1 reply to this topic

[Wilfrid]

I have enjoyed not only eating in your restaurants, but also cooking from your excellent "Nose to Tail" book (out of print?) - I love the tripe terrine and the crispy fried pig tails.

I have seen many attempts to characterize your cuisine, but none seem to get it quite right. As someone who grew up in London, I resist the theory that you are recapturing or re-creating a lost British cuisine of the past. Certainly, such ingredients as marrrow bones, tripe and oxtails appeared more frequently on the home dining table thirty years ago than they do today. But your very direct approach to the ingredients; the stark (in a strikingly good way) manner of presenting the food; and your incorporation of elements foreign to British cooking, like snails, slated pigs liver, and so on, make me think of your cuisine as forward-looking.

In my view, you offer not traditional British food, but an intriguing deconstruction of a certain concept of traditional British cooking. Am I just talking pretensious nonsense, or do you recognize some truth in this?

Looking forward to the squirrel season!

[fergus]

There is some truth in your post, one can't deny the hand of for instance Marcella Hazan in my cooking, nor indeed that of my mothers (from Bolton, which may explain a lot?!).

But I don't feel we are jingoistic in our approach...it still, and always will come back to the spirit of time and place.

Oh, and sadly, unless you hurry you're about miss the squirrel season.