'He always starts with soup, whatever it is He has half a bottle of Blue Nun Liebfraumilch whatever he's eating and she had a port to start with and then half a bottle of some kind of Sauterne. He has boiled potatoes with every lunch and either peas or carrots or, when it's in season, asparagus, which he's very partial to. She picks her way about among the expensive dishes but usually has Steak Diane because she likes the drama at the table.'

In his 1967 essay for the The Bad Food Guide, Derek Cooper didn't mention what she would have had for a starter. Only one contender, really: prawn cocktail.

Glutinous polyphosphorated prawns, bland as tissue except for the tiny lurking threat of a rich and vicious stomach upset, sunk in a lousy brackish menstruum of melt-water and salad cream, offered up with a chipped glass, a short spoon fluted with dirt and some ribaldly poor service. This is what we have come to expect of the prawn cocktail: this monster of a crime against the palate.

It needn't have been so. Rick Stein has said prawn cocktail is 'one of those dishes that used to be extremely nice but has been messed about'. And four years ago, when Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham began to rescue maligned classics from years of abuse in The Prawn Cocktail Years, they wrote with passion of the dish's everlasting appeal, of the strangely addictive nature of the combination 'which contradicts all the rules of fine cooking' What they signally weren't writing about was the more usual one, the monster: the one which, perhaps more than any other, says it all about British sloppiness over food, and British corporate cheese-paring, and that very British ability to take something simple and foreign and make a cheap drizzly pappy British mess of it. This limp insult is the one that survives: far from the gastrodomes and delis of London, millions still invite this wan pink effluvium into their lives of a Sunday lunchtime.

So: how to get the most perfectly monstrous prawn cocktail.

Ingredients

Frozen prawns, jumbo-packed. As taste-free as possible. Try, if possible, to wittily hammer home to your guests the irony of modern consumer society by ignoring the fresh plump prawns swimming in their squillions in the nearby sea and opt for a pack of shrivelled pink commas flown in from the other side of the world. Hotels on the west coast of Scotland excel at this.

Leaves from the outside of an old lettuce; the deeper the green, the better. One leaf should be chopped extremely fine, so the texture will be wholly lost in the resultant emulsion: the others should be left whole, to hinder eating.

For the sauce Marie Rose

Salad cream, bulk-bought - avoid mayonnaise, if possible. Should be warm; if the tub can be left for a decent period of time in direct sunlight, so the cream begins to separate and curdle, all the better.

Condensed tomato soup; teaspoon of Worcestershire or Tabasco (optional: you can't be expected to have all these exotic ingredients, particularly if you're only a national chain of travellers' restaurants. Pepper should do instead).

Method

Separate prawns into two piles. Defrost one half in a microwave until a warm wet mush, hot to the touch, and squeeze all the moisture out of this pile with splenetic vigour; leave the rest wholly frozen and glazed with ice. Place both sets of prawns in glass, add lettuce in middle to prevent them being tainted by sauce, pour on sauce and serve immediately in as miserable a setting as possible.