COOKING - A SOLITARY VICE

HAPPINESS IS A SOUFFLE THAT RISES.

          

Georges Auguste Escoffier and his invention, the brigade de cuisine.

Having a house guest and friends visiting means I've spent a lot of time recently in the kitchen. Not that I'm complaining. Cooking is one of my greatest pleasures - all the more so for being solitary.

           It began as a way of meeting girls. In Australia, where foreplay often consisted of making a muscle and say "Feel that!", the offer to cook someone a meal had the merit of novelty. And once one is communicating by candle-light over food and wine, muscles didn't matter. Well, not as much, anyway.

Love-making Australian-style: Woman optional.

           The post-war waves of emigrants brought with them Parmesan, aubergines, garlic and the revelation that meat could be cooked other ways than grilled a minute on each side. I learned about Italian and Greek food, then Indian and Asian. Sometimes my enthusiasm outpaced acceptance. Not everyone shared my relish for chili, sashimi or Gorgonzola.

           My father cooked cakes and baked bread all his life, but at home could barely boil an egg.  And though I enjoy cooking, in a working kitchen I wouldn't last a day. Why? Because, as in most areas of expertise, between the amateur and the professional there yawns an unbridgable abyss.

           The Ur-text of modern cooking, Georges Auguste Escoffier's 1903 Le Guide Culinaire, is, unapologetically, a manual, not a cookbook. It breaks dishes down into constituent parts, like carburetors. Recipes begin "Take a litre of Sauce X (see recipe on page x), prepare six chicken breasts as if for Y (recipe page z)…" This works for chefs de cuisine with sous chefs, saucieres, rotiseurs and other specialists at their command, but not for the amateur at home.

            I tried making one of its simpler dishes, soupe à l'oignon. Even to do that, quantities of beef bones had to be roasted to make bouillon, onions fried until coramelised, Gruyere shredded, bread oven-dried. In a professional kitchen, with at least two kinds of bouillon always simmering on the back burner, heaps of onions already fried as a basis for stews, and plenty of cheese freshly grated for use in souffles or gratins, the dish could be assembled in a few minutes. For me, working from scratch, it took three days.

           Was it delicious? Yes. Was it worth the effort?  Let me get back to you on that.            People occasionally say "You should open a restaurant." I was never tempted. Not only is the failure rate catastrophically high; being forced to cook, whether you feel like it or not, can make you detest the very look of a stove, let alone of hungry customers. Those stories of chefs spitting in the soup aren't entirely invented.

           If this means I'll never create a dish to rival the Boeuf Poellé à la Matignon at Taillevent or Alain Passard's Tomate confit aux Douze Sauveurs, c'est la vie. For the moment, I'm satisfied that my souffles rise, I can turn out a respectable chicken Madras, and - which is more difficult than it sounds - the whites of my soft-boiled eggs are invariably firm and their yolks runny. Let's see you do better,  mon cher Georges Auguste.

Tomate confit aux Douze Sauveurs - the star dessert of Alain Passard’s Arpege.

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