Boiled gammon (or boiling bacon as it was known to FIL & MIL), small potatoes, white cabbage and a spot of cheese sauce to start. Treacle tart and a spot of hot yellow custard to follow. Mary Berry variety of treacle tart, with the filling made of white breadcrumbs, golden syrup and a spot of lemon juice. All helped along with Pierre Précieuse, just visible back right. Noticed in these pages from time to time, for example at reference 1. Very good stuff, but buyer beware: it does not seem to keep once opened, even in the refrigerator. Not as good on the second day. Maybe something to do with it being organic and preservative free. BH did not object to the faint whiff of farmhouse cider about the stuff on this occasion.
Wound up with chocolates from Fortum & Mason and, after I knocked off the wine, Calvados from Waitrose.
The chocolates started off well, with a smooth online buying experience, which included being able to nominate a delivery day. They arrived on that day, with packaging very much up to the standard set by Neal's Yard Dairy. A nicely packaged box of chocolates inside, with one of the nice touches being that they left the price off the consignment note. The chocolates tasted good too. I am not sure if I have bought chocolates from them before, but on this basis I dare say I will again.
Managed both Scrabble and a session with the bricks later in the afternoon.
While this morning I was moved to look them up. Were they always as grand as they are now? Answer, a clear no, the founders have either been builders (after the Great Fire) or in service with the monarch of the day. Downstairs, rather than upstairs. Some talk of recycling all the candle-ends wasted by express command of the monarch. Candles had to be fresh every day.
Slightly more surprising, the company was taken over by a Canadian business man, Garfield Weston, in 1951. The man responsible for the big clock outside. Now owned by the very discrete Wittington Investments - their web site (reference 5) tells one more or less nothing - in turn owned by the Garfield Weston Foundation, a UK based grant making charitable trust (reference 4), founded by said Garfield Weston. Perusal of their annual report at reference 7 confirms that they do indeed own Fortnum & Mason. But a much bigger holding is their ownership of Associated British Foods.
Which reminds me, that somewhere along the line, I read that Fortnum's was the very first place in the country to stock baked beans from Heinz, taking the very first five cases to arrive.
The annual report also includes a list of recipients of grants, with some big grants going to high-end art, but with plenty more spread around more community flavoured activities. There is also a faith section, but you can't expect to please everybody. The snip above gives something of the flavour.
With my closing thought being that Garfield Weston must have been very successful, with this foundation getting investment income of around £75m a year and making charitable grants to roughly the same amount.
So one can shop at Fortnum's with a clear conscience. It's all going to a good cause.
PS: appropriate on this occasion that the pie slice visible top left was a gift from my mother, while the plate holding my portion of tart came as part of a wedding gift from BH's naval uncle and aunt. While the spoon is German and came from Heal's back in the 1970's. A shop which is also now owned by Garfield Weston; or at least what is left of it is - not the shop it used to be. And the cloth from which the tablecloth is made came from Finland. And the G-Plan table on which it all sits came, I think, from an Epsom charity shop.
Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnum_%26_Mason.
Reference 4: https://garfieldweston.org/.
Reference 5: https://www.wittington-investments.co.uk/.
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