buying books

If you're going to cook, you've really got to start with a cook book.
The dread phrase that dooms any chef at an interview is " I like to do the classics - but with my own twist". Sure as hell this guy is going to be writing his name in raspberry coulis on his signature dish while the sauce is disappearing into a pool of tar. The classics already have their own twist, and unless you're a genius (like Peter Gordon) buy books so that you can learn how to do them rather than invent your own.

The act of dotting casually a few cookbooks somewhere visible in your living room, is the first step on the road to culinary brilliance. But just as the secret of cooking is the avoidance of error, so you should be careful when buying a book.

(1) Resist, whatever the cost, books written by professional chefs, in particular, anyone who‘s had a TV show. Too long as a Head Chef and/or being on the telly corrupts absolutely.

For example, Raymond Blanc once brought out a book with the text printed in such a colour that you needed a special kind of mercury lamp in order to read it. Furthermore, the recipes were graded by a code of little chef’s hats which indicated the level of difficulty. The one hat recipes, it seemed, were laughably easy and required merely two or three days of stock making, egg white aided sauce clarification, advanced butchery and other preparatory work. The three hatters, however, were at such a level of complexity that it’s likely a typewriting monkey would come up with an explanation for Shrodinger’s Cat Paradox before you managed to produce anything edible.

The exceptions are anything written by one of “The Three Degrees” the trio of university educated chefs who changed the face of London restaurants in the 80’s; Simon Hopkinson, Alistair Little and Rowley Leigh. You can buy Alistair Little’s “Keep It Simple” just to read the preface.

(2) Don’t buy books without colour pictures. When you go on holiday it’s nice to have seen a photo of your destination. You can also tell when you‘ve arrived.

(3) Avoid books written by French people. Instead buy books about French cooking written by foreigners. In particular, any book by Patricia Wells - though you won’t find any pictures, so be careful you don’t end up in Switzerland.

(4) Don’t buy books with an open ended category. So that rules out anything along the lines of
“ My favourite Whatever” or “At Home With Whoever” or “ The Romance Of The Something-or Other”.
What you want is writing of real authority and understanding of a particular type of cooking. And then you want a long list of recipes of that particular type.
So zoom down to a particular region and get something like “Cucina Siciliana” by Clarisa Hyman. Or hard boil your focus into a very narrow category like Pork or Biscuits or Soups Etc (Time Life series edited by Richard Olney), Fish (Jane Grigson, Rick Stein).
Or go to the intersection of two or more cookery sets - like Bourgeois Indian (Madhur Jaffrey, J. Inder Singh Kalra) or Asian Street Food (Tom Kime).

(5) Anything bought on holiday is always great

(6) Everyone says Elizabeth David - they're right, what a woman. Best read when nowhere near a kitchen, glass in hand.

(7) A photo of a fat author is usually a good sign.

The Rule

Imagine this – it’s 7 O’clock on a Saturday evening, your home has scrubbed up quite nicely, and, though you wouldn’t shout about it, so have you.
Your guests are due to arrive in about half an hour. There’s a bottle of Corton Charlemagne ’98 in the fridge, a cheeky bottle of claret breathing on the kitchen table, a slab of ozone-fresh turbot, the most kingly fish, glistening on your chopping board and a Lighthouse Family Greatest Hits CD lying next to the music centre.
What could possibly go wrong with the evening ahead?

To be honest, how long have you got?
Apart from the obvious dangers of friends, spouses and alcohol being in the same room at the same time, and just concentrating on the food – with a complete and utter idiot at the helm, this good ship Dinner Party is never far from the rocks.
That’s not to say that you, gentle reader, are a blithering idiot. But what I can say is that, aided by a singular, golden and immutable law of culinary navigation, this ship could be brought safely to port, even if it were skippered jointly by Frank Spencer, Benny from Crossroads and the entire English World Cup Football Team.

So what’s the rule all chefs are taught?
It’s simple; “Don’t make any bloody mistakes”

It stands to reason. Food is naturally great. That’s why it’s food. If it wasn’t great we’d eat something else. So just don’t mess with it. Don’t make the mistake of buying turbot that’s not fresh! Then don’t make the mistake of trying show-offy effects (like making Bearnaise sauce for the first time) while the fish burns or stews to a pulp. And it’s much better to pull out of the oven some tasty, crispy, golden, salted oven chips than to serve up from the fryer some soggy, unseasoned “perfect-for-chips” Maris bleedin' Pipers.

Make sure each process is not mistake-ridden.
It’s easy to remember which bits of flora and fauna, heated, go well together on a plate. It’s easy to buy fresh fish. It’s easy to cook fish. It’s easy to make good chips. Concentrate on not messing these easy bits up. Then add a few skills.
Go carefully and correctly, step by step.

As The Man says – “first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin”
An idiot can do it, I’ve seen it.

first of an irregular post

Members of the public, who’ve never seen a real professional kitchen, might think that behind the swing doors of the great restaurant kitchens of the world work teams of blessed individuals, each the winner, in life's great lottery, of the rare chromosome of culinary genius.
Actually, not much could be further from the truth. Most members of these motley crews are lucky to have found any sort of gainful employment at all and, jeez, if they can cook so can anyone.

There’s a couple of reasons why anything edible ever comes out of these places.
First – someone, hopefully the head chef, needs to know what they’re doing.
Second – this person who knows what they’re doing coaxes some sort of organization out of the blind chaos that is the default setting for most kitchens, and then
Third - imposes a fearsome rule on the other people who don’t know what they’re doing.

The rest is relatively easy because,luckily, generations of French grandmothers have worked out what goes nicely with what, and their husbands, sons and (sometimes)daughters have worked out what to do with grapes.
So all you’ve got to do to is buy a good bottle of wine, buy some ingredients of the marrying kind, and follow the rule.