She is a brave woman, Jennifer Paterson, and I suspect that her fame, as one of television's "Two Fat Ladies", has made her braver and bolder in recent times.
Only someone brave to a point of foolhardiness would not only include a recipe for Tomato Aspic Ring in a cookery book, but then also allow it to be photographed.
"It is spectacular looking, and gleams like a vast bit of amber," writes Jennifer, but I think it looks awesomely hideous and inedible, with wobbly hard-boiled eggs sealed in wobbly aspic atop a mound of tomato mush, the sort of cordon bleu cooking that gave cordon bleu a bad name.
Mind you, I suspect Jennifer includes it simply as a riposte to the fashion-following cooks of today, and good luck to her for doing that. She also includes an upside-down pear pudding which looks even worse than the tomato aspic ring, and we won't dwell on the sight of her Turkey Loaf.
So, her collection of recipes from The Spectator: Seasonal Receipts is basically a lot of damn-the-begrudgers cooking, a spirited attempt to fillet the generation of bruschetta and sauve vierge, and we all need that from time to time. Mind you, it's not all ghastly stodge and gruel from the 1950s, as witnessed by this spiffing recipe for Pureed Basil Potatoes. Basil? Olive oil? My goodness, whatever next? Quesadillas?