The other day last week on Thursday evening I was cooking a dinner party for my parents. This is arguably one of the most stressful audiences you can have as a cooking audience, because they sort of know you - or sometimes definitely know you - and they also know your parents, and are guests of your parents, and so there's family meat in the game. And most likely everything you make you will hate, because this is the Law of the Land of cooking for a family occasion. If you aren't familiar with this particular Version Subsection A (ii) of the Law of the Land let me enlighten you. The Law of this Land is as follows:
1 all that you make shall be Disappointing to your palate, the sauce will be too sharp and there will be nothing to sweeten it gently with, like a smooth clusp of heather flowers,
2 the salmon will be Wild and Dry -
3 the salad will be underoiled, the courgettes overoiled and the white gazpacho thickset with bread and sickly;
4 you will lose your ability to judge whether anything you are making is good, as if you were cooking blind drunk, stumbling around the kitchen pouring in bits of this and that in a vague attempt to rectify which you cannot tell if you need to rectify because you have tasted it so many times
And the worst thing about it is that everyone will tell you how delicious it is, when really it is not delicious, it has all Failed, they are being biased and Polite and you must smile through it all like a cream licking prat when really you feel like tipping it all into the neighbours hedge and pretending that your cat threw up. Apart from the fact that its raining outside and you don’t have a cat. You also said you would do it so you better bloody do it now and at least pretend you think it is good, because who wants to eat food served by a nervous cook?
Thursday morning
That Thursday was an apocalyptic day. The air pressure was up, as if God had racked his switches right up to the max. I had awoken late back from a tiring trip the day before. Shit! It's noon! It was noon. My ingredients were still in the shop, where I had not bought them from yet, and I was buried deep in darkly trapping dreams and a thin sheen of humid sweat. I had two pressure headaches needling into my temples, and a question mark on half of the menu scrawled in pencil in the notebook on my bedside table that currently looked like this:
Starter? White gazpacho? Recipe???
Main Roasted Salmon with sumac yoghurt, salads??? Moro wild pilaf with aubergines and spices/brown butter tarragon potatoes?
Pudding - peaches (roasted? Or peach cake with whipped mascarpone?)
Oat, nut and raspberry petit four
And I often find that this is the best way to hatch a plan: don’t make one. At the last minute one will be made for you in a subconscious ream of activity, because you will have no time to flounder anymore. Making plans this way generally takes far less energy expenditure, but can involve more stress, unless you are a seasoned pro. FYI - to become a seasoned pro at this kind of plan making you have to be unperfectionist and zen about everything going wrong, which takes a few disasters to get the knack of).
I am in the farm shop ten minutes later in my boots and running shorts and pyjama top, and the menu is sorted.
Starter: White gazpacho
Main: Roasted wild salmon with harissa yogurt, buttered herb and nut salad, courgette and tomatoes with basil oil, brown butter new potatoes with tarragon and mint
Pudding: Olive oil cracker, roasted yellow & macerated white peaches, white wine caramel and vanilla ice cream
Oat nut and raspberry petit four
Thursday afternoon
Work begins. My noble brother spends four hours picking the herbs diligently for the herb salad whilst I play a charlixcx album three times on repeat at him and voilà - before we both know it it is time to serve the meal. There is everyone, they are waiting, and talking, drinking and laughing and sashaying into the night, ready for the mug of gazpacho that they don't even know they are getting, and here my brother and I are with our cumbersome brown wooden trays, tripping our way to the table. My mother pours everyone out a generous cup of chilled gazpacho. I fret at the way it looks so plain and thick, have I just served everyone a cup of bread sauce for starter? I want to tell people to pretend they are at a Spanish trattoria because I think they would be able to enjoy the gazpacho more if they did; under the low glow of late summer English dining table lights the gazpacho seems strangely out of place. But I cannot do that, because you cannot demand people to pretend they are somewhere they are not for the sake of immersing them deeper into the flavour you have been attempting to conjure. The food is just the vehicle for the evening. Remember, I tell myself sternly, most of these people probably don’t care half as much as you do. They are not in a Galician trattoria and it is not your evening. (If it was my evening I would be projecting a short series of video clips on the wall behind everyone shot in a European trattoria to conjure up the feel the soup should be evoking.) They are not here for the gazpacho, they are here for the company. They are not Marco Pierre White. I can’t help but dimly feel as if I have misjudged something by serving gazpacho. I decide to remedy the situation by garnishing it with a few roasted grapes because a garnish always distracts. Always. (Cooking rule - if you are worried about a dish, garnish.) People are now half sat down. I take my bowl of roasted grapes around the table with me. Excuse me, would you mind if I garnished your soup? Sorry, excuse me - would you like a roasted grape on your soup? Hi! Yes I am well thank you, sorry - could I just - a roasted grape on your soup?
I wonder if any of them have ever been asked before if they would like a roasted grape on their soup. I am three quarters of the way around the table. I say to a man I have never met before - Hello! Would you like an grape on your soup?
He looks up at me, puzzled, and then down at the bowl full of tarnished roasted green grapes, and they back up at me.
Are they yours?
No they’re not eggs, sorry, they're grapes. I reply, before plopping three onto his soup -
He looks up at me, puzzled, and then down at his soup, peering into the surface, searching for an egg -
I repeat - they're grapes.
Yes, says the bemused man, but are they yours?
Oh! Our grapes! I am startled, are they ours? Suddenly I realise he was not asking me if they were eggs, he had indeed meant his question, were they ours. Because of course, they could be ours, grapes do grow in England. I had not thought that he had asked that question because why would anyone ask that question? I frown. Now we are both confused.
Yes! They are! I spring back at him on impulse. Suddenly I realise I have just lied, no - no they are not ours! They are not, haha, sorry, No. No they are not our grapes. I feel as if I have let this man down; he is the subject of a comedy skit that he didn’t give his consent to being a part of.
No no, I breeze, trying to remedy the situation - they're from the local farm shop.
I have silenced this innocently curious man. He has nothing more to say, and certainly would want to say no more to me in the future. The woman to his left pipes up. Oooh a farm shop. How lovely. I try to redeem myself, - well, yes, they do have beautiful vegetables there, very expensive - only ten minutes down the road - we should really go more instead of the local coop, it's just so easy to nip to the coop, you know ….
The man looks at me blankly. He does not want to know about my local shopping habits, and certainly not after I have shown myself to be so inept at answering simple questions. I move along, this time dodging back and around people's glasses and arms without excusing nor pre warning them of my garnish in case someone else asks me a silencing question.
Upon pondering the incident I feel relieved, because this man has accidentally but definitely taken the pressure off me. How can someone cook a good dinner if they don't even know the difference between an egg and a grape?
Why would you garnish your gazpacho with a grape in the first place?
Or- really, let's be honest -
Why do people ask such strangely arresting questions when I am clearly hard at work, garnishing their mug of beautiful pearly white Spanish almond and shallot soup before their very eyes?
P.s. cooking notes:
I could not find any Pink Fir potatoes, which - if you were wondering, are the key element to the brown butter potatoes. First - pre boil with big bouquets of herbs; mint and tarragon, second, chop up in jagged bits to maximise brown butter surface area, third, par-roast until they are browned with butter, golden and aromatic and caramelised with nutty buttery liquid.
The herb and nut salad is from the Ottolenghi OG cookbook which I highly recommend. I added extra butter dribbled through the finely picked tarragon, parsley and dill leaves; and after the leftover salad had spent a night in the fridge and the leaves were stuck together, frosted through with cold butter, I placed a gentle herby handful onto a hot pan and let the butter melt off the leaves, left the nuts (blanched hazlenuts and almonds) to fry slightly into the butter, and ate it hot, on a plate, just like that. Though it would be very good with an egg on top.
As for the white wine caramel that I drizzled over the peaches - it was brown sugar, white wine, white wine vinegar and vanilla, reduced… a great way to use up white wine and make an interesting flavoured caramel… more experiments incoming.
That’s it!
This was short and silly. Thanks for reading. Tune in next time, whenever that may be, whenever you feel like checking your emails, wherever you get them.
And by the way, I am a freelance chef looking for freelance work, if you or your friends or your friends of friends ever feel like hiring someone to cook a lovely dinner party. I can make you tasty and interesting food! Don't be shy! Peace and love.