Locally Sauced - Table B'hote in the news again

When Linda Berry hit upon the idea of manufacturing cooking sauces she was moored up on a boat in Falmouth Harbour. Her husband had boasted to a group of sailing companions about Linda’s fantastic homemade chilli, and the crew asked to put it to the test. One blustery evening, with the boat listing and ingredients rolling everywhere, she produced a chilli to warm to cockles of the hardiest sailor. ‘You should put that in a jar,’ one of them told her.

That experience in June 2008 provided Linda with the name for her new enterprise, which she launched just three months later: Table B’hôte (it’s pronounced like ‘boat’ – geddit?), a play on the French Table d’Hôte. Although Linda’s initial idea was to develop a range of high quality convenience foods that can be easily prepared in the limited space of a boat’s galley, Table B’hôte has become much more than that.

Her gluten-free sauces include: chilli (available mild, medium or hot), cottage pie sauce, bolognaise, sweet’n’sour and have found appeal across a wide variety of customers. These range from busy parents trying to produce a healthy, filling family meal in limited time, to those who normally prepare dishes from scratch but find Linda’s sauces so tasty that they are willing to forego their home-cooking principles.

They’re also bought by cafés and restaurants, such as The Taphouse in St Agnes, who are keen to Locally sauced growing number of companies are advancing the food scene in Cornwall by manufacturing artisan products of a type more often found on the supermarket shelf, such as Table B’hôte cooking sauces.

Support a local business that can supply quality, gluten-free products that their limited kitchens can’t stretch to.

The broad appeal can be attributed to the high quality of ingredients, Cornish wherever possible, that Linda uses. All her sauces are completely free from artificial additives and preservatives and all are gluten-free. They’re steamed rather than boiled to preserve the vitamin content and keep the vegetables fresh and crunchy.
However, Linda’s insistence on steaming has forced her to compromise on one aspect. ‘It’s a Cornish enterprise and the inspiration is pure Cornwall,’ says Linda, ‘but there’s nowhere in the county that can actually manufacture the sauces.’

Instead the manufacturing process takes place in her home city of Manchester. She explains that if she were willing to boil her sauces she would be able to find a local plant to make them. ‘But steaming makes the difference between Dolmio or Ragú and Table B’hôte. If I made them that way there would be no point in doing it,’ she says.
As it is, Linda certainly appears to have found a winning formula. Sales have risen steadily since the products were launched just two years ago and Table B’hôte can now be found in delis, farm shops and butchers across the county, though Table B’hôte’s sea-faring beginnings have once again become evident: one customer recently moved to America and asked Linda to send her sauces to him in Boston, while another has imported Linda’s cottage pie sauce to the Middle East.

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Words by Lisa Cooper.
www.food-mag.co.uk