Feed the Soul
The molecular gastronomy pioneer is famed for disguising meat as fruit. Is it any wonder one of his most memorable meals contained a rock?
The meals that shaped British chef Heston Blumenthal
It was a short walk home, only five minutes or so, but it felt like a week. I was very young and every Saturday morning my grandmother would drag me to Church Street Market off Edgware Road in London. In those days, it was lined with people selling junk off horses and carts – it’s the last thing a sevenyear-old wants to do on a weekend. But there was one great thing about it: an ice-cream parlour with a curvy window. After my grandmother greeted what felt like the whole town with “oh, hello, mister”, we would stop and buy a tub of ice-cream. I wasn’t allowed to eat it there and then. I had to wait to get back home. To this day I have the most vivid memories of that walk – of the sound of that brown paper bag as it crunched in my hands and imagining the delightful Italian vanilla ice-cream with coffee beans. Those walks are probably why I’m obsessed with ice-cream and, I guess, were the inspiration behind my crab ice-cream in the 1990s.
Living in London, we would go to Cornwall for holidays every year. But one year my old man did okay with his business and we went to France, to Provence, where Picasso painted and Van Gogh lived. I was 15 and had never seen an oyster in my life but here I was dining in one of the world’s most incredible restaurants, l’Oustau de Baumanière (baumaniere.com). It’s still there but in those days it was something else – Queen Elizabeth ate there and so did all the famous people on their way down to St Tropez and Monaco. I ate red mullet salad then a baby leg of lamb stuffed with its own kidney and wrapped in pastry, then a crêpe soufflé. The food was memorable and so was the atmosphere – the smell of lavender, the sound of footsteps crunching on gravel, the cheese trolleys, the sauces being poured into soufflés and the wine list, which was the size of a billboard.
My third memory is of a meal I created myself: pumpkin soup with a big lump of rock in it. Now, I live in Provence, where I have set up a laboratory to do my research. The region is rich in bauxite rock – it has a magnetic field to it that creates this unbelievable photon energy. One day I made soup and because I could really smell this rock, I decided I would put it in the soup. It was an amazing addition. Immediately, I had this connection to the land. I realised that despite all the complex recipes and techniques I had developed over the years, some of the most beautiful things in life are also the simplest – like pumpkin soup with a rock or vanilla ice-cream with coffee beans.