Flatbreads

Mrs. Cynic and myself, being both lazy and terminally incompetent when it comes to all matters epicurean, are regular patrons of restaurants and pubs that serve food (note our reluctance, on grounds of good taste, to employ that hateful term gastropubs). Thus it has been impossible for us not to notice the meteoric rise of a new culinary innovation, flatbreads.

Menus tend to take note of and reflect the foodie crazes that from time to time sweep across our fair nation like foreign 'flu epidemics. Some of these – such as curry which, despite popular misconception, is not originally a British invention (though consuming it right after a football match and twenty pints of Kestrel Lager is very much a tradition unique to these Isles) – achieve enormous popularity and rapidly become as ubiquitous as headlice in primary schools, transforming our cuisine forever (and in the case of curry, for the better. British food had no flavour until we discovered coriander and chili. That's why we invented the strongest mustard, Worcestershire sauce etc.), while others – mousaka, Scandiwegian open sandwiches – are doomed to vanish once for all after a brief spell of popularity. Once such example dates from the late 1970s, when food manufacturers identified this nation – which, previously, had existed perfectly satisfactorily (up until a arterially-clogged early middle aged point, at any rate) on pies, fry-ups and lard - as a potentially lucrative market for garlic bread. Within mere months those eateries lacking either the financial means to recruit chefs skilled in the creation of such alien fare or the outside-the-box thinking among existing staff to knock up a batch from first principles vanished, leaving dark and empty shop fronts easy prey for Bill Posters and squatters; in the case of the latter sometimes for a decade or more due to nationwide ordeal that was Thatcherism.

Next came steak and chips – a dish not to far removed from traditional British fare, indeed seemingly as British as a violent fat man in a Ford Transit, and thus unlikely to offend our “I ain't eatin' none of that foreign stuff” palates and yet – when ingeniously combined with such exotica as (steady yourselves, fuddy-duddies) a prawn cocktail starter and Black Forest gateau dessert – also just unfamiliar enough to pique the interest and appetites of those dangerous few unsatisfied by the norm. Note that those who had eaten such rare delicacies henceforth never referred to the sweet course as “afters” - it would, forever after, always be “dessert,” 'cos it sahnds French, like, dunnit?

In time, steak and chips became so popular as to almost replace that time-honoured Brit staple chicken tikka masala – and, of course, once it achieved such popularity as to even be served in some of the more unorthodox restaurants Up North, the chattering London glitterati sought out new, ever more exotic thrills. Once the smoke of a thousand steakhouses had cleared from the capital's grimy air it became apparent that a new foreign invader had taken up residence on those hallowed streets – Italian restaurants, in most cases named Luigi's. Yet these were Italian restaurants of a type one cannot find in Italy, for they served food that would have shamed Luigi's grandmother: spaghetti bolognese (a dish utterly unknown in its alleged home Bologna) and lasagne served with chips and ketchup. For a few brief years in the mid-to-late 1980s Britain consumed pasta in vast quantities, slowing only when those same chattering glitterati – now renamed yuppies (by the press - the public called them scum) – discovered that a diet high in carbohydrate couldn't possibly provide the instant energy boost demanded by their high-paid, high-stress, high-bullshit jobs and offered in calorie-free form by cocaine.

For the last few years, the latest word on every menu and latest substance hanging on every fork as restaurant goers discuss whether or not it really is made from horses has been chorizo, a lightly-spiced Mediterranean sausage that, in common with the entire sausage genus, presents the meat industry with a very convenient and profitable way to dispose of those cuts, offal, eyeballs and bollocks to which the general public turns up its many noses. It is for this reason that, here and abroad, sausages have hitherto been sold as a low-cost food; the meat of choice for those able to not worry about what the meat they are eating actually is, those who concoct the school dinners served up in modern comprehensives and those who, following a long lifetime spent working, fighting for the nation and paying taxes, find that having bought their only living companion a week's worth of Whiskas (almost certainly made of less-frightening cuts than chorizo) they are unable to stretch to the cost of a small beef joint for Sunday dinner. But chorizo is different, for it has a foreign name, and that means it's a premium product (though the dubious cuts, eyeballs and bollocks from which it is made are no more premium than the ones sold in the supermarket own value brand packaging). This meant that, before can even think the words “Lamb and chorizo kebab please, Carlos,” commercial kitchens the length and breadth of the land were dreaming up new uses for it at a rate matched only by the public's ever-increasing new ways to pronounce it (tcho-rizzo...kor-eetho...sho-ritzo...ah fuck it, just point at the little picture on the menu, and hope the waiter doesn't gob in your dinner for mangling his mother tongue. You'll probably be OK because he's actually from Bracknell and the closest he's ever come to foreign climes was a day out in Southend when he was 14. This does mean, of course, that if, when your plate of greasy meat is delivered to you it does have a mysterious green oyster nestling within, it is there simply because he thinks you're a wanker. Fair play to him, to be honest).

The latest innovation to join this list is something called flatbreads, which – for some reason or another – is always pluralised, though always sold singly. Flatbreads, at their most basic, are long, thin slabs of unleavened bread resembling an extended pitta. Oft billed as “freshly made for you” but in reality pulled from a freezer and toasted under a grill by a teenager (it's amazing how old bread needs to be before toasting cannot render it inedible), they will then be served up on a piece of wood and topped with a bit of salad and some bland hummus and, this being dear old Blighty, a side serving of oven chips. The cost? Well, the very well-known chain of pubs, owners of the establishment that forms my current location, flogs 'em for £4.39 to you, guv'nor. Not bad for a bit of stale bread with some leaves on top – provided, that is, one is looking at the dish from the point of view of the chain's accountants.

What we have here, in other words, is a sort of pizza that can be produced for a mere fraction of the cost of an actual pizza (which, apparently, they no longer serve here, so pizza has presumably gone the way of steak and chips) but which can be sold for the same price. Resist!

(Note: Pizza is, of course, every bit as entirely pointless and a blatant rip-off as flatbreads; due to it being nothing more than very expensive cheese on toast).

(Note also: If you are elderly, retired and unable to feed yourself once you've bought Tiddles' din-dins, shoplift. We the people of Britain will both support and protect you).