Tuesday 20 April 2010

Food, glorious food.


This will be a moan. I’m blessed with a wife who’s a wonderful cook. She knows about flavours, combinations, health stuff and is far more creative than most of the restaurants in Aberdeen (and elsewhere for that matter). The highest compliment I can pay a restaurateur is to say that his/her food is just like we eat at home.

I don’t know if it’s the same elsewhere but in the UK, the TV is crammed with cookery programmes. AND FOR THE MOST PART I HATE THE PREMISS THEY’RE ALL BASED ON. Sorry, I must calm down and explain. Let’s start back in the late 80s. I made a series of programmes in France about various aspects of French culture and one of them, naturally enough, focused on food and leisure. At the time, we’d all at last moved out of that vile ‘nouvelle cuisine’ phase – you know the one, where a chef would cut a pea into maybe 7 or 8 slices, arrange them in a crescent in the middle of a plate the size of a basketball court, put 3 millimetres of something red near them and charge you £17.99 for it. BUT …

…when I interviewed a lecturer in the cookery school of an excellent college of commerce in Agen, where we’d just eaten a delicious lunch cooked by the students, he insisted that ‘presentation’ was a very important part of the discipline they had to learn. And presentation has come to prevail. So what do we get nowadays?

I could sort of understand it when they turned radishes into miniature roses or created crenellated carrots or turned beetroots into red spaghetti, but they’ve gone mad now. First it was towers of things – the same basketball plate but now with a tube of layered stuff in the middle with a sprig of flat parsley stuck in the top, or maybe a biscuit made out of a thin slice of pig. But soon that wasn’t enough. They had first to drizzle stuff, then drizzling was passé so they took ages making a flavour-filled sauce then put a small dollop of it somewhere on the plate and scraped it with a spoon to form a smear. This smear was neighbour to a minute portion of salmon or rabbit or venison or lamb or Gloucester Old Spot which was sliced into a small fan with some fragments of coloured things (one assumed vegetables) arranged on and around it. Nearby, if you were lucky, might be a fraction of a potato carved and teased into a curly or flat shape. And it could even be dusted with something that might be an exotic spice but looked like dandruff.

And then, pièce de résistance and horror of horrors, worse than Bram Stoker’s vilest imaginings, like something out of a bedside spittoon in a hospital, some ingredients whipped up into FOAM. Why, oh why does it never occur to these Michelin-starred chefs that their delicious, slaved-over foam looks exactly like throat-clearings? Who on earth wants to eat, however delicious it’s supposed to be, mucus?

But still the critics and the top chefs crave good presentation. Bafflingly, people who’ve sweated their apprenticeships out over years in hot kitchens spend hours arranging things on plates which (please let me remind you, ladies and gentlemen) are going to be scooped up with a fork, chewed and swallowed. OK, I don’t want to be served a plate with a grey lump on it, but I’m equally against risking being called a vandal because my fork desecrates a work of art. Food can look good without being made to resemble a Matisse.

I’m not a food philistine. I love eating, and no, I don’t just want huge platefuls of any old thing. But I want the chefs who prepare the stuff I eat (and for which I pay lumps of cash) to concentrate on getting the flavours and combinations right rather than on turning my plate into a Turner prize entry.




14 comments:

  1. Glad you got that off your chest, dude? And when do we get to meet your wife? She must be due a guest blog event.

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  2. Oh dear. Exotic spice that looked like dandruff! I have sons. They have the same attitude to fancily arranged bits of food, but I still sprinkle the odd bit of green on top of their dishes.

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  3. Thank you, Bill. I am no longer suffering from guilt at not spending the time creating works of art instead of producing good food! Which my husband gobbles up in no time anyway.

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  4. Michael, my wife's far too busy to do any guest blogging. Anyway, she'd immediately undermine this image I'm trying to project of me as a nice guy.

    Shelia, glad to hear your sons have their priorities right. And sprinkled bits of green stuff are fine as long as you don't take half an hour to arrange them lovingly into a post-impressionist montage (which I'm sure you don't.)

    Rosemary, if the food police ever charge you, I'll provide a character reference. (And your husband and I should maybe have a food race one day.)

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  5. Well, you know from my blog that I love good food. I'd rather have one bite of something mouthwatering, than a plate full of trash. Lucky you to have such a cook! (I'll thank you to keep the descriptions away from the table -ugh, a bedside spittoon.)

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  6. I tell it as I see it, Marley, but I'll steer clear of table descriptions in future.

    I think part of my complaint is that the food these people are arranging with such finesse isn't trash but probably bursting with beautiful flavours. That's where the effort should be going, not on poncing it about.

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  7. This is me wondering if the word "poncing" translates across the pond?

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  8. I wondered the same thing Michael but I think we'll be told if it doesn't. Mind you, defining it isn't easy.

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  9. I think I get the jist of poncing though it's not in my dictionary, :) The thing I've noticed is that the fancier the plate the smaller the portion, maybe that's the motivation.

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  10. Yes, yes, a guest post from the wifey! It gets my vote. :)

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  11. Stop trying to cause trouble, Scary.

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  12. You're a man of taste and perspicacity, Ferg.

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  13. Jean, good point about how looks don't equate with quality (at least in terms of food). And you could always send those uneaten cakes to a good home - such as mine.

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