Cornish Bakery review: ‘One of the best sausage rolls I’ve had’

If you want a stark visual metaphor for the obesity crisis in this country (and a terrifying glance into its future) then you need look no further than the car park of any motorway service station in Britain this summer. For there you will find the fattest people in the country, in the highest imaginable concentration, in their natural habitat, doing the very thing that has made them the size they are, for specific reasons that can be examined here in microcosm and then extrapolated to the country at large. Very large. Extra large, in fact.
For it is into these vast, hideous commercial roadside troughs (signposted with a fork and spoon but selling only food to be eaten with your hands) that the largest of our endlessly enlarging population flock in their millions, all summer long, in cars that have widened gradually since the 1970s at a rate commensurate to the widening of their drivers and passengers, swerving hungrily off the highway, lured by the most basic of logos — the golden arches of McDonald’s, the Burger King bun, the four yellow squares of Greggs, the yellow and green arrows of Subway, the simplified siren of Starbucks — to feast on the ultra-processed rubbish these tragic icons have triggered their engorged unconscious into believing they want.
• Read more of Giles Coren here
Unable to resist, they veer into the slip lane, summoned like zombies to the apocalypse (how fitting that the sirens of antiquity existed to lure lonely, desperate men to their deaths). And, like zombies, after parking, they march, dead-eyed, thick arms outstretched ahead of them, on wobbling, swollen legs, pink and blotchy in their damp shorts, vast bellies heaving at their T-shirts, with that tragic rolling gait of the giant-arsed and elephant-thighed that was not seen on Earth before 1980 and is now the modus ambulandi for 30 per cent of us, towards the pies and burgers and torpedoes of fizzy pop that they will order with wordless swipes of their porky digits on the greasy touch-screens lined along the wall.
But it’s not their fault. They have no choice. This awful, artificial, fatty crap is all that is on offer by the UK roadside. As it is in the country itself, outside certain privileged enclaves of the wealthiest towns and cities. And there is your metaphor. People like you and me eat this terrible shit on the motorway sometimes, because there is nothing else to eat. Just as there is nothing else to eat anywhere else in this land for 90 per cent of the people. Government doesn’t legislate to restrict junk food and promote better options, and Big Food tucks into the profit regardless of public health. The poor bastard common people have to eat all week the way you do when you pull into Taunton Deane services, starved and desperate, halfway to Cornwall and still four hours from dinner.
And these humans here, in the service stations, are the fattest of us all. For they are the ones who cannot go so much as half an hour without stopping to eat again, so nutritionally impoverished is their diet, so fully hypnotised are they by the toxic mind virus of the red and yellow bandits. The car parks are rammed at these places but the fuel pumps are rarely busy. They haven’t come for the petrol. Their cars can go a couple of hours without filling up. But they can’t. The junk they eat only fools their body into thinking it is food, mimicking the action of proteins with complex chemical compounds welded to empty carbohydrates. So half an hour later they’re back, “breaking the journey” from one Maccy Ds to the next Maccy Ds with a quick Maccy Ds.
It is how we will all be one day, unless some sort of central action is taken: just piggy-eyed, rolling-necked, knock-kneed, flat-footed service station people, 80 per cent arse and the rest just sugar and salt.
Because eating healthily and maintaining a recognisably human shape is not easy. It is, if not a full-time job, certainly a half-time one. Between us, I’d say my wife and I spend as much of our life planning, preparing, cooking and eating healthy meals as working. Or going to restaurants to spend stupid money on them that barely one per cent of people can afford.
But when we go on summer holiday in rural or coastal Britain, all bets are off. We don’t have our posh north London local shops and restaurants, or our Ocado delivery. And with children on our hands all day there is minimal prep time, so it’s whatever is in the local shops — squishy bread in polythene, ice cream, pasta, sausages, crisps, maybe one old brown banana dug out from under the Giant Wotsits display at Spar or the Co-op’s doughnut aisle — and then, occasionally, if we dare, a restaurant.
There is some good fish and chips along our western coastline, and some excellent pizza and beer. The occasional artisanal burger. I can broadly keep my family out of the American-owned, world-killing behemoths. But the menus are mostly frozen, ersatz, loveless fare and I come back half a stone heavier to London whatever I do, convinced that someone has been boiling my T-shirts because they don’t fit me round the middle any more.
And on the long drives in between, it is impossible. You can try coming off the motorway to eat but it’s almost worse. In Weston-super-Mare, for example, the No 1 rated restaurant on Tripadvisor is a pig-themed family diner offering mainly burgers, bangers and mash, fish and chips, that sort of thing. It’s called the Ginger Pig Kitchen (no relation to the posh London butcher) and, to be fair, we had good burgers there (in the middle of a day-long drive from St Davids to Dartmouth). But that’s it. Top of the tree. That’s the Ritz of Weston-super-Mare and everywhere else is down from that. Down from a cheeseburger and fries. Not surprising when you stroll the high streets and note that most of what might have once been restaurants are boarded up, and all that’s open on a weekday lunchtime are dingy cocktail bars offering two-for-one deals on sticky afternoon oblivion.
Then again, it’s better than Fishguard, another road stop for us in August. The No 1 restaurant there is the Royal Oak. The menu includes no fewer than three variations on “loaded” nachos, a dish made out of crisps, and the “gourmet” burgers smell of feet and the deep freeze, cost £15.50 (if you please) and taste like something you’d put out to poison the foxes. Not a fresh thing in the house. Just ready-meals. The “Welsh lamb kofta” was a cylinder of doner meat sliced in half like those 1970s ads for Pedigree Chum (“Top breeders recommend it, because it’s solid nourishment”). Even the Welsh rarebit tasted to me as if it had been brought in frozen and reheated in a microwave. And it’s £13.50! For cheese on toast made six weeks previously (from the worst imaginable bread) in a dark kitchen and transported here on a donkey. Or in one.
Which is why, on the last long drive back from Devon to London, we didn’t bother looking for a restaurant and reckoned just to grab something at a service station. Taunton Deane was where we needed petrol. On offer was McDonald’s, Chozen Noodle, Krispy Kreme, Costa or a month-old sarnie from WHSmith. So Esther and I decided to skip it and wait the four hours till London. Maybe chew on some wet wipes from the glove box. But Sam was hungry.
The Maccys, Chozen and Krispy each had queues a mile deep of human hippos in Crocs wearing sweaty T-shirts you could have hoisted up the mast of the Golden Hind, and I didn’t fancy the wait. And then, corner of my eye, next to a Costa stand, I saw two slim boys with clean hair in a blue stall labelled “Cornish Bakery”. No queue. I glanced at the counter and saw rows of golden, flaky-looking pasties. Cheese and onion ones, bacon and leek, chicken masala, spiced cauliflower and onion, and traditional, medium or large.
“I’ll have a large one,” said Sam. “Except, wait, it says it’s 1,039 calories!”
“You’ll be fine, Sam,” I said. “You’re a growing lad.” And I ordered one for him and a sausage roll for me. One of the best I’ve ever had. Firm and juicy, roasted fat flavours, a bit of caramelisation, no artificial aftertaste, short, buttery pastry. And Sam’s pasty was perfect too. At least a third of the contents was swede, steaming nicely and stacked down one end of the pie, as is correct. The meat was good enough and not oversalted, allowing the salt of the excellent crust to do that work.
It’s a chain, I know. But a smaller one. A prettier one. A British one. And the fact that the serious fatties didn’t seem interested must mean they’re doing something right.
Cornish BakeryTaunton Deane services, M5, and nationwide (thecornishbakery.com)Pasty 7Service 8Location 0Score 5Price Dunno. You haven’t got much choice though, have you?