A gleaming monument to cleanliness. Photograph: Reuters
A couple of weeks ago I butchered a sheep in the kitchen. It was small and had been eviscerated and nicely hung before delivery so this was not, as you might be picturing, any sort of domestic bloodbath. At no point did I have to corner the beast behind the fridge with a cleaver, in fact, the procedure was characterised by the kind of organised calm that has, I like to think, become my hallmark. No fingers were lost, nothing was damaged and most importantly, an hour after the last chop was in the freezer, the kitchen gleamed, every surface squeaky clean with the evanescent but reassuring smell of chlorine.
The next day the Baker decided to knock out a small cake. An 11" three-layer chocolate cake with a poured ganache topping and a discreet trim of tiny sugar rosebuds, if you must know. Within an hour of cracking the first egg, every surface in a 10 metre perimeter was coated with a congealing film of powdered sugar, starch and albumen. Four days later I was still chiselling the dried gunk from the underside of the toaster.
I learned to cook in proper kitchens in the days when a chef wasn't some telegenic fop but a 20-stone sociopath who'd been cashiered from the Catering Corps for catastrophic lapses in personal hygiene. We learned, painfully, the cook's mantra - 'clean as you go'. A messy station is dangerous, inefficient, an affront to the craft and could attract physical chastisement from the chef.
The Baker makes toast the way Michael Cimino made 'Heaven's Gate' - a vast, bloated production, calling on every available resource to create a hubristic monument to genius. Every single bit of kit is dragged out, messed up and left somewhere where it's going to get in my way. ("It's toast - how, in God's name did you end up with shreds of parmesan in the wok?").
It seems that the culinary world is divided into two distinct camps. There are those who's ability to create sublime food under pressure is enhanced by their precise control of their surroundings - let's call them 'kitchen rationalists' - and there are those, like the Baker, who view the kitchen the same way a four-year old would look at three gallons of syrup and a bucket of glitter - let's call them 'wrong'.
For me, tidiness is fundamental to any kitchen practice, for the Baker, mess is a necessary precursor to creativity. What is your kitchen to you - operating theatre or Montessori playpen?
