Words: pan-fried, adj.

THE FOOD industry always tries to pull a fast one. The latest attempt to blur the issue - similar to oven-baked - is pan-fried, demolished by Nigella Lawson in the admirable How To Eat.

"I object to the term pan-fried because what are you going to fry something in, if not a pan? But the thing about pan-fried is not so much that it is tautologous, as that it is a con-trick. Let me deconstruct: fried is greasy, heavy, fattening, old-style food which none of us eats any more; pan-fried is modern, light, healthy . . . But food, whether fried or pan-fried, is cooked in the same way. It's a brilliant wheeze."

If one doubts the poetry of frying, Johnson quotes Waller: "spices and gums about them melting fry, / And, phenix like, in that rich nest they die".