When Did Cooking Disappear Up Its Own Arse?

I finally persuaded a friend to lend me his vintage copy of The Art Of Simple French Cookery by the superbly named Alexander Watt, a notorious gourmet who spent much of his life lounging around in bistros - a name he tells us originated around the fall of Napoleon, when ravenous Russians encamped in Paris would wander around shouting “bistro, bistro!” (meaning “quick, quick” in their nasal tongue) as they entered cafes looking for something to eat.

No doubt beginning his day with pastis, moving on to red wine, and then finishing the night on brandy, Watt would gorge himself on bistro classics such as poularde Marie-Louise, boeuf en gelee, rognons a la moutarde, gibelotte de lapin, and always a plate of seasonal cheeses.

The accounts of his “gastronomic peregrinations” are a joy to read, as is his book, Paris Bistro Cookery, which adjoins the back of The Art Of Simple French Cookery like an upside down Siamese twin. As you flick through the pages, noting the splendid simplicity of the dishes, you can picture Watt swaying in the doorway of tiny Parisian kitchens, disrupting service as he scrawls into a grease-spattered notebook.

In one introduction, he quotes Alexandre Dumaine, the celebrated proprietor of the Hotel de la Cote d’Or, at Saulieu, and at the time of writing in the 1950s, a man widely considered to be the greatest chef in France, remarking that “the simplest dishes are often the most difficult to prepare to perfection”. And it got me thinking about when modern cooking finally disappeared, irretrievably, up its own arse.

Talk to chefs and food writers now and they’re obsessed with 480-hour slow-braised pork, moss infusions, locally-picked weeds, ingredient reversals, baby vegetable purees, quintuple-cooked chips, and anything else they can jam into a sous vide bath. When they’re not boring you to death about acidifier particle accelerators or the optimum water bath temperature for mackerel, they’re waffling on about their new £2,000 Swiss gelato machine, or their latest experiment with meat glue.

“I’ve been transglutaminasing duck skin on to chicken legs - it’s wonderful for the barbecue,” I honestly heard one food nerd say the other day.

It was at a highly pretentious food convention I’d been invited along to. Everyone had to bring something. There were the predictable, umami-filled burgers, stacked full of shaved ambergris, sun-crisped tomatoes and parmesan, and vac-packed offerings that had been poaching away since Christmas. All the vegetables were hand cut, the fruit hand picked, there were twin shots of soup, and trifles with fancy labels boasting of Amontillado sherry. The bread was savoury enriched or griddled or both, the cheese shaved, the custard thick set, the apples brandy-stewed, and of course the stilton soufflés were twice-baked and organic. And that was just the less pompous stuff.

Celebrity chef Ted Allen cooks a recipe from his new book Pretentious Foodie Bullshit...

It was a haven of unadulterated pretentiousness, and I would like to have said I felt out of place, but of course I went along with the head-nodding and the nerdy chat about flavour enhancers, emulsifiers, and the mysterious night-time activities of enzymes. When it came to my own offering, I suddenly became quite embarrassed.

“How long did you confit the chicken?” they wanted to know.

“Definitely vac-packed with the marinade,” someone else butted in.

“What, and then flash-seared?” another serious-looking, where’s-my-TV-show, wannabe asked.

How could I tell them I’d knocked up the marinade in the two minutes I had to rush out of the door for a forgotten appointment?

When I’d returned a few hours later, having left instructions for the chicken thighs to be taken out of the fridge after a few hours and then roasted, something magical had happened. The chicken was almost falling apart. The colour was a rich gold, and the jelly left behind made the best dripping sandwiches I’ve had in a long time.

But it was the reaction that was the biggest surprise. The food bores were licking their lips and going back for more, and the hyperboles came so thick and fast, I began to fear it was some sort of cruel joke. But no, the superlatives continued.

How could I tell them the truth? All the meals I’d spent days slaving over, spanking my wallet with expensive, unnecessary ingredients, and I’d never had such praise in my life. And it was for a chicken dish that could hardly have been simpler to make, and one that I hadn’t even cooked myself. I fended off the questions and then wandered off to a corner of the patio to ring my accomplice for the secret. How long had it been in there? What temperature? Top of the oven or bottom?

“Can’t remember, I just put it in the oven,” she slurred.

As people kept pressing me for the recipe, I was too embarrassed to confess its simplicity, and then I stopped myself. I thought about Paris Bistro Cookery, and how the chef Auguste Perrot had taken pleasure in preparing the simplest of dishes for the exclusive gastronomic Club de la Casserole. Dishes like Foies de Volaille Andre (chicken livers fried in butter with finely chopped onions), and Les Tomates Lucien (basically scrambled eggs with tomatoes).

Had cooking skills advanced so much that these lowly dishes are now to be pitied, I thought? I remembered Dumaine’s words: “Cooking is not just a matter of pressing buttons. One should forget the gadgets and the tricks...” So I told them the truth and they quickly became bored and went back to their PacoJets.

Here is my embarrassingly simple recipe with a highly pretentious title, named after the cook who can’t remember how she cooked it...

CHICKEN MARIE-ANNE (serves 4)

8 chicken thighs, with skin

2 Teaspoons Paprika

1 Teaspoon Turmeric

1 Teaspoon Garam Masala

3 Tablespoons Sunflower Oil

2 Cloves Garlic, crushed

1 Teaspoon Salt

Put the salt and garlic cloves in a vintage, hand-crafted pestle and mortar, and bash away for a few seconds. Put in a bowl, add the spices and oil and mix until you’ve got a thick paint. Dip each thigh in the marinade, making sure they are thoroughly coated. Cover with clingfilm and leave in the fridge for three hours. Pre-heat an oven to an unknown temperature. Put the thighs on a metal tray and get someone to cook them for you. Or as a Russian encamped on the Place de la Concorde might say today: “Simples.” 

The Night The Roux Brothers Had Bread Rolls Hurled At Them

It is a little known fact, but before the Roux brothers arrived in Britain, people were sitting around in puddles eating mud, completely unaware that ovens even existed, let alone the complexities of the sort of soufflé that would engender begrudging Gallic approval.

No one knew how to cook, animals were eaten raw, and the Government was so concerned about the nation’s eating habits, they flew in the two Frenchmen to save the British people before it was too late.

Or at least, that’s the impression you’d get if you read today’s Daily Mail interview with Michel and Albert Roux, who modestly claim they single-handedly transformed British cuisine, turning the UK into the celebrity chef-obsessed, great food Mecca it is today.

“It was the dark ages,” said Michel, 70, shaking his head in disgust at the memory of the British culinary scene when he moved to London in the late 1960s.

“Nobody was serving decent food. I'm not even talking about good food. You would go to the Lyons Corner House where they would give you bleached bread and vegetables saturated with water. It was inedible. You have no idea what it was like.”

But by first opening Le Gavroche in Chelsea in 1967, then The Waterside Inn at Bray in Berkshire, and several brasseries, the brothers changed all that and showed the British how to eat, apparently.

“The Roux legacy is a lifetime of hard work which transformed food in Britain. We now have a food heritage to be proud of,” boasts Albert's son Michel Roux Jr (pic below) in the interview to plug the Good Food Channel’s new series - called funnily enough The Roux Legacy, and featuring the family's celebrity chef chums and a whole lot of tedious back-slapping.

But it wasn’t all plain sailing. A friend of mine - who’s retired now after making a fortune running racecourse catering firms across the UK - remembers a disastrous night in 1985 when the Roux brothers were pioneering a very modern cooking system known as sous vide.

They catered for a special function at the Royal Albert Hall for 2,500 members of the advertising world using only vac-packed food cooked under pressure, so all they had to do was reheat it just before service, which they claimed would make it very easy in the kitchen.

My friend, who helped run the event, had voiced his concerns beforehand, saying he’d had problems in the past with sous vide, and the Roux brothers were restaurateurs not caterers and were used to knocking out grub for 200 people not 2,000.

But Michel Roux reassured him: “It will be a wonderful way of introducing this cooking system to a lot of people. We are opening a restaurant in the City which will only use sous vide and this dinner will be a showcase for us.”

But the evening couldn’t have gone worse.

Because of the complexities of the new system and all the equipment (no, not just scissors) that needed to be brought in to solve the logistical problems of getting food out at the same time to all seven tiers of the Albert Hall - a place that Albert Roux had half-joked was named after him - the main meal was so late, the guests had polished off most of the wine before it arrived.

“The highlight,” my friend recalls, “was Albert and Michel Roux on the stage at the Albert Hall being jeered and pelted with bread rolls by all the luminaries of the London advertising world.”

Wonder if that will appear in the programme?

MORE: Coq Au Van: In Defence of Gordon Ramsay

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Coq Au Van: In Defence Of Gordon Ramsay

I was about to begin my post, telling you how many of the dishes at the Fat Duck were cooked using the ‘boil-in-the-bag’ sous vide method. I was about to tell you how the vac-packed salmon fillet was dipped in a liquorice gel, which set at around 89C, so it stayed solid when gently poached in the water bath.

I was about to tell you how Heston Blumenthal claims the method helps preserve the natural flavours and colours, and manipulates the chemical make-up of the proteins, starches and fats to create new textures and flavours.

I was about to tell you how the process was championed by masterchefs like Ferran Adriá (who tricks people with his ‘caviar’ – it might look just like osetra, but it is made of squid ink and calcium chloride) and Thomas Keller (who compresses watermelon and poached lobster in a vac-pack machine with exquisite results).

I was about to give you my penny’s worth on how the trendy sous vide method (French for ‘under vacuum’) has had the biggest single effect on professional cooking since Escoffier himself. And I was about to ponder how long it would be before every gadget-crazed foodie has a vac-pack machine gathering dust with the pasta machines and bread makers at the back of the cupboard...

But then I got distracted by The Sun and the Daily Mail, and their hatchet job on Gordon Ramsay. The charge? Using ‘boil-in-the-bag’ food in his three gastropubs and Foxtrot Oscar, his bistro in Chelsea.

With typical ‘rip off Britain’ histrionics, the papers worked themselves into a self-righteous frenzy over how the celebrity chef’s hoodwinked customers are served pre-prepared meals produced by a central supplier, and delivered by Transit van.

The meals – dishes like pork belly, coq au vin (coq au van, geddit!) and braised pig’s cheeks – are then heated up in a pan of boiling water, and passed off as ‘freshly made’. But it doesn’t stop there.The food is sold for up to six times its cost price (Exhibit A, your Honour, a fishcake made in Mr Ramsay’s central prep room - a place near “railway arches and a council estate in Clapham” no less - costs £1.92 to make, and sells for up to £11.25 on the menu).

The reports then hammer home Ramsay’s devilish two-facedness by quoting him from past interviews saying stuff like “my food hell is any ready meal” and examples of him slagging off British roadside restaurants for heating up pre-prepared meals rather than making it fresh there on the premises.

The Mail gives its outrage a stamp of culinary authenticity by getting rent-a-quote food critic Richard Harden to slam Ramsay for his shameless hypocrisy by pointing out how the chef has always stressed the importance of freshly-cooked ingredients. Then others line up – Jamie Oliver, Shaun Hill, Lindsey Bareham – to put the boot in.

A spokesman for Ramsay defends his sous vide cooking, saying: “The central kitchen is a state-of the-art-facility...it just happens to be off-site.” He points out that the food is still “freshly prepared”.

And this, in my humble opinion, is what it is all about.

Given the way The Sun and the Mail presented the story, the reader would be forgiven for assuming Ramsay was buying lasagne ready meals from Tesco, removing them from their plastic trays, and then passing them off as his own. And judging by the readers’ comments many of them did.

But all of this shows a complete lack of understanding of professional cooking, and the need to get meals out quickly to waiting customers. What is freshly prepared anyway? Every kitchen I have ever been in makes much of its food in advance - from the meat jus in top French restaurants, to red sauce in Italian restaurants, to vac-packed lobster portions at The Dorchester, to containers of curry sauce filling up the fridges in Indian restaurants.

There are a few restaurants that make risotto from scratch each time, but these are the exception – even the best restaurants partially cook the rice in advance, then finish it off when the order comes in.

The simple truth is anything that takes a long time to cook is done in advance. When you order slow-roasted pork belly, lamb shank, or braised pig’s cheek, do you really expect a chef to start chopping the mirepoix, frying it off, cooking off the wine and gently stewing the meat for the next three hours?

And why stop there? The bacon in the coq au vin, for instance. Should that not have been cured in the kitchen while you sit there waiting for your meal? And the pig – surely that should have been freshly killed on the premises?

Restaurants like the Fat Duck, Rick Stein's Seafood Restaurant, and Ramsay’s gastropubs use prep rooms because their kitchens are too small. The fact the food was made off the premises is irrelevant – it’s the quality and freshness of the ingredients that count.

Ramsay’s spokesman points out that the ‘ready meals’ are made in a “Gordon Ramsay kitchen run by Gordon Ramsay chefs cooking Gordon Ramsay food”. Food miles and environmental concerns aside, does it really matter that it was cooked on the other side of London?

As I have written about in recent blogs, much of the Fat Duck food is made in a prep room 100 yards or so from the restaurant. Should we not also be attacking Blumenthal over this abominable revelation? Does the fact the food is carried over the road by chefs rather than delivered in refrigerated vans make any difference? Interestingly, Harden is quoted as saying: “There is normally nothing wrong with prep kitchens except I am not sure there has ever been a prep kitchen that gets top class standards." Doesn’t he consider the three-starred Fat Duck top class then? Are those hundreds of chefs and critics who voted it the second best restaurant in the world wrong?

Of course, none of this outrage is about the horrors of ‘boil-in-the-bag’ cooking at all. It’s about the growing witch-hunt against Ramsay, and the ‘build them up then knock them down’ schadenfreude so enjoyed by the British press.

For years the famously litigious cook has managed to side-step press attacks through clever means, which for legal reasons I can’t go into, but now his number appears to be up. He has spread himself too thin, been far too ubiquitous on our screens, and now newspaper editors have decided enough is enough.

Of course, Ramsay’s plight was not helped by one of his assistant managers telling the undercover reporter who broke the story that the food is “definitely” freshly made on the premises. Thus giving legs to the 'expose'.

But the moral justification for the slur – which is so important for amoral tabloids – came after he was exposed in the News of the World for allegedly cheating on his wife, and was then subsequently accused of exaggerating his football career.

With the same relish they greeted the collapse of celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson’s overstretched restaurant business, the papers have lovingly imparted every detail of Ramsay’s unravelling empire, from the forced sales of restaurants abroad, to flogging his beloved Ferrari for a £50,000 loss.

But it begs the question are we just watching the spud-faced bully finally getting his comeuppance, or is this part of a broader mood that finally spells the end of the celebrity chef culture?

:: Got an opinion on this...please spare a moment and leave a comment below, go on - it'd be nice to hear from you...

'How Long Have You Been Cooking For?'

The rush subsided, the adrenal tide went out, and then came crashing back like a vicious tsunami. Seven a la carte orders came in for the radish ravioli of oyster with goat’s cheese and truffle, and rissole of fromage de tete. Even I knew we were fucked.

The detail that went into them was frightening. It was the fiddliest job I have ever - or hope to ever - come across. The thought of my sausage fingers butchering those delicate fancies still gives me nightmares now.

The success of the dish rested on the thinness of the sliced radish, and Jon was taking no chances with that. He cut insect wing slivers with the finest setting on his mandoline, lay them out on a piece of towling, then let me get on with it. He put a silver thimble where he wanted the ravioli built - right near the rim of the plate, that no-go area I’d always been told was ‘waiter’s territory’. But then nothing at the Fat Duck followed the rule book.

I set about the dish with a pair of tweezers, building the radish slices in a circle around the thimble, each overlapping slice meeting the middle of the previous one. I took my time, but my first two were rejected before I’d even completed the bottom ring.

Yet even with my cack-handed efforts, you could see the kaleidoscope magic – it looked like a mad man had drawn Venn diagrams on the plate with a ridiculously thin pink pencil.

The fillings – a brunois of goats’ cheese, black truffle and chopped oyster - had already been portioned out like lumps of hash in clingfilm wraps. You formed it into a ball, placed it in the centre of the ring, then built up the radish wall around it using tweezers to position every sliver. And with the clock ticking and the adrenaline pumping, I was shaking like a surgeon with a smack habit.

A minute later and the confirmation finally came...

I wasn’t a Michelin chef at all. Far from it. The nearest I’d get was four tyres and a road map. The whistle was blown and Claudia, the German stagier helping out on pastry, was brought in to fill my place.

:: This blog eventually became a bestselling book, called Down And Out In Padstow And London by Alex Watts, about my disastrous attempt to train as a chef, including stints at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck and Rick Stein's kitchens in Padstow. You might like it if you're a foodie or have ever entertained the ridiculous idea of entering the padded asylum of professional cooking. It's here on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle book if you want a read...