Yorkshire pork on Virgin trains

I wrote a little while ago about Virgin Trains East Coast’s first class menu*; it bothered me, partly because of its crap use of the English language but mostly because it said it was providing rare breed pork without saying the breed.

I like to think that someone at VTEC took my post to heart when ordering the new menus, as they have improved, but not by much. In the next instalment of my never-ending pettiness, I present to you the new Virgin Trains East Coast menu.

The rare breed sausages are now identified as ‘Yorkshire rare breed sausages’. The Yorkshire pig, also known as the Large White, is not a rare breed. Simply being raised, slaughtered, or butchered in Yorkshire, or any other region, does not count as being a rare breed. I’ll repeat what I said on my earlier post:

Gloucester Old Spot and British Saddleback may both be rare breeds, but they are not the same fucking thing. Pretending that they are the same thing is, frankly, an insult to the farmers who bust their guts looking after rare breeds.

I mention here that I find no mention online of the Laverstoke Farm black pudding that appears in your Great British breakfast. Laverstoke Park Farm is everywhere. If you’re making a point of the provenance of your food, get the provenance right.

The rest of this page (with the exception of the return of ‘Yorkshire rare breed’ bacon in the bacon roll is fine: it is clear, unpretentious, and direct† – until the penultimate word. The penultimate word is ‘tasty’, and it comes in a footnote indicating that the free-range egg in the fried breakfast and the bubble & squeak may, on some services, be replaced by ‘a tasty soufflé’. Is the egg not tasty? Does it not warrant this step on the gustatory cursus honorum? Are the rest of the ingredients on the menu mere shadows, where the soufflé is the very Platonic ideal of a baked egg dish?

You see, an adjective is used to indicate a particular quality of something and to mark it apart from others. If there are six trees in a line and I say that I have my kite stuck in the tall one, it is implicit that the other five trees are less tall. By highlighting – pay attention, Virgin Trains East Coast, because this is important – the tastiness of your soufflé, you are suggesting everything else is less than tasty. I know that’s not what you meant to do; you were veering logorrheic again. You are putting in words because you think it makes your menu funky, or some similar PR bullshit term. There are some descriptions on the menu that tell us about the good without this attempt to be cool with your use of language: ‘chicken in a paprika tomato-based sauce with onions, yellow peppers and spicy chorizo served with parsley potatoes’ makes the Mediterranean chicken sound really quite appetising. I’ll let the ‘rich and creamy’ description of the macaroni cheese pass.

I think the food on VTEC first class is actually pretty good. The mushroom rarebit on the previous breakfast menu was something I actually looked forward to and the current bubble and squeak is surprisingly enjoyable, too.

* If you book in advance, it’s often cheaper or only two or three pounds more expensive to travel first class.
† Before anyone says it, the opposite of me. I know.