends on what else you drink.

Cocktails reached their full flush of acceptance in the US, where there was not (until recently) a widespread tradition of drinking wine with dinner. Confine yourself to a single Purple Room martini, stick with Badoit for the rest of the evening, and you should be OK.. A class of six-year-olds in Finchley has had three cookery lessons this year. That’s more than some children get during their whole school career. A class of six-year-olds in Finchley has had three cookery lessons this year.

That’s more than some children get during their whole school career.
The class wasn’t being taught in school, though It took place in a bus in a supermarket carpark. For the responsibility for practical cookery education in this country is being borne not by the state but by the supermarket Waitrose – sponsors of the Focus on Food campaign.The campaign, which is organised by the Royal Society of Arts, and designed to put hands-on cooking back on the curriculum, has its climax later this month when 2,000 schools (a tenth of all UK schools) will take part in a special cooking week.The Cooking Bus is the flagship of the operation – not so much a bus as a touring pantechnicon which opens up into a colourful lecture room to accommodate a generous-sized class. It is equipped with five cookers and five work tables and cost Waitrose £250,000, a small proportion of its five-year commitment to funding the project, now in its third year.When I visited the bus last week, the smell of baking greeted me. Resident teacher, Jill Luke, was distributing some delicious hot fruit tarts which the children had baked, first peeling and cutting the fruit and rolling pastry and shaping it.The children tasted them with apparent amazement They smelled good They tasted good.

Creative cooking wasn’t on the agenda at home, it seemed, and a spot check revealed that what they ate at home was mostly burgers, fish fingers, baked beans and oven-baked chips.So, if schools today won’t teach practical cooking, then most of the next generation of twentysomethings and thirtysomethings won’t know how to cook anything at all, says Jill, a former home economist and teacher herself.How did cookery classes disappear from schools? The teaching of cooking skills wentdown the pan in 1990, says the campaign organiser, Anita Cormac, another former home economist and teacher. Schools were forced to adopt a new curriculum, which abandoned Home Economics in favour of the more modern- sounding Food Technology.As the parent of any school age child will know, this actually means your child will acquire a passing knowledge of the social context of eating, of health and nutrition, and something of industrial procedures (my daughter did a project on airline food). But he or she will learn almost nothing of ingredients, equipment or the methods of cooking.”Children today will be lucky if they get half a dozen lessons in their whole school life,” says Anita “And often they won’t be serious lessons. At worst they make a pie with a tin of apple filling and a packet of crumble Or make the topping for a bought-in pizza base.