Taste that tangy, zestful sodium benzoate!

As a typically naïve and ignorant consumer, I had always vaguely thought that the chilled prepared dishes colourfully packaged and temptingly displayed in supermarkets were really rather superior to frozen ones, being somehow nearer to fresh food. Not a bit of it: in order to increase their shelf life and for other purposes, many chilled dishes have to be crammed with additives: for example, Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Luxury Shepherd's Pie—"based on the famous Ivy restaurant's recipe"—has a roll call of 69 ingredients, featuring artificial flavourings, preservatives, hardened fats and science-lab additions such as wheat gluten and dextrin that you would not find in any self-respecting home kitchen. If you read this you will get the picture.

So frozen is generally superior all sorts of ways, apart from being much better value. I recently discovered a company started in 1997 by a couple of chaps in a kitchen based on the principle that it is possible to freeze dishes made using only the ingredients and methods one would use at home; of course it is, for after all many of us sometimes freeze our own home-made dishes.

Selling them commercially is not so easy, but evidently these two found the right collaborators and the right way because the company, still private and family-run, now employs 200 people and sells both on line and in eighteen shops of its own (one of these, happily, being near me).


It is called COOK and there is a well-planned and elegant website at www.cookfood.net.


• COOK’s products should not be confused with one of Marks and Spencer’s over-priced ranges of chilled dishes. They are branding this one as COOK!, and this was their charming response to a polite suggestion that their unoriginality might be causing confusion.

[I have no connection with COOK other than as a new and satisfied customer.]