Rugby High School Parent Portal - Rugby High School

News from Mr Grady
13th October 2022

Hello Everyone,

This week I managed to actually visit a theatre. I think this may be my first visit to one for about three years. It wasn’t to see a play, it was to watch a recording of “The Kitchen Cabinet” a Radio 4 programme where a food critic, Jay Rayner, asks a panel of food experts and chefs a variety of food-based questions – a bit like gardener’s question time, but with more butter. The audience too, can ask questions.

As part of the programmes’ celebration of Black history month, there was a special appearance by the owners of a Jamaican Restaurant in Coventry, and a sharing of Jamaican and Caribbean recipes, as well as actual food (although this was enjoyed by the panel, and not the audience.) The smell of the food though, rippled through the auditorium, and left us all drooling slightly…

What was fascinating to me, was the breadth of knowledge and the connectedness of knowledge that the panel, and of course the audience needed to draw on for the programme, and it made me reflect very much on our curriculum here. In order to fully access the conversations taking place on stage, I needed to draw on my geography and historical skills, understanding how food, recipes and heritage had made its way round the world, and ended up in Coventry, understanding the science of food, as they discussed the chemical reactions happening in certain cooking methods, and why and how flavours were developed, understanding language, as recipes, names of food or cooking styles had different linguistic roots, and of course enjoying the use of language in the discussion, the humour, and also, as an aside a whole segment on the local terms for a bread roll in Coventry (batch) as opposed to other places in this country and beyond; barm, bap, cobbler etc…

We often think about school as a variety of subjects. “I’ve done Maths, now I’m going to Business Studies, then on to Art…” and don’t always think about the connectedness, or the cohesion of how subjects interlink, overlap and inform each other, but it is occasions like this where suddenly, and quite obviously you realise just how connected things might be, and that your participation in the individual subjects and topics, and your curiosity to learn and discover will result in far richer experiences.

My question about interesting things to do with avocados that doesn’t involve guacamole was not selected to be asked on the programme, but on the other hand, as people had far better questions, as a result of the programme, my understanding of jerk seasoning, Scotch Bonnets and Pimentos has definitely been enhanced, and will be deployed in further cooking experimentation in the coming weeks.

With all best wishes,
Mr Grady