ROCOCO COOKING

The most absurd programme I watched in 2006 was probably Heston Blumenthal`s "In Search of Perfection". Heston, as all good bourgeois readers of the Guardian-Independent-Sunday-Times will know, owns a restaurant called The Fat Duck in Berkshire. The Fat Duck has three Michelin stars and was voted the best restaurant in the world in 2005. The following year, it was relegated to second place by El Bulli, a restaurant on the Costa Brava. Both restaurants specialise in "molecular gastronomy," a sphere of cooking which seeks a conciliation between science and food (and which no domestic cook can ever hope to replicate). Via ingredients denoted merely by letters and numbers (N7 is a store cupboard favourite), Heston can magically transform bacon and eggs into ice cream, or a cup of tea into one that is half-hot, half-cold. His menu, for those with the inclination or money to see it for themselves, reads like a culinary joke :
NITRO-GREEN TEA AND LIME MOUSSE
OYSTER AND PASSION FRUIT JELLY
LAVENDER POMMERY GRAIN MUSTARD ICE CREAM
RED CABBAGE GASPACHOQUAIL JELLY
SNAIL PORRIDGE
SARDINE ON TOAST SORBET
SALMON POACHED WITH LIQUORICE
MANGO AND D0UGLAS FIR PUREE
NITRO-SCRAMBLED EGG AND BACON ICE CREAM
etc etc


SNAIL PORRIDGE

Food critics wax lyrical about his revolutionary powers, while the rest of us scratch our heads and wonder if he`s taking the piss. (I should point out that his Taster Menu will set you back 80 quid a head, without drinks.)

I don`t think he`s taking the piss, and I have absolutely nothing against experimenting with food. I don`t doubt that many of his dishes are delicious. But his television series was interesting because of the dishes he chose to "perfect". In the first programme, Heston tried his hand at two dishes : sausage and mash, and treacle tart with ice cream. The implication is clear : Heston wishes to take two staples and cleanse them off their proletarian muck.

Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, noted the class-differences in domestic cooking, when he demonstrated the ornamental style of cooking favoured by many French magazines :

Ornamentation proceeds in two contradictory ways, which we shall in a moment see dialectically reconciled : on the one hand, fleeing from nature thanks to a kind of frenzied baroque (sticking shrimps in a lemon, making a chicken look pink, serving grapefruit hot), and on the other, trying to reconstitute it through an incongruous artifice (strewing meringue mushrooms and holly leaves on a traditional log-shaped Christmas cake, replacing the heads of crayfish around the sophisticated bechamel which hides their bodies). It is in fact the same pattern which one finds in the elaboration of petit-bourgeois trinkets (ashtrays in the shape of a saddle, lighters in the shape of a cigarette, terrines in the shape of a hare).

Barthes added that magazines aimed at the working class were full of recipes for absurd, decorative dishes, the ingredients for which the average person had no hope of affording, while magazines aimed at the middle classes described how to cook more straightforward dishes (a salad nicoise or, to Anglicise things, a Lancashire hotpot). The message here is that, for the working class, food is not to be consumed and enjoyed, but to be aspired to. If only housewife a could better herself and afford a partridge, a new social stratum would be hers for the taking ... but, alas, she cannot. Conversely, bourgeois housewife b does not need to aspire to partridge - she is equipped to divine the simple pleasures of a chicken or lamb shank - and so she can look down upon housewife a as a pretentious wannabe. A food column in a Sunday newspaper will tell you more about its politics and its target audience than its news section.

But Heston´s tactic is altogether more unpleasant. He wishes to shame housewife a into believeing that her humble sausage and mash is inadequate. If your pork is not taken from a bespoke pig from a farm in Somerset ; if you don`t soak the breadcrumbs first and then freeze-dry them ; hell, if you don`t own a sausage making machine and have to buy your sausages (probably from a - pshaw! - supermarket), then you don`t deserve to eat this British classic. No, let`s leave the proper preparation of this sacred dish to the experts - the real cooks, the men and women who watch Heston`s programmes and sleep soundly in the knowledge that they will never need to cook one of his laborious recipes. The mere fact of their class assures them that sausage and mash, or treacle tart and ice cream, are rightfully, morally, their preserve.