Which sort of food goes best with a skinful of lager? A university miseducation and several stag nights have convinced Andrew Purvis that seafood is the only answer.
Long before the Hay Diet made food-combining fashionable, I was engaged in a similar little project of my own. As a student, I quickly discovered that the traditional advice for avoiding hangovers - "Never mix the grape and the grain" - was far too simple. At every party I'd ever been to, the beer had run out after half an hour and everyone had switched to lukewarm Liebfraumilch in styrofoam cups, or started swigging Valpolicella straight from the bottle. Mixing the grape and the grain was inevitable, but the damage could be minimised by paying attention to colour. Pale lager followed by white wine seemed to be all right, and dark bitter and red wine caused few problems. But Guinness and champagne was a vile combination, which was why people who drank Black Velvet always ended up with their heads down the loo. A biochemist friend told me it was all to do with tannins - and the Purvis Drink-Combining Diet was born.
To this day, I have avoided such tempting party combinations as Bacardi (white) and Mackeson stout (black), or Malibu (white) and Jacob's Creek (blackish red). What I haven't managed to do quite so successfully is avoid fateful combinations of food and drink. My father, who is a man of few words and even fewer opinions, once gave me the invaluable advice: "Never mix beer and bananas." At the time, I couldn't really imagine the circumstances in which one would - Pacific Rim cookery hadn't yet been invented - but he has since told me about the night when, as a young civil engineer in Newcastle, he ate a banana sandwich for his tea and went out drinking with the lads. The results were in the style of Jackson Pollock - and on a similar scale. He must have known, even then, that this was something he would tell his grandchildren.
Drinking beer on a stomach full of bananas is counter-intuitive, but what is the perfect food to accompany six pints of beer? We've all read about the sublime pairing of bouillabaisse and muscadet, or the London Spanish restaurant Moro's famous combo of fino sherry with salty Manchego cheese and quince. But the only foods traditionally consumed with lager are pork scratchings, cheese-and-onion crisps and vindaloo. Our drink writers have let us down. Thankfully, another thing I learned at university was the value of the Bargain Bucket. Colonel Sanders's only triumph - a four-litre carton crammed with thighs and fries - was a boon to the ravenous drinker wobbling home on a push-bike late on a Saturday night.
One trend I've noticed recently is the freakish combination of lager louts and seafood. At a seriously foodie dinner party the other night, a former colleague threw up her truffle-stained hands in despair after a weekend spent in Whitstable, Kent. "We went to the oyster restaurant," she protested, "and we were shocked. Half the people there were locals, but the rest were braying toffs down from London on a stag night."
Curiously, I too have been to Whitstable on a stag night. I don't remember much about it, but all eight of us peed into the tankful of oysters sunk into the restaurant floor. Sorry, there must be something wrong with my keyboard - I mean, we peered into the tank and saw dozens of oysters and mussels. Somebody took a photograph as we waited at the station for our train home, and you can clearly see a lobster's claws poking out of the bridegroom's pocket.
But although my memory of that occasion is a blur, my research does seem to confirm that alcoholic binges and molluscs are a winning combination. When a friend of mine married the Cabinet Secretary's daughter - this sounds like the first line of a lewd joke - he decided to spend his stag night not in a Soho strip joint, but at a celebrated seafood restaurant in Boulogne. With a dozen crew fuelled by hot toddies, he commandeered his uncle's boat and we sailed across the Channel by moonlight. Once in France, we ate only at the kind of restaurant where a dozen sinister tools are provided for weedling out recalcitrant marines from their shells. Despite a skinful, several winkles, a nightcap, and eight hours spent bobbing around in a harbour full of diesel and brine, not a single one of us was sick. Until the next day.
Perhaps there is some primeval connection between seafood and pre-nuptial celebrations. A while ago, there was a television commercial for a Peugeot (or was it a Renault? It clearly didn't work), in which a svelte woman in a black microdress crammed dripping langoustines into her boyfriend's mouth until he screamed. Then she chained him up, and drove off in his car. Maybe I missed the point, but that doesn't seem like a good campaign to me. Seafood may be an aphrodisiac, but it's highly dangerous for a man on his own. The only time he can safely eat it is when there's a stag night in the month.
My father, who is a man of few words and fewer opinions, once gave me the invaluable advice: 'Never mix beer and bananas'