HE small savoury often makes an admirable ending to a meal,’ sighs Ambrose Heath in his 1934 mini opus,, ‘like some unexpected witticism or amusing epigram at the close of a pleasant conversation. It has the last word, as it were, before we turn to the frivolities of dessert.’ Mr Heath is very much a man after my own heart. Because the savoury was one of the crowning triumphs of the Victorian and Edwardian table, gleefully devoured at the end of the main course. They may have been modest in size, no more than a mere mouthful, but, in the words of Mrs Beeton, were ‘piquant’, possessing the all-essential ‘strong, appetising flavour’. And for those of
