When Nouvelle Cuisine hit our fair shores around 1980, one of my friends named it Cuisine Stingy.

It looked wonderful on the plate, but there was not much of it. Still, to the eye it was pretty attractive…we salivated at the prospect.

She further challenged this style of eating by suggesting that there must have been a fair few hands on our plates, ergo on our food, to achieve such artistic perfection. So let’s just say she wasn’t a fan.

But those of us who could blind our eyes to the possibility of someone else’s paws being on our meals, soon dismissed the imagined horror, as we warmed to the…