For my next recipe, all you need is a goat and a medieval fire pit . . .
Simple, homely food prepared by a plaintalking cook for the cameras. We can all agree that would make welcome viewing. But when even mary Berry is tempting us to go all fancy, with white wine and double cream in an oven-baked spag bol, it seems straightforward food is off the menu. What next — cordon bleu pot Noodles? michel Roux Jr in Hidden
Restaurants (C4) promised to be our culinary saviour.
He was leaving all his fiddly ingredients and twiddly preparations back in his michelin-starred le Gavroche restaurant in mayfair.
‘As much as i love the fripperies of fine dining with all its pomp and circumstance, this is my chance to break free,’ he announced.
And then he served up mussels steamed in white wine with sausage meat for a starter.
Followed by goat pie with anchovies for the main course, and then sculpted pineapple soaked in rum and braised over a medieval fire-pit for dessert.
That’s no misprint — he made a goat pie. The very thought of it is so disgusting that he didn’t dare tell his diners what they were eating, but waited until the plates were cleared before confessing the true ingredients.
To describe this as ‘unpretentious food’ is a porky pie. Only the most pretentious, show-boating chef would say: ‘i can’t be bothered to cook tonight — i’ll just butcher a couple of goats and light up this 13th century fire pit.’
That might be normal in Game Of Thrones, but it’s decidedly outre for the Home Counties.
professional chefs do have an innate knack for rubbing people up the wrong way, and michel was raising hackles wherever he went.
On a floating restaurant in the middle of the River exe estuary, he teased the staff that they had no time to go fishing. By the looks on their faces, this was a sore point.
And when he met a mussel fisherman, michel weighed a handful of baby crustaceans in his palm and tossed them overboard. For a moment, the seaman seemed on the point of chucking the chef after them.
All these irritations could not quite disguise the fact that Britain’s gourmet diners have a new trend to enjoy. if you’re getting tired of country pubs that deliver prizewinning dinners, go looking for culinary treats hidden in more unlikely places. Some of the best pork in Wales, apparently, is served in a former shower block on an Anglesey caravan site.
it’s only a matter of time until someone opens a bring-yourown-goat restaurant.
The wisdom of searching out treasures, culinary or otherwise, was proved by archaeologist Howard Carter, who spent a decade digging in the dust of egypt’s Valley of the Kings before he finally uncovered Tutankhamun’s tomb.
What he eventually found is familiar to us all, not least through the evocative black and white pictures taken by photographer Harry Burton.
margaret mountford told his story in The Man Who Shot
Tutankhamun (BBC4) and attempted to reproduce some of his images with vintage equipment. She was joined by Harry Cory Wright, a real artist with a camera, who spent most of the episode in rhapsodies over Burton’s technique.
Those eerie pictures were made with a wooden box camera on a stick insect tripod, captured on glass plates coated with silver emulsion.
Unless you’re an enthusiast, you might never have stopped to wonder about Burton’s famous photos and how they were made.
This impassioned programme, despite its niche appeal, had a lot to teach us.
MARRIAGE GUIDANCE OF THE
NIGHT: The celebrities’ Indian landlady on The Real Marigold Hotel (BBC1) had sound advice for the girls. Never wed a rich man . . . he can afford to keep mistresses. Poor men make better hubbies.