Chicken and champagne

From Clement Freud's collected racing columns, as reviewed at the Guardian by Stephen Moss:

"I asked a friend who had been to a West Country course to assess the meal he had eaten, to be told that: 'If the soup had been as warm as the champagne, the champagne as old as the chicken, and the chicken as fat as the waitress, it would have been adequate." At Yarmouth, he recalled, "a fish and chip van was on hand to sell what St Paul in his letter to the Philippians called 'the piece of cod that passeth all understanding'."