Fortify yourself with… A bottle of madeira and a bottle of Australian liqueur muscat or PX (pedro ximenez) sherry. •Use the madeira for deglazing pans when you’ve fried, grilled or roast some meat. Madeira is good because of its unique tang, but sherry , port and marsala also work. Sherry has the advanatage of being widely available and any style can be used as long as you take into account the sweetness/dryness. •Douse ice cream (choc, coffee, ginger, rum and raisin, vanilla

Far be it from me to suggest that anyone should find cooking with wine in Britain off-puttingly expensive, but I do concede that, thanks to our swingeing taxes on alcohol, it can be expensive. The trouble with wine is that once opened, it doesn’t keep, so anything left over has to be drunk (isn’t life hard?) which means that next time you want to cook with wine you have to buy another bottle. This is where, spirits and fortified wines have the edge. Spirits, including liqueur