Nothing To Pork About

Jane’s Snack & Sandwich Bar, 243 Bedford Road, Kempston, Beds, MK42 8BP

 
My mother always told me that if you don’t have anything nice to say then you shouldn’t say anything at all. I never did listen to my mother.

It’s a cold October lunchtime, I’m just heading towards the bank when I catch a whiff in the air, a meaty whiff, a bacony whiff. Mmmmm bacon. So in an instant it was decided, I would first go to the bank, make my deposit then slink (as much as a fatty can slink) my over to Jane’s Snack & Sandwich Bar and purchase a sausage & bacon French stick with brown sauce & mustard… it’s a classic!

The café itself is pretty smart, the staff seem friendly enough and the food is cooked to order. Now this is where my mothers advice should kick in. Just to reiterate, I never did listen to my mother.

The lady handed me my order “to go” and I trotted along back to my motor car (“poop poop” – That’s a Wind in the Willows reference for all you Mr Toad fans out there, I am not saying my car is shit!).

I unwrapped the little bag and took a bite, well thank god for brown sauce & mustard is all I can say. The bacon was thick but flavourless and large bits of soggy fat were hanging from its sides. I get that most people love bacon fat but not like this, bacon fat needs to be crispy this was as if someone had stuck the dregs of a liposuction operation to the sides of some very poor meat. It was almost as if this wasn’t real bacon at all and that perhaps it had been made in a warehouse somewhere in Kempston Hardwick by some grubby little ham monkey force to work in some kind of fake meat sweatshop. Honestly, I cannot understand how something that had an aroma that good lacked any taste whatsoever and was just plain disgusting.

Hey, that was just the bacon, at least there’s the sausage to… *blurgh!*, what the hell is that!?! It was what you could technically call a sausage but I’ll bet you a fiver that there is more meat in Pinocchio’s pants that there was in this sausage. As a hobby I make sausages and this thing was more rusk than meat, yes there had to be some meat in there but it was pretty hard to find. It was more like a skin filled with mushy grains of who knows what, again flavourless and just bloody odd all round.

But hey, there’s always the bread right?

Yes, there was bread but again there was something odd about it. The outside was crispy (good stuff) a bit like fried bread (love fried bread) but the inside was just doughy as if it hadn’t been baked properly (Paul Hollywood would have thrown all sorts of insult at it). It reminded me of one of those half baked French sticks you get in the supermarket, you know the ones where you have to go home and finish baking it yourself for double the cost of a fully baked loaf from the bakery.

Something good, something good… As previously mentioned, thank god for brown sauce and mustard. If you like brown sauce and mustard and are passing this café then why not pop in and squeeze a few drops in to your mouth before you toddle off on your merry way…. Keep going… keep going… RUN!