I buy different salad dressings, but we keep going back to our old favourites, like Caesar dressing. So we bought all the ingredients, then when we tasted it we all thought ‘Yuck’ – but the lemongrass is still in the drawer, it might come in handy. But I’ve also got things like oregano, bought for a recipe and never used again, and a pack of cloves that have been there since I got married 18 years ago.My children like experimenting, and the other day my son brought in a recipe for chicken with pine nuts and lemongrass. Last time I found a pack of jelly that was five years old and threw that out; the other day I came across a can of Carnation milk that must be four years old.I’ve got herbs and spices that I use all the time, like garlic salt, chicken seasoning, bay leaves, anchovy paste, and stock cubes.

There’s always a tin of lychees that turn up when we move, or a box with jellies and sauce packs and things like seasoning for potato wedges that appear. They have twin children, Laura and Philip, 16.”We’re an army family so we move every two or three years, and my kitchen cupboards are very neat to start off with; tomatoes and vegetables on one shelf, baking stuff on another Once we’ve all been through it a few times, it’s bedlam. If you have a store of dusty, sticky packets and tins well past their sell-by date, don’t feel guilty; you’re far from alone.
Judy BeswickThe 47-year-old nurse and her husband, Nicholas, 48, an Army officer, live in Warminster. And although we buy cook books and watch cookery programmes avidly, typically only seven new recipes make it to our dinner tables over the course of a year. A new survey by McCain foods has found that only around half of the most exotic ingredients we buy make it to a second tasting; the rest remain uneaten, cluttering up the kitchen shelves and spice racks of the nation. Most of us have jars and bottles bought in a fit of culinary enthusiasm that we’ve used once (or not at all) and shoved to the back of the drawer.

Caper berries, tamarind pulp, candied angelica, galangal. The fantastic smell rising off a gigantic dish of andouillettes in the market at St Pierre had obviously been due to the cider, and definitely not to the sausages.. Jane Grigson, in her book Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery (1967), says that andouillettes are “of bland and mild flavour, making an excellent picnic lunch”.When I fried the sausage that evening, its pale, wrinkly gut casing shrank and the innards were gradually disgorged into the pan. Under the obligation to try everything, however, we bought a single andouillette (chitterling sausage) from a butcher in Falaise. Charcuterie vans offering a better-than-average array of goodies lured customers in with the aroma of freshly roasted pork.I enjoy kidneys, tongue and even duck hearts, but I’ve always drawn the line at intestine.