A quiet supper with Clement Freud

Freud's London house is comfortable and unshowy, and the supper he serves is the same. He has invited Fanny Cradock and Robert Carrier, two cooks whose public style is the opposite of his own, and he means to make a point with a menu of eggs, oxtail, and bread and butter pudding.

Cradock, who has spent thirty years making cooking into theatre, finds the scrambled eggs almost insultingly simple and says so; Carrier laughs and asks for more. Freud's argument is that a cook is revealed by the dishes that cannot be disguised, and by the end of the meal even Cradock concedes that the oxtail is very good.