I don’t normally reply to letters, but Mrs Postin touched something. A couple of things: “Dear Sir, In the Culture section February 17, 2008, on page 15, the TV reviewer AA Gill used the plural ‘penises’. I remember that back in the 1970s, one journalist used the word ‘penes’ in an article about Idi Amin. Presumably, journalists in that era (and their readers) had received a better classical education and could use and understand Latin with competance. Yours sincerely, Norma Postin.”

It’s an interesting lexicographical dangling stet and, of course, I defer to Mrs Postin’s obvious expertise in the naming of multiple cocks. I thought I had better do a bit of checking, however; get down to the nuts and bolts. The OED divides honours: while stressing that “penes” is correct, it also points out that “penises” are perfectly acceptable in polite company. And that ought to lay Mrs Postin’s ire to rest.

Dictionaries, though, are only the ultimate arbiters of Scrabble games. When it comes to real language, lexicons and lists follow the tongue, they don’t give it. So we inquired of a professor of classics: after much deliberation, he thought that, on balance, he would, if the need ever arose, say – nay, gasp – “penises!”, this being the easiest and clearest English usage. (Exclamation marks, by the way, are traditionally known as “dogs’ cocks” by printers.)

The interest here lies in a small, dry crack in the grammar. Though penis is a Latin word, its current meaning is not Roman. For them, it was a tail, and was hardly ever used apropos the ganglion vitae. Their most common words were mentula and verpa, both vulgar, I’m afraid – the Romans didn’t seem to have a polite or scientific name for their willies. So, not being a properly Latin word in its meaning, the English grammatical convention should apply.

Bizarrely, penis revealed itself to the English only recently: its first recorded use is 1676, and it seems to have been a word devised specifically for medical and scientific books. Until then, nobody had needed a polite word for something that never appeared politely. The Old English word was teors, which I don’t see making a comeback. So, Mrs Postin, we must both make a fist of what we’re given, swallow our differences and say whatever fits most comfortably between the lips. And as you’re such a stickler for these little things, I might just point out that you spelt “competence” wrongly, which is doubly funny, and I’d hate you to do it in public.

(All this is like the eternal misunderstanding about homos. Homosexual is not from the Latin homo, meaning man, it’s from the Greek homo, meaning same. Not man-sex, but same-sex. The confusion is more inverted on the cross. Ecce homo is not from the Greek that the gospels are written in, but the Latin that the legionary spoke. So, it reads “Here’s a man”, not “Here’s another one.” Queer stuff.)

There is a cold wind blowing through the city’s kitchens. Froid épaule and fromage dur are on many a menu. There is whispered talk of recession and nondom tax. The customers who handed over their credit cards without looking at the bill are hanging from ledges. What is frightening them most, though, is the shrinking mortgage pot and slaloming house prices. For the past 20 years, restaurants have been as much a property business as a catering one. The rising value of the lease underwrote the ridiculous overspend on the decor, the waste of ingredients and the amateur owners’ drunken freebies. There are now a lot of dining rooms looking into the cauldron and taking stock.

One of the first things they do is fire the chef, or at least make him revamp the menu. And so it was that the Blonde and I found ourselves, yet again, lunching at The Grill at Brown’s Hotel, on Albemarle Street in Mayfair. This Victorian building was radically reinvented by Rocco Forte and his sister, Olga Polizzi. It didn’t really work first time round – surprisingly, because, singularly, they are both consummate hoteliers. The best thing that ever happened to Forte, it turned out, was the loss of his family business to the grim cynicism of Granada. It has allowed him to build a clutch of charming, comfortable small hotels around the world.

The dining room at Brown’s eluded him, however, so they have remade it. There is a lot of protected boardroom panelling, which is quite assertive and dictates everything else. They have taken away the ridiculous lighting and made it simpler, but they have still managed to hang the silliest pictures in all the West End – and that is really saying something. As decoration, it’s worth going just to see the art. Say I sent you. There are photographs of an Italian fop reflected in a shop window. Do notice that he is using a very pretentious Leica, of the sort favoured by war photographers.

The menu is made of aesthetically sterner stuff. They have brought in Mark Hix (IvyCapriceSheekeyScott’s). Sensibly, he has done what everyone else is doing, like Gadarene Gloucester old spots, and made the menu traditionally English. Every new restaurant is now an old restaurant, offering food that is like eating Beatrix Potter garnished with Noël Coward, cooked by Elgar. But this bill, while offering all the usual John Bull bits, is even more retro and nostalgic than most. The thing that first caught my eye was brown Windsor soup. One of the first pieces I ever wrote in this column was about brown Windsor soup, and how stereotypical it was of the cheerfully grim, inhospitable endurance test that was eating out in England when I was a child. The inevitable railway-hotel menu was a sordid, typed English joke from a time when grace was said, and went: “For what we are about to receive, may Elizabeth David please deliver us.” I had to go to Clarissa Dickson Wright to find a recipe for the soup, and I said, with absolute certainty, that we would never see its like again on a cosmopolitan menu – unless they were running a Brief Encounter theme night.

And here it is, without irony, inverted commas or Celia Johnson. The brown Windsor soup at Brown’s Hotel is essentially what it always was: thickened gravy with lumps. It doesn’t specify the meat, as long as it’s brown. This was well-made gravy, with perfectly acceptable lumps, but still too close to the horror of the past for any unalloyed pleasure in eating. I could feel the scratch of my woollen blazer on the back of my neck, the pinch of my Clarks sandals, my lopsided fringe and the smell of coal gas and Brasso. I ate nearly half of it.

Next, I had Irish stew – a black-and-white double bill. This is a recipe that wears a trench coat and says: “Lummy, that’s a rum do and no mistake.” It was a rum do and no mistake. Impeccably Irish stew before partition is heavy on the potatoes and kidney, skimpy on the meat, as the dinner of the labouring poor should be. Sparse but honestly flavoured. There seems to be something not quite right about eating this in Mayfair for pleasure, wearing Italian slip-ons.

Pudding was bakewell tart and steamed stuff, crumbles and spotted things. There were hard cheeses and Stichelton, the only unpasteurised Stilton being made, and because of foodie copyright, it uses the original name of the old Leicestershire village. It is all good and I would happily go back. But it is not simply foodish faddery that makes old British dishes fashionable: all dinner is metaphor and parable. This is the grub of hard times, of a depression and rationing, of an island stoically making do with a firm jaw and joshing banter. It is the taste of the hard times that turned out to be the best of times. We are eating ourselves into training for bread and dripping and jam tomorrow.

30 Albemarle Street, W1; 020 7493 6020.
Lunch, Mon-Sat, noon-3pm; Sun, 12.30pm-3pm. Dinner, Mon-Sat, 6pm-10.30pm; Sun, 7pm-10.30pm

5 stars: Brownie points; 4 stars: Charlie Brown; 3 stars: Foxy Brown; 2 stars: Brown Windsor soup; 1 star: Brown and out

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