I am, occasionally, asked what sort of food I cook.
I'll normally answer vaguely with "Modern English" as though that were a phrase that actually means anything. It's a kiss-off answer, like answering "Goodfellas" when someone asks you what your favourite film is, as if anyone can narrow their preferred films down to one. "Oh, Modern English" I'll say, waving my arms around for emphasis, though what I'm emphasising is not explained. Normally by the time my interlocutor has worked this one out I've gone and hidden in the walk-in.
It's a bit of a vexed question, what do I cook? Allsorts, really, I've never really drilled down to define it.
The truth is that, in my patchwork, self-taught career I've jumbled together a bunch of influences into a style which resembles, from a distance, something that's my own. I've never approached cheffing from a chef's perspective, I've generally looked at my job as being one of making people happy, then asked myself how I'll go about that. It's not so much my vision as it is anticipation of a need. Sometimes it's a need people didn't know they had, and then I get to look clever, but it's never been my ego on a plate.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. As I discussed here not long ago, I'm starting to step back a bit, and that's afforded me a little bit more space and time to really think about what I do, and how and why I do it.
As I've said before (Coastalblog passim), I never really intended to be a chef, but I did always enjoy cooking, and I think that the fact that I came of age in the nineties, just when the general public was starting to get the idea that there might be more to life than Findus Crispy Pancakes (not that I was averse to those).
I remember as a smaller child it was a more more functional thing. My Grandma's roast on a Sunday being one of the the only proper meals I could reliably recall (Though my Mum did a mean Chicken casserole, in one of those clay bricks that Terence Conran told the aspiring middle classes that they had to have). My main food memories from that time, are based around stuff, the first Microwave, the excitement when a Sodastream was brought home.
However, elsewhere, something was stirring. In the eighties and early nineties, Delia had quietly suggested to people that they might like nice things, and here was how it was done properly. In the nineties, the baton was picked up and run with, and that's when I got started.
As you've probably guessed I did not grow up in a Delia household, I mention her because I have a firmly held belief that, without her, a lot doesn't happen, I think that her series and books paved the way for food to become something it was socially acceptable to have an interest in, and without the British Middle classes shedding their suspicion of cooking then a lot of the chef boom that I tagged onto doesn't occur. But she was never really a big influence on me (though I have fond memories of my housemates following her instructions for making toast and ending up with, well, cold toast).
The first cook (definitely cook, not chef) that give me the idea that I might be able to cook a bit was Nigel Slater. People get a bit snotty another his simple, easy recipes, but his foregrounding of flavour over technique was an eye opener for a teenager who just wanted to eat nice things and maybe impress a couple of girls at University (it worked, I'm married to one to this day). I had a copy of Real Food that I worked my way through, and rather wish I still had. I gave it away to a lad I knew who wanted to learn how to cook, and by then I'd moved on a bit (by which I mean no disrespect to Nigel, whose columns I still read now, he's a humane and sensible writer, and his recipes work). Might by myself another copy, though, I miss that.
Then the young lady who was impressed enough got me a Rick Stein book. Now, Rick was a big deal growing up, I lived not far from Padstow, and he was already well into his stride by this point, though The Seafood Restaurant was a grown-ups treat. I've always loved seafood, and this was a real wake-up call, as the book detailed techniques as well as recipes (I can rather grandly say that I have actually cooked for Rick Stein, but it was only a bowl of chips in a pub in Boscastle, lovely bloke, though), and so I started to learn a lot about the mechanics of cooking, filleting, the importance of temperature.
Rick also was unafraid to mess around with what we would now, in more straitlaced times, refer to as a bit of cultural appropriation. Cooking a Goan curry and blithely imagining it superior to the original (a charge which can also be levelled quite a lot at Jamie Oliver), but this, in the latest nineties, was a revelation, a myriad of food cultures were there to be explored.
Had I but known it at the time, my card was already marked, and were there any doubt, then Prue Leith put the tin lid on it, when I bought a copy of the Leith's Cookery Bible (long since robbed by an old head chef of mine) as part of a book club job lot along with some literary theory and an encyclopaedia of philosophy which remains resolutely unread 25 years later. Taken up some impressive space on some impressive bookshelves in that time though, I can tell you.
Leith's was a touchstone, an ur-text, it had EVERYTHING in it. I think that's why (redacted) thieved it. Want to know how to cook a thing? Prue knows how to cook a thing, Prue's taught thousands of people how to cook that thing. That she's primarily known for Bake Off these days is a travesty, everyone should have a copy of Leith's Cookery Boble (in fact, I think I might bob off and order a copy now)
I still, at this point, had grand dreams of being a writer (still do, tbh), so restaurants were a thing I did while I was waiting to write the work of genius that was absolutely definitely going to pop fully formed into to my brain any minute now.
Any minute now.
There have been too many influences to list since I realised that I'd been doing this long enough that that was probably me now. Fergus Henderson probably deserves a post on his own, and there's probably a blog about how quite a lot of it all is Anthony Bourdain's fault, but back in the formative days that's what started me off, even if I didn't realise it at the time.
Next time I cook chips for Rick Stein, I'll be sure to blame him for it to his face.
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