Have you ever taken a woman out for dinner and ordered the veal? “I’ll have the veal, please – it is very young, isn’t it? I like mine unborn, preferably. Or kept in an extremely confined crate and transported for 500 miles.” Check her expression. You can forget sex if that was on your list of post-prandial options. She will look at you with loathing. At least, women with me do. So maybe it isn’t the veal, after all. Just me. I hope it’s the veal, though.

There are lots of things women won’t eat.

An awful lot of them won’t go near oysters, for example. Always be wary of a woman who won’t swallow an oyster. First date, take them to an oyster bar: if they spit the oysters out, leave. And they cannot abide that sharp tang of urine you get from the best and freshest kidney – in fact, they hate all offal. Serve a woman grilled spleen and you’ll get spleen in return. They’re not keen on pastry. Oh, they’ll nibble away at a piece of filo, especially if it’s surrounding something as effete and worthless as a goat’s cheese, spinach and pine-nut melange, or, indeed, anything faux-Mediterranean. But a pie will set them running, especially a pie baked with a suet crust. And especially a suet-crust pie with big lumps of meat in it, smothered in a rich sauce that has been made by boiling down animal bones for five hours. They don’t really do rich sauces, girls. They like a jus. They like a drizzle. We men, meanwhile, like gravy.

Women like green vegetables to be steamed or raw. They’re not keen on orange and white vegetables mashed up in a saucepan with black pepper and cream. They think that they are somehow above potatoes, unless it’s a potato baked in its skin with a teaspoon of cottage cheese for lunch that some joker has told them, sniggering behind his sleeve, isn’t remotely fattening.

Truth be told, women are seriously misguided about calories. They will shriek if they spy a piece of crackling, yet swallow gallons of coconut milk – one of the most fattening things you can eat. Likewise, dairy products are out if served in abundance, but they will devour an avocado – because it’s green, you see, it can’t be fattening. Ha. My menu is anti-women; the three recipes are designed to be as offensive as possible. I’m particularly proud of my main course – a familiar enough dish, to be sure, but one that manages to combine almost every ingredient women hate in a single, delicious, plateful. Serve it up if Dawn Primarolo or Diane Abbott come to dinner.

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