The weekend before last I made sandwiches so disgusting that my boyfriend was sick. The ingredients weren’t off. It was the combination – salmon eggs and avocado, taramasalata and celeriac remoulade – and, beyond that, the intention. This was a lunch born of the eagerness to use up leftovers, rather than the desire for it to taste nice enough to at least keep down.
So I was a bit concerned about cooking supper last Friday for quite a lot of people – especially given that ambulances were likely to be tied up with Bonfire night. But it passed without casualty. The reason? Nigella. Specifically, Nigella’s first book, How to Eat, whose guiding principle is to refocus attention away from preparation and back to consumption.
She writes: “There is a reason why this book is called How to Eat rather than How to Cook. It’s a simple one: although it’s possible to love eating without being able to cook, I don’t believe you can ever really cook unless you love eating.” You must begin with the pleasure of the person faced with the plate, then work backwards from there.
In the new movie Burnt, Bradley Cooper plays a hotshot chef who comes to London in the hope of gaining a third Michelin star. For him, pleasing the people who eat his food isn’t really of interest. The opinions of those punters who fork out crazy money for the privilege of supping at his trough barely warrant a thought. The verdicts that do matter are those of the critics (including Uma Thurman as a saucy lesbian from the Evening Standard), the Michelin men (you can spot them by their fork-dropping) and, most crucially, other hotshot chefs (stubble, commitment-issues, chuck pots at the wall). Such select few are even served dishes quite different from those pushed out to the poor suckers who have waited months for a table.
Burnt is a bad movie with a title that’s just asking for trouble. But inside this turkey lies a kernel of truth. When I have been lucky enough to go to a name-chef restaurant, I too have found that the intention isn’t really to just please you – it’s to wow, or even intimidate. The food rarely serves the person being served. Squid ink batter may look flashy wrapped round cod, but it tastes odd and takes an age to plough through. An amuse-bouche of sweetbreads may not be, actually, that amusing. That sauce with those scallops might look luxey, but good luck to your arteries trying to bale out the butter. Gordon, Marcus, Marco: take it from me – think about the digestion rather than the self-satisfaction.
Underground art for all
I used to buy everyone’s Christmas presents from the shop at the London Transport Museum, mostly because I wanted all that kit myself: the Routemaster washbag, the cushions that look like the Metropolitan line, endless Edward McKnight Kauffer prints. The museum’s grand new permanent exhibition of tube art and posters would therefore pose considerable temptation, were it not that a decade of commuting has sated my enthusiasm a bit – and made me realise you can enjoy art every day if you go underground. The Piccadilly line platforms at Finsbury Park, for instance, have a sequence of six huge mosaics of hot air balloons – incredibly intricate even before you’ve factored in the curve of the tunnel, all sweet pinks and soothing blues.
What I hadn’t clocked until last week was that they’re a sequence, the balloon slowly – slightly trippily, certainly unsafely – descending as it floats northbound along the platform. These mosaics were commissioned from an artist called Annabel Grey in 1983, at considerable cost, including £50,000 alone (in today’s money) for a few gold tiles. Today, such spend is unthinkable. In fact, there doesn’t even seem to be the funding to wash them.
