My great friend Joe, a vegetarian and professional smartarse, managed to avoid going into Cook in Brighton for 18 months. For the first six of those, he thought it was a bank. For the following year, having recognised it as a shop selling frozen ready-meals, he gave it a wide berth. When he was eventually drawn within, retreating to his nest with a portion of Vegetable & Bean Chilli, he declared it, with some dismay, to be as good as his own. 'I can spot a preservative at 50 paces,' he says. 'And there weren't any. It really was bloody good.'
Such news, for the many cooks reading this, is both a boon and a blight. It's almost enough to have us stop cooking altogether, such is the tastiness and reliability of what you can pull out of your freezer in block form from Cook. Now that the range is available online, as well as at 18 stores in market towns across the south east, the nation may never again know the glory of separating its own eggs.
Once you have purchased your Moroccan Lamb Tagine (£7.85 for two), the only question that remains is whether to reveal your saucy little secret to the assembled throng at your table. You could always eat the cartons before the guests arrive and pass it off as your own.
Oh yes, it's cheating. Real cooks don't pull out a goulash from the deep freeze and hum while it bakes, do they? Real cooks caramelise their own onions and swear at their handmade pâte sucrée. Real cooks look dolefully at the photograph of Nigella Lawson's shiny happy fairy cakes and then back at their own dribbling efforts, lined up like the remedial class at school. We blast our hollandaise when it curdles, we grate fingertip into syllabub, we spend hours trying to get shards of shell out of the egg whites in order to approximate the meringues they do better at M&S.
Except that we don't, do we? Not often. The modern kitchen is afflicted by indolence, apathy and lassitude, with occasional peaks of frenzied interest when Tim and Kate are coming over with a bottle of Cava and their holiday snaps from Portugal. Today, we cook to impress rather than cook to eat. How many of us wear an apron with any regularity? Who needs one? Really, how much mess are you going to make of your cardi if you're only pricking a cellophane lid with a fork?
The food on offer at Cook, though, has integrity, which suddenly makes it OK to cheat. You can feel it in the air at their kitchen, located, somewhat prosaically, on a Sittingbourne industrial estate. Inside, it's all go: proper chefs are busy making proper roux, veloutés and reductions . Only they're doing it on a grand scale . While as much as possible is sourced locally (the Bramleys for the Eve's Pudding are grown two miles up the road), Cook doesn't aim to be all-organic or freerange or otherwise eco-trendy: 'It's just real cooking done by real people ,' says co-founder Edward Perry. 'People who buy from us tend to be good cooks in their own right. Freezing rather than chilling means there's absolutely no rubbish in it.' So that's no Es. No modified starch. No hydrogenated fats. No eyeball, nostril or gonad.
Each meal is stamped with the name of its maker - Spencer Reader, Damien Payne, Robert Stevens (though I suspect the Pork Dijonaise is made by God). I note at my local Cook that the Liver and Bacon has been made - delightfully enough - by a lad named Wayne Fritter.
Back at supper with Joe et al, we tested Cook to the limit, employing the scientifically exacting Chocolate Roulade Test, introduced by Sir Henri Roulade in the 1870s to ascertain with absolute certitude whether a pud has been made by staff or by the good lady of the house. The original test calls for callipers and a pair of foot bellows, but we just used forks. The roulade from Cook was a dazzling triumph. So good was it, in fact, that by my third slice, I had convinced myself that I had made it in my own kitchen myself that very morning.
