Noma, Celler Can Roca, Bocuse & Co: Culinary Unicorns

Let's go unicorn-hunting

There are rare cookbooks and there are influential cookbooks. But there are very few rare and influential cookbooks.

The reasons are quite straightforward. Normally the more influential   cookbook has, the more widely it is read. This follows a straightforward commercial logic. 1) Chef becomes famous/important. 2) Said chef writes book. 3) Said book becomes famous/important. 4) Said book is subject to numerous reprints cos at the end of the day said chef wants to make a living.

For rare cookbooks the opposite logic applies. 1) Cookbook is published. 2) No one wants to read it. 3) Cookbook falls out of print. End of story. If it ain't good enough to attract a reprint, its unlikely to be particularly significant.

Of course (and there is an "of course" otherwise there wouldn't be much point to this blog post!) there is also a delicious category of exceptions. a small cadre of books do exist which are both mind-bogglingly influential  and incredibly rare.

They have mostly been written in the last thirty years, many by chefs who are household names. For various reasons - cost, obsolescence or simply ignorance - their authors or publishers have let them fall by the wayside, such that they are almost unobtainable today.

These are the culinary unicorns.

Let me show you what I mean:

Joan Roca's revolutionary manifesto

Sous-Vide Cuisine (Joan Roca & Salvador Brugues)

Today the Catalonian restaurant El Celler de Can Roca is part of the culinary establishment. Situated in sprawling new premises in Girona it wears its three stars with pride: A leading light of Spanish gastronomy, a pioneer of sous vide cuisine and a purveyor of an exceptionally good value wine list.

It wasn't always like this. When I first went it was in a slight ramshackle out of town site by a service station (the restaurant originally started off in the basement of the Roca family's Catalan diner, hence the name). The food was good, the wine was a snip and as I was leaving I spotted Sous-Vide Cuisine on sale in reception.

Even back then it wasn't cheap. The book itself cost a hundred Euros (about the same price as the tasting menu!), and at under 200 pages you weren't getting much content for your money. But the information it contained was priceless.

First published in 2003, this was the first cookbook to properly document the techniques of sous-vide cuisine in the high-end kitchen. Although today it is thoroughly ubiquitous, at the time it was the wild west of culinary technique. At the time there were so many unanswered questions about using sous vide in a gastronomic (as opposed to industrial catering) setting - how long to cook different cuts for? What temperatures were safe? How quickly do you need to cool merchandise to avoid giving your customers a nasty case of gastroenteritis? This was the first book to systematically explore and answer these questions.

Part cookbook, part physics manual.

Starting from first principles, the book explains the sous vide method in tremendous detail, from what gas to use to package the food to what equipment to use in the sealing process. This section, while essential, if quite dry. However it kicks into gear from chapter 3 onwards as Roca talks about the application of sous-vide in his own kitchen. His revolutionary insight was using sous-vide not only as a way to prepare food for storing (e.g. tough cuts products above 65c for an extended period to make them tender and fridge-sterilised), but also what he calls "Indirect Cooking" - using sous-vide to cook more delicate foods at a lower temperature, to create entirely new forms of taste and texture. This allowed him to create iconic dishes, such as his Warm Cod with Spinich, Idiazabal Cream, Pine Nuts and PX Reduction, where the cod is cooked sous-vide to a 38-40c internal temp to a melting, gelatinous texture. Or foie gras taken to a 60c internal temperature which not only yields a silky, consistent result but also minimises the dreaded foie-gras fat leakage:

The benefits of sous-vide are lavishly illustrated with before/after images and scary-looking temperature charts. The book also deals with some natural extensions to the sous-vide technique such as using it vacuum sealing to compress ingredients to give a firmer texture, and also its applications for desserts (e.g. using it to infuse green tea into chocolate). The book finishes with twenty-five resturant-class dishes - not many for a standalone cookbook, but more than enough to illustrate the principles at work:

Looking back at this book nearly than a decade after publication (and when mainstream food science has moved on immeasurably) I'm struck but how fresh and comprehensive it still seems. Every single book about sous vide since them - from Thomas Keller's Under Pressure to Modernist Cuisine owes a debt to this volume. (Side-note: One disappointment about Under Pressure is that it complete airbrushes the Roca brothers out of its history of sous-vide, while copiously name-dropping Keller's French equipment manufacturer instead).

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However the book itself remains frustratingly hard to find. Partly also its because of the obscenely high sticker price and limited distribution. Partly also I think is the nature of the work. The way the text is arranged and presented reminds me of some of the horribly obtuse chocolate-making books (e.g. anything by Jean-Pierre Wybauw). There are a bunch of fantabulous cheffy recipes a the back but you have to wade through an awful lot of flow charts and exposition before you get to them. I suspect this tends to banish it to the top-shelf marked "professional cookery" rather than the section marked "really interesting cheffy books" in any bookstore.

Anyhow I don't think I've ever seen it in a bookshop, ever. In the US second-hand copies are fetching $180 on Amazon (although strangely the UK site seems to have new copies - a snip at £85). Given the growing interest in sous-vide techniques I think this book deserves - and demands - a wider audience. But until the Roca brothers pull their finger out and arrange a more accessible edition, it will remain the quintessential culinary unicorn.

Bocuse and his friends

Great Chefs of France (Anthony Blake &

Quentin Crewe)

In the age of the 24/7 Food Blog you forget how hard it used to be to find out about three star cuisine. For English speaking foodies, the cuisine and culture of France's three star temples used to be an undiscovered country. Set against that backdrop, Quentin Crewe and Anthony Blake's Great Chefs of France is a monumental work. Published back in 1978, he minutely profiles every French three star outside Paris, describing each chef, their cuisine, their their day-to-day life routines. At the back of the book is also a copy of the carte for each men, which makes fascinating reading thirty years on.

This was the first book to people's eyes in the Anglophone world to what food could really be. Unsurprisingly many of the today's leading chefs cite this as a definite influence. Heston Blumenthal writes:

More than any other volume, I read Quentin Crewe and Anthony Blake's Great Chefs of France, which presented, in words and pictures, portraits of a dozen of France's most influential chefs... I read these words over and over until I knew them virtually by heart.

The genius of this book is its timing. Crewe and Blake were lucky to be writing as a the revolution was taking place. You see time you see Emeril or Gordon or Wolfgang on TV its all down to Paul. In the 1970s Paul Bocuse singlehanded defined the role of the celebrity chef, with sheer force of will accompanied by tureens of black truffle soup. This book captures him and his nouvelle cuisine cohorts - the Troisgros brothers, Michel Guerard, Georges Blanc in the pomp (it is notable that Crewe decided to focus on the non-Parisian three stars - as this was the age when France's regional restaurants really came to the fore).

As well a profiling the nouvelle cuisine muskateers, It also provides a nod to the generation of postwar chefs (many forgotten today) who laid the groundwork of the revolution Pic, Point, Thuiller, Bise. There is no other book in the English language which captures what was taking place. Just as Bob Carlos Clarke's White Heat captured Marco as he defined the rock star chef, Crewe was simply at the right place at the right time.

And there is one last reason why this book should not be missed. It contains one of the few accounts of the great Lyonnais chef Alain Chapel available in English. For those who know of Chapel's stellar reputation (and he counts Ducasse, Keller and Heston among his fans), that's worth the price of admission alone.

Michel Guerard: Culinary revolutionary and fashion terrorist.

But the book itself is frighteningly elusive. I found my copy in a Charing Cross Road basement after a hot online tip (I'd previously made do with a copy I'd spent an evening painstakingly copying on the work photocopier). I guess given the look and the content of the book so clearly rooted in the seventies (check out Michel Guerards flares to the right!), there's little money in a reprint. But if you do ever come across a used copy, seize it with both hands.

Northern Lights

Noma Nordic Cuisine (Rene Redzepi &
Claus Meyer); Source: TasteFood

But of course there is one culinary unicorn which outstrips all of these. A book so mythical that Japanese gourmets have been known to fly thousands of miles just to catch a glimpse of it. A book who's very pages are said to contain the secrets of the unlimited foie gras and pickled herring.

I refer, of course, to the legendary Noma Cookbook.

Note that I am not referring too the Phaidon-published travesty that is Noma: Time and Space in Nordic Cuisine. The less said about that (or anything else by Phaidon), the better. Long before that was even a footnote on a marketing manager's schedule, Redzepi had published his original book Noma: Nordic Cuisine, wayback in 2006.

It's this English edition, of which only a thousand were printed, which is the ultimate culinary unicorn. I don't have a copy, and have never had a sniff of one. I know it only by reputation. If you search hard you can find traces on the web. The introduction (and manifesto for Noma's cuisine) is on the website of collaborator Claus Meyer, here. This blog post (part 2 here) has some pictures and a few recipes (even these authors admit they were only using a borrowed copy). It could be of course that the book is a complete let-down and consists largely of recipes for pickled herring, but somehow I doubt it (the egg yolk cream recipe looks both unusual and promising).

Source: TasteFood

Just like the Crewe book, this book precisely captures the moment - Noma just as it (and Nordic cuisine) was emerging from El Bulli's shadow. Looking back this is a work which should feature front and centre in every bookshop in the land. But it does not.

In fact the opposite is true. A mere seven years after publication the book is virtually unobtainable. One copy is listed on Amazon for a mere £1800 (although be careful - judging by the cover it might be the Danish version). Otherwise I think it's pretty much impossible to find a copy.

The problem is that in 2010 Phaidon published Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. Rather than a sequel to the earlier book, it covers much the same ground in a more overblown fashion, outlining Redzepi's culinary philosophy with the help of a few recipes and lot of soft-focus photography. Alas this seems to have been the death-knell for the earlier volume, as there seems little reason for a reprint while the newer book covers the same ground (and is selling so well). To me that is a shame - I rarely have anything good to say about Phaidon cookbooks and this one is no exception. The separation of the photos of the dishes from the recipes they describe smacks of an editor who fetishes how the book looks but doesn't want to understand the food itself. I hope that at some point they see sense and reprint the earlier volume. Until then I think the food world remains much the poorer.

Postscript: Other unicorns

While writing this piece a bunch of former and nearly -unicorns crossed my mind. I thought they were worth mentioning:

La Tante Claire by Pierre Koffmann

Until its recent reprint, Pierre Koffmann's Memories of Gascony would have been first on my list of culinary unicorns, not only as the heartwork of one of London's defining culinary figures (and for that pigs trotter recipe), but also because it is an excellent exemplar of the memoir-with-recipes. I do note however that its sister-volume La Tante Claire (co-authored with Anthony Blake, who worked on Great Chefs of France) remains out of print. This is a shame as it continues the story of Koffmann's journey to Le Gavroche in London, out to Bray to create the Waterside Inn and back to Chelsea to La Tante Claire, where he later won his three michelin stars. The pigs trotter recipe also features, if you missed it the first time round.

White Heat by Marco Pierre White

Like some of the other unicorns, another exercise in Zeitgeist-capture, this time from Marco Pierre White in his sizzling eighties heyday. I've already written about this one before, but just to note that before its 2009 softcover reprint there was a period of 4-5 years where this book out of print and heart-breakingly hard to find. A good example of the publishers seeing sense and doing everyone a service.

Le Grande Livre de Cuisine de Joel Robuchon

As I noted before, the definitive record of Robuchon, at least in his Paris haute cuisine days. Unlike Ducasse's similar books however this one hasn't been translated into English which means it remains much more of a niche item. It can be had on Amazon for around $400, but I suspect as time wears on it will be rarer and rarer.

Pei Mei's Chinese Cookbook

The subject of one of my earlier blog posts, this book used to be readily available second-hand on Amazon, but I note it has become harder to find over the last few years. Partly a historical relic partly a culinary landmark,the user unfriendliness and 1970s styling of the book probably precludes a reprint (unless someone is willing to embark on a fresh translation). It can be had on Kindle but the full fat print version is becoming rapidly hard to find.

Future culinary unicorns

What books readily available now will become future culinary unicorns? Speaking facetiously all of them, if e-books cannibalise print as I think they will. More seriously I think Modernist Cuisine will probably get there - if only because its size and expense limits the scope for reprints; when all copies are gone there'll be gone.

In the UK I suspect if David Everitt-Matthias ever got annointed with a third michelin star, his existing cookbooks (Essence and Dessert) will instantly become collector's items (viz the Noma book when Rene get made Best Chef in the World Ever). Ditto Sat Bains, helped by the fact that his cookbook is pretty much unobtainable already - as far as I can tell its available only direct from the restaurant or the publisher with little or no retail availability (I think its a Face Publishing thing). Also NB DEM has his third cookbook out imminently. Worth looking out for, three stars or no.

And to finish with, entirely different kind of Culinary Unicorn.

Signatures: Pommes Puree (Robuchon)

Another post in my occassional series on famous chefs and their signature dishes. Enjoy.

The Two Lives of Joel

Robuchon the chef

Robuchon in his 1990's pomp

Joel Robuchon is the chef with two lives. The first as a trad haute Parisian chef (you know the sort... Lalique China, Riedel glasses and more truffles than sense). The second as the zen master of the global McRobuchon brand - Davos Man's caterer of choice.

Let's deal with his first incarnation; Robuchon the chef. From 1981 through to the mid-1990s Robuchon was acclaimed as the finest chef in Paris, ergo in France and ergo the world (remember this was an era when El Bulli was still serving duck magret and fish pot-au-feu). Robuchon was the first culinary superstar of the post-nouvelle cuisine era. His cuisine married the technical innovation and lightness of Bocuse et al, with a return to more traditional bourgeois combinations - a reaction to the excesses of nouvelle cuisine (you know... raspberry vinegar... kiwi fruit with everything).

So rather than pairing his lobster with vanilla it went with spring vegetables and a lobster-coral sauce (pic at left). Truffles were layered on a bosky galette of smoked bacon and onion. Foie gras came with a smooth cream sauce made with humble lentils. These were combinations you might find in a provincial auberge, but taken to the nth degree by Robuchon's notorious perfectionism. and obsession with detail.

This approach was exemplified in his most famous dish - not some elaborate concoction of caviar (although there was the famous Gelée de caviar a la crème de Chou-fleur too), but simple pommes puree. Or mashed potatoes to you and me. You can hardly call it a signature dish, perhaps a signature side? But it was Robuchon's philosophy on a plate - taking the humblest dishes and applying the finest craft, ingredients and several dozen sticks of butter, resulting in something completely extraordinary.

Of course the food was followed by the plaudits. Robuchon won three stars at Jamin, his first solo venture which later transferred to an elegant mansion at 55 Av Raymond Poincare. For nearly fifteen years he ran the toughest kitchen in town - who's starred alumni included Eric Ripert, Benoit Guichard and a youthful Gordon Ramsay (who famously had a plate of langoustine ravioli thrown at him when he messed up the dish). But then at the height of his powers he gave it all up.

Having seen so many of his peers kill themselves slaving away at the stoves (the great Alain Chapel, who dropped dead at 53, springs to mind), Robuchon always vowed that he wouldn't end that way. So in 1995 he sold up Av Raymond Poincare to Alain Ducasse, and retired to oversee the refit of Larousse Gastronomique, prepare cook-chill meals with Fleury-Michon (sic) and generally enjoy the good life.

Robuchon the brand

Of course it was never going to end that way. After six years away Robuchon was back. Not behind the stoves mind you - but in that elusive role of chef/consultant/general big cheese. A sort of Brand Fromage, if you excuse the pun.

The comeback kicked off in 2001 with Robuchon A La Galera, a haute cuisine joint in a casino in Macau. But it really began to gather pace with opening of Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Paris two years later. Atelier was a mashup of haute cuisine and a sushi bar, heavily influenced by Robuchon's itinerant wanderings in Japan (he had franchised Toyko's ludicrously OTT Taillevant-Robuchon wayback in 1989). Kitted out in a slightly absurd black-dojo-pyjama outfit, Robuchon presented himself as a sort of zen master of haute cuisine.

Robuchon, Atelier, Spiffy Website, Silly Pyjamas.

A cynic would say that he (along with Alain Ducasse) had finally figured out how to apply the franchising model to foie gras. Certainly Ducasse and Robuchon were the first people to realise that if your people and processes are good enough you don't have to be in the kitchen to win Michelin stars (Bocuse had led the the way when he pointed "who cooks at the restaurant when I'm not in the kitchen? The same people who cook when I'm there!"). Although arguably they were only following in the footsteps of Dumas and Rembrandt in getting educated wage slaves to craft the gear and then slapping their name on it to sell it.

Robuchon was also helped massive growth in appetite for haute cuisine - both in terms of the blogosphere creating a wider audience and Michelin's international expansion slapping a macaron-shaped seal of approval on his ventures. Galera received three michelin stars in the first HK guide; the various Ateliers (by now Paris, London, Vegas, HK, Singapore, Taipei, Tokyo) a star or two each. The shamelessly gaudy Robuchon At The Mansion in Vegas another three.

Beef & foie gras sliders at Atelier McRobuchon

The food had evolved some too. For sure it was still assuredly French deluxe, but the plates were smaller and the dishes even more finely wrought. A langoustine (just the one) came tempura-ed with a dab of pistou. Lightly cooked egg was delicately layered in a martini glass with a morel cream. But classics like the truffled bacon tart and the caviar with cauliflower cream had fallen by the wayside (though I think they still do a version in Vegas). The one constant, however, was the pommes puree.

I had it a couple of times in London. Its delicious, though ever so slightly rich (note: that's English irony at work). In fact I'd describe it as being more a butter puree, enriched with potato than vice versa. Its strange - start munching a stick of butter neat and you'll soon start to feel slight ill. But dish up a bowl of JRs super-mash and you could frankly eat it all day. It's that good.

The Recipe

The Pomme Puree recipe from Cuisine Actuelle (click on image for more detail)

Not as easy as it sounds!

There are several versions of the recipe scattered around my library. The most obvious place to start it Patricia Well's Cuisine Actuelle (later reprinted as Simply French), which was the first book to bring Robuchon to an English speaking audience. The set up is very simple. Boil spuds, mash with butter, add hot milk. Hmmm maybe the "chef of the century thing" isnt that hard after all...

The devil is in the detail

Of course as with everything Robuchon the devil is in the detail. Remember Robuchon was the ultimate perfectionist - every tiny detail counts.

La Ratte- Joel's secret weapon

To start with the variety of potato. Ratte was Robuchon's weapon of choice - its a small thin-skinned tuber which is remarkably high in starch, which makes for a fluffier mash. The science behind this is slightly tiresome, but I found a good explanation in Cook's Illustrated compilation of culinary awesomeness, The Best Recipe:

Although you can mash any type of potato, the variety you choose does make a significant difference in the ultimate quality of the dish. Potatoes are composed mostly of starch and water. The starch is in the form of granules, which in turn are contained in starch cells. The higher the starch content of the potato, the fuller the cells. In high-starch potatoes, the cells are completely full-they look like plump little beach balls. In medium- or low-start potatoes, the cells are more like underinflated beach balls. The space between these less-full cells is mostly taken up by water.

The full starch cells of high-starch potatoes are most likely to maintain their integrity and stay separate when mashed, giving the potatoes a delightfully fluffy, full texture. In addition, the low water content of these potatoes allows them to absorb milk, cream, and/or butter without becoming wet or gummy. Starch cells in lower-starch potatoes, on the other hand, tend to clump when cooked and break more easily, allowing the starch to dissolve into whatever liquid is present. The broken cells and dissolved starch tend to make sticky, gummy mashed potatoes.

Then the boiling. Boil then in their skins - apparently to keep the moisture in (hmmm is that really the case?). Then peel warm. Then (gently) stir the drained spuds on the heat for 4-5 minutes to drive off excess moisture.

Then the mashing - by hand mind you (potatos do not take kindly to mechanical agitation). It bursts the starch cells and makes them gluey. A hand cranked vegetable mill (mouli-legumes) is the preferred method. And then rub through a tamis, a flat-bottomed drum sieve.

And in comes the butter - lots of it. The finest unsalted of course. Cut into small chunks. Stirred in, not beaten.

And finally the milk - This comes last for all, just before service. The milk should be piping hot and this time whipped in. Vigorously. To get some air into the mix.

For a full overview of this technique check out this video of JR getting his minion to do all the hard work for him. It's in French but you should get the general idea.

What you're left with is not so much a puree, but a potato butter emulsion. More mousseline than mash. Its paler in colour than your used to. And ever so slightly buttery:

The full-fat Robuchon

One word of warning. If you want the full-fat Robuchon, then Patricia Wells may be an unreliable witness. For all her good points (of which more below), her book dates from an era when full resto recipes were deemed unsuitable for the eyes of domestic readers. She readily admits her recipes were "adapted" for the home kitchen, to capture the essence of Robuchon (hmmm Essence of Robuchon? How about a truffled-scented perfume line for foodies? :-p).

An example would be the proportion of cow fat. Well's puree is 20% butter, but that sounds too low. Anecdotal sources claim the puree was 50% or even 70% butter (Wells herself cheerfully adds that you can double the portion of butter "for exceptionally rich potatoes"). If you want to be cautious, more is more.

There are other versions of the recipe. In his food column in the Le Journal Du Dimanche (compiled and republished as La Cuisine de Joel Robuchon) he outlines much the same method, although does not give quantities. Ditto the 2009 Complete Robuchon. I suspect a more complete version is the one in his Grand Livre de Cuisine, a 2001 magnum opus roughly the size of a truffled turkey and costing much the same. Its been on my Amazon wish list for a while but alas I do not own a copy.

Actually the best version of the recipe I have isn't written by Robuchon or Wells at all, but by British chef Tom Aikens, who worked with Robuchon just before his first retirement. His cunningly titled Tom Aikens Cooking has the following account.

Robuchon in Paris was famous for its puree de pommes de terre or mashed potato. When I was working there, I was fortunate enough not to have to prepare it, as it was one of the hardest jobs in that kitchen, taking about 2 hours from start to finish. We used Ratte potatoes - a good waxy potato. They would first be scrubbed and slowly cooked, still in the skins to protect them from the water. After about 30-35 minutes they would be drained and kept over simmering water, so they remained warm while being peeled. They were then put into a mouli with a lot of butter, then placed in another pan with even more butter, and then it was all brought together with hot milk. It was then passed through a very fine sieve (so fine you couldn't actually see through the mesh). This would take another 30 minutes, and it was so hard the chefs would be exhausted by the end. When the time came to use the potato, it was placed in a copper pan and warmed, then more butter was whisked in to make it light and fluffy. This would take another 45-60 minutes! There was more butter than potato, and it was so rich you could only eat a small amount.

It's mash cap'n, but not as we know it.

The Books

Cusine Actuelle (also publised as Simply French): For all her simplifications, Patricia Well's work is still the best book on Robuchon available. It captures his cuisine at its pomp, in the glory years of Jamin. The great classics are all there, including more truffles than you can shake a stick at (check out the Radicchio and Black Truffle salad on p36 - its basically a pile of truffles with a few lettuce leaves shoved in the bottom). Her introductory comments and interview with JR are well worth a close reading. They contain some of the wisest word on translating three star cooking for the home kitchen that I know of.

La Cuisine de Joel Robuchon - A Seasonal Cookbook (also publised as Cuisine Des Quatre Saisons): This is a compilation of the weekly column Robuchon used to write in France's Journal Dimanches. It was first published (in French) in 1993, so again covers only his Parisian incarnation. The book contains fifty two columns, each a musing on a particular ingredient followed by a recipe. There's some overlap between the Wells book, but unlike UK cookery columns he at least treats the reader like an adults. I guess standards are higher on their side of Le Manche.

Grande Livre de Cuisine: Taking after Alain Ducasse's Grand Livre de Cuisine, this is a meaty volume with a price tag to match. Again covering Robuchon's Paris years its probably the closest you'll get to the actual restaurant recipes, packed with step by step photos which show how he (or his food stylist) did it. Note I don't think this was ever translated so you're have to slum it with the original French (fine by me - I speak fluent a la carte French and dim sum Cantonese!).

The Complete Robuchon: This is an English translation of the French kitchen manual Tout Robuchon. A word of warning - despite the  title this isn't the complete Robuchon at all. Few of his signature dishes feature (although the mash is there, described pretty much as above). Instead there's a pretty exhaustive list of classic French dishes, from Lievre a la Royale to Chou Farci All very useful but not what it promised me on the Amazon pre-order page! On the positive side the layout (by UK cookbook specialists Grub Street) is simple and accessible and the recipes thorough. Think of it as a useful appendix to Larousse, or as a version of Phaidon's I Know How to Cook without the pretentious marketing bullsh*t. Just don't buy it expecting the complete Robuchon - it isn't.

Tom Aikens Cooking: Tom Aikens is a divisive chap. In his mid-2000s pomp he was one of the few chefs in London cooking genuinely distinctive food, but there has also been no shortage of controversy (branding staff, phantom kleptomatics and pre-pack administration for a start). Most recently he's reinvented himself as a purveyor of ersatz new-Nordic cuisine - a shame because I these he's more original than that.

Unfortunately this book is another disappointment. The recipes tend towards the identikit, showing little of Aiken's distinctive style. There also a weird, slightly Dorling Kindersley tone to the text as well - sort of like what you'd expect from a five year old's Comprehension Test. e.g."Cod used to be widely available, but now, because of overfishing, it is one of the most expensive fish to buy. I just hope that we never run out of it for fish and chips", "Tuna is a fabulous fish, which should always be eaten rare. If cooked to well done, it can get rather dry" or "I get my crabs from Dorset, my lobsters from Scotland, and my prawns from Magagascar" (hey Tom, I get mine from the local supermarket!). It feels like it was thoughtlessly dictated to a ghostwriter between shifts (although I note none is listed in the credits). A frustrating debut from a frustrating chef.

The Best Recipe: America's Cooks Illustrated magazine was doing food geekery decades food geekery was cool. The set-up, for those who aren't familiar, is they select a recipe (e.g. "grilled pork chops"), test of multiple variations on it in their kitchen and come up the ultimate version (a formula copied in a more kitchen-sink manner by Felicity Cloake's How to Cook the Perfect series and book). This volume is a deluxe-sized compilation of magazine articles, covering pretty much every US home-cooking standard, from Pumpkin Pie to Popovers. It's a great-resource for two reasons: Firstly because you know you have a bunch of fail-proof recipes for any conceivable domestic culinary situation. Secondly because each recipe is accompanied by a great deal of explanation (often backed up with a lot of solid food science) not only about how each recipe works, but why it works. And for a cookbook, I can think of no higher praise.

Larousse Gastronomique by Prosper Montagne et al: Grand Tour Larousse

Okay to round up before Christmas, a few words on Larousse Gastronomique. This isn't quite a book review, more an appreciation-cum-users guide. My main point is that Larousse tends to be ignored or dismissed nowadays, which is a shame. Sure its no longer the Bible of cuisine nowadays (that is, I believe, now called T'Internet). But it's still a wonderful trove of deliciousness to be enjoyed in its own right. I do.

Knock, knock..

Nowadays it is very fashionable to knock Larousse Gastronomique, the famously frumpy French culinary encyclopaedia.

It's outdated people say (true). The recipes don't work they say (also true). Its ridiculously French they say (Good point. The entry on Great Britain rather pointedly claims "British cookery is basically medieval...").

Even after recent attempts to drag it into the 21st century, its publisher's claim to be "authoritative and comprehensive" looks risible. This is a book which has no entry for "sous vide" (even though it's a French term!), but it does provide a potted biography of Marie, Vicomte de Botherel who's only claim to fame is an unsuccessful attempt to install kitchens on buses (it goes without saying that he gets included because he's French).

To be fair, it does have an entry for Nigella, although it actually refers to a Asian spice rather than a buxon English TV personality.

Nonetheless if I had to be locked in a cell for a month with only one of my cookbooks for company, I think I'd take Larousse.

Introducing Larousse Gastronomique

The story of Larousse

Prosper Montagne: This is what sleb chefs looked like

before they started using stylists...

Larousse Gastronomique begins with Prosper Montagne, best described as the Thomas Keller of his day. Along with his (slightly older) contemporary Auguste Escoffier, he was one of the superstars of fin de siecle gastronomy. While not quite as revolutionary as the Big E (think of Escoffier as the Ferran Adria of the age), Montagne was no slouch, cooking his way around some of the biggest kitchens in France, notably the venerable Pavillon Ledoyen (currently Christian Le Squer's three star lair).

Anyhow to cut a long story short, after many decades behind the range Montagne decided to kick back a little and starting writing books. This culminated in the 1938 publication of Larousse Gastronomique, co-authored with a Dr Gottschalk and published by Larousse, leading purveyors of encyclopedias and other doorstops.

What Escoffier did for French cookery in practice, Montagne did for French cookery in print. Larousse was a staggering confection of history, dishes and recipes. The heart of the book is its coverage of French cuisine - from humble to haute. Montagne systematically went through every French region, dish, and garnish in the classic repertoire. He also provides pen-pictures of famous chefs and personalities, and added articles on history and on many notable ingredients (guess what, foie gras and truffles have some of the longest entries).

Lost in Larousse

On paper it sounds quite prosaic but in person the effect is quite staggering. If you are remotely interested in food this is a book you can get lost in.

Consider the duck...

Take your favourite ingredient - let's say Duck. Flip to the entry and you will learn about the breeds of duck (Aylesbury, Barbary, Gressingham, Long Island, Nante, Norfolk, Peking and Rouen). Then you'll hear about notable preparations of duck, which may take you on to an article on Aiguilettes (long-thin fillets of meat - also used for strips of beef). Or to an article on the Tour d'Argent restaurant, a Parisian old-timer famous for serving pressed, numbered ducks (#253,652 went to Charlie Chaplain). There's an anecdote here (and a painting) about the chef Frederic carving his famous canard au sang:

Frederic carving his famous canard au sang

You ought to have seen Frederic with his monocle, his greying whiskers, his calm demeanour, carving his plump quack-quack, trussed and already flamed, throwing it into the pan, preparing the sauce, salting and peppering like Claude Monet's paintings, with the seriousness of a judge and the precision of a mathematician, and opening up, with a sure hand, in advance, every perspective of taste.

For there you might follow an entry to the famous chef Paillard who cooked at the Tour D'Argent in the 1800s, or Claude Terrail who ran the restaurant with an iron fist until his death in 2006. Meanwhile back to the original article on duck it concludes with twenty two different recipes, including a honeyed duck Apicius-style popularised by Alain Senderens, and Rene Lasserre's duck a l'orange.

You don't get that with Nigella.

The many lives of Larousse

Lost in translation...

Family portrait: 2009 edition (rear), 1988 hardback (right),
much-thumbed 1990 paperback (left)

There have been a number of editions of Larousse over the years (for a more detailed treatment see this article). After the original in 1938 the most important revision was the 1984 edition. This gave the text a thorough overhaul, masterminded by Robert Courtine of Le Monde, adding colour pictures and updating it with the latest trends in nouvelle cuisine. The last major update was in 1996 when a culinary committee of the great and the good (headed by Joel Robuchon) overhauled some of the entries, although the changes were nowhere near as significant as those twelve years earlier. There was a further update in 2007.

These changes are reflected in the English editions. The first English edition was in 1961, adapted from Montagne's original. Similarly in 1988 the Courtine version was translated into English (also released as a natty paperback two years later). The Robuchon version made it into anglais in 2001, with an update in 2009. These two are the versions you're most likely to come across today.

Larousse - key editions you are likely to find

Party like its 1988...

La Belle Patissiere

I actually own three copies - a reprint of the 1988 hardback, a dog-eared copy of the paperback version (quite excellent for taking on long backpacking trips), and the 2009 edition which I found going cheap online.

I actually prefer the 1988 version over the more recent versions. For one thing the entries they added to bring it "up to date" are pretty superficial (as I said - articles on Adria, Heston but nothing on sous-vide or spherification; they do seem quite proud to have an article on tonka beans though). For another the pictures in the newer version tend to be pointless Dorling-Kindersley fluff.

In contrast the 1988 is stuffed with fascinating paintings and drawings which where chopped wholesale in the later version. For example the painting of Frederic and his quack-quack above is gone, as is Joseph Bail's ravishing La Belle Patissiere accompanying the Patisserie article (yes I look like that when I make pasta too :-p ).


Non-French food (according to French people)
Also the 1988 still has outbreaks of hilarious French sniffiness which have been shamefully bowdlerised in more modern versions. So you have the article on Great Britain where they point out that out food is basically medieval and the best thing to happen to British cuisine was actually when Careme and Escoffier turned up in London to teach us how to cook.

In the piece of Australia and New Zealand the author goes to great lengths to talk about Aboriginal traditions which include the cooking of such animals as cockchafer grubs, bats and lizards. Kangaroo-tail soup is considered to be a delicacy whilst adding that Fish and shellfish, often giant-sized, are very popular but are not cooked with any gastronomic refinement.

Rather pointedly the page on North American food (actually more like 3/4 of a page - roughly the same space the book devotes to the town of Lyon) begins It would be wrong to dismiss American cuisine as being confined to the fast food and the snack-bar, and to believe that its contributions to gastronomy are limited to cocktails, ice cream, corned beef, and hot dogs. Yeah right...

Now a lot of this has been amended in later versions (the USA gets its own article for a start) but actually I find these sections some of the funniest bits of the book. Its a shame they've been cut in favour of banalities like Far too vast and varied to be comprehensively described in a few paragraphs, the food of the United States is as rich as diverse as its people.

Changing attitudes to American food!

Real men eat salad

Larousse is basically a book about French people saying how great their food is and being rude about everyone else's cooking. Let's enjoy it for what it is! I love Larousse precisely because its a quirky, opinionated snapshot of classic Frenchness. In particular I was very  annoyed to see Lucien Tendret's glorious recipe for a mixed salad left out of the latest edition. In the name of culinary artistry I've reproduced it in full:

Put into a salad bowl some olive oil of the best quality, some white wine vinegar, 4 tablespoons roast turkey juice, 1/2 teaspoon tarragon mustard, the inside of a lobster, salt, and pepper. Stir until the mixture is perfectly smooth. Then add slices of lobster flesh, slices from the breast of a braised chicken and the breast of a roast turkey without the skin, the breast of three young partridges (keep the best slices for decoration), some thinly sliced truffles cooked in an excellent dry white wine, some mushrooms prepared in the same way, and a number of shelled crayfish. Cover with a layer of blanched endive (chicory) leaves. Add a second layer of the mixture, then a further layer of endive. Then on top tastefully arrange the reserved slices of meat, a few strips of ham from which the fat has been removed, a few large slices of truffle and mushroom, a border of shelled crayfish, a tablespoon of capers washed in white wine, and a cupful of stoned (pitted) green olives. Put a mound of thick mayonnaise in the centre with the largest truffle on top. Serve with the finest dry champagne, very cold but not iced.

That's my kind of salad (apparently Jeremiah Tower once served it at Chez Panisse). Mr Ritz and Mr Waldorf eat your heart out...

Living with Larousse

So to close a few more things I've learnt after twenty years of living with Larousse:

Larousse can be really really random

Quite good for picnics, apparently...

Part of the fun of Larousse is that its like rummaging through an elderly uncles very very random attic. The text is sprinkled with little gems, from a culinary appreciation of the Elephant (The feet and trunk are of the greatest culinary interest: their flesh, which is muscular and gelatinous, resembles ox (beef) tongue) to the Street Cries of Paris (Crapois y'a for salted whale meat, apparently) to Queen of Sheba, a chocolate gateau made especially light by the use of potato flour and ground almonds. For all its failings Larousse has a magpie-like mind that should please anyone who confuses significance with obscurity.

Never cook any recipe from Larousse

To be fair the recipes in Larousse are notoriously unreliable. I remember trying to cook French food from Larousse during my gap year in China (I took two books: Larousse and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Shakey never stood a chance). Complete nightmare. Scrambled egg custard for the ile flottante (OK that maybe I shouldn't have tried to thicken the liaison in a makeshift wok). Disintegrating liver dumplings. Never again. Everything they've told you about how unreliable Larousse's recipes are is true.

There are multiple reasons for this. Montagne wasn't writing for home cooks for a start - the recipes are rudimentary at best (very similar to the brief one-para ones in Escoffier actually). I don't think the translations have helped either - sometimes recipes are newly translated for the 2009 edition, sometimes they are recycled wholesale from the 1988 translation (or earlier). With so many authors across so many editions I doubt there's any consistency as to what kind of recipes got in (and whether they were ever tested). If you want a cookbook, read Nigella.

You can read it online. Now

Hit Amazon.com and look up the 2001 English edition. They hit "Click to Look Inside". Normally Amazon offers you a page or two and the author puff. But lo and behold pretty much the whole damn thing is available to browse. Okay there's a page or two they've held back but I figure 90% of the book is there to browse through. Go have a look if you don't believe me.

Get lost in Larousse

Look you can keep Larousse on your shelf and haul it down as an occasional reference when you need to figure out what a Pate de Pezenas is, but that's a waste. Larousse deserves more than that (incidentally, a Pate de Pezenas is a sweetened pie of mined mutton, shaped like a cotton bobbin which is sometimes served as a dessert).

What you should is brew yourself a nice cup of tea and sit down on the sofa with your Larousse and a plate of cooked pork products (preferably crispy ones). You may want to prop up Larousse on a separate table to avoid knackering your knees.

Then pick your favourite ingredient or region and start reading. Every time you find a funny French term or cross-reference to another article flip look it up and continue reading. When the trail of articles runs dry, back up and carry on reading the original article (you may want to deploy Post-Its to keep your place). Continue for an hour. Or two. I guarantee you will come away hungrier than when you started.

As I said at the start, this is the book I'd most like to have if I were locked away for a month. You can use it to embark on numerous culinary voyages, and never have the same trip twice.

And to finish some nice Pate de Pezenas and a glass of wine...

Signatures: Black Cod with Miso (Nobu)

After a couple of weeks of book reviews, a return to my ongoing series on cheffy signature dishes, and  the cookbooks where you can find them...

The Dish

The problem with Nobu's Black Cod with Miso is that its too damn successful.

Black cod is actually a very interesting ingredient - probably the only seafood with less than eight legs which can't be overcooked. And its fatty and delicious to boot. But if you look up recipes for black cod you will find only one.

This one.

It's because it really is that good.

The dish looks very simple. A golden-grilled fillet of fish plain on a plate. If you get it in the restaurant there's a shard of pickled ginger on the side. But once you put your fork to it (look this is Nobu. Doubt you'll be using chopsticks here) oh-my-oh-my. It flakes away into scalloped flakes, not disintegrating like a normal cod. Taste it and each one is a beguiling mix of salt-sweet miso glaze and then the melting-fatty fish. Even if you're have it dozens of times, it still remains a wow dish.

There's a couple of things that make it so great.

The first is the miso glaze. Now contrary to popular belief Nobu didn't invent this. Marinating fish in a mixture of miso, alcohol and sugar is an age-old technique in Japan. It was originally used as a preservative - sea-fish would be pickled in miso or in the lees from sake-brewing to preserve them for the long journey to the capital. Nowadays of course the miso is there more for taste than preservation, but its definitely nothing new.

Nobu didn't invent the idea of grilling it either. Once the preserved fish had got to its destination, grilling  (Yakimono) was a quick and easy way of preparing it. After all Nasu Dengaku (miso-topped aubergine), an izakaya stand-by, is pretty much the same thing done to an eggplant.

Oi! Keep that pot of Miso away from me I tell you!!

What Nobu did do however is stumble on the idea of pairing this with Black Cod, an unusual fish he came across in Alaska. Black Cod - or sablefish - is a very unusual fish. Unlike most fish we eat, it lives in very deep water, between 1000 and 9000 feet down. This gives it a very special physiology - to adapt to the extreme pressures the flesh is saturated with a great deal of fat, which acts as a sort of natural antifreeze.

Why is this important? It's because it gives it particular lip-smacking texture which is the source of its other name - butterfish. Apart from the Chilean Seabass (which has a similar stygian habitat) this is almost unique amongst the fish we eat. Perhaps a nice piece of grilled salmon belly can match it, but that's much oilier. What so special about the Black Cod is that the fat does leach out, it just remains soaked into the beautiful, moist flesh.

It is the fattiness which makes Black Cod so well suited for this dish. Much as you pair savoury-fatty foie gras with a sweet fruit chutney, the savoury-sweet miso glaze is a perfect foil for the buttery Black Cod. It's one of the great food marriages. And Nobu was the bloke who discovered it.

Respect is due.

The Recipe

The only problem with this dish is it costs you a whacking great £42 a plate at Nobu's London outpost, only its only $32 in New York (hmmm, I wonder if its worth doing a Economist-style Big Mac Index to figure out currency overvaluations for the jet-set?). But the good news? Provided you can get your hands on the fish this one's a snip to do at home.

As far as I know the recipe features in two of Nobu's books, and an interminable number of random recipe sites (Google "black cod miso recipe" and you'll know what I mean). It was originally published on p124 the 2001 Nobu Cookbook  pioneer of the Haute Asian Fusion (HAF) genre (viz Tetsuya Wakuda, Susur Lee, Alan Wong and Momofuku). It's pretty much foolproof.

Hmmm. How much Sake again?

The first step is to make the Saikyo Miso marinade (recipe on p172). Basically boil together a tub of white miso, some sake, mirin, sugar and then let it cool. One warning - the recipe in the original book omits the quantity of sake; other sources say it should be the same quantity as the mirin (150ml), which is what I always use.

This gives you a great big pot of golden-yellow miso sauce. More than you need for the recipe. Stick it in a bottle and keep it in the fridge - given the amount of salt and sugar in it the stuff is pretty much indestructible. Whip it out whenever you have any grilled meat you want to gussy up (it's great on grilled lamb chops).

Then take a cup or so of the miso sauce and brush it onto the fish. At this point the book marinades the  fish for 2-3 days (perhaps a hat-tip to the old days of preserving the fish), but its just as good if you cook it immediately. Grill the fish skin-side up til its browned and then whack it into a 200c over for 10-15 minutes (alternately I grill the fish til browned on both sides and skip the oven bit).

Now normally when you grill fish it goes dry pretty damn quick. But the great thing about the black cod though, is that with its extreme fattiness it remains moist no matter how much damage you deal to it. This piece of protein is pretty much idiot proof, and will brown long before you can ever overcook it  (especially given the amount of sugar in the glaze).

After that you're done. Plop it on a bowl of nicely steamed short-grain rice and your in salty-sweety-buttery black cod heaven!

The Book

Book cover front and back: Note hilariously cheesy quotes from random 90's slebs (click on the pic to zoom in). My pick: Everything tastes so clean, PURE and unique. There is so much choice from marinated tofu to tangy mushroom salad, and of course the gold leaf sake is a must. --- Jude Law and Sadie Frost.

A few thoughts on the book itself (I'm focusing on the original Nobu Cookbook here; the recipe also features in 2004's Nobu Now, but I've always found that volume much less exciting).

Returning to it over a decade later this volume has aged very well. Okay Nobu's Persil-white Nike trainers and relentless name-dropping is a bit 1990's (Princess Di: I was struck by the firmness of her handshake when we first met, and her mentioning that she had read about me; Kenny G: I could tell form his performance, from the way he mingled with the audience, that he really loved his work and enjoyed entertaining fans).

However the tightly-packed text and stately layout are surprisingly fresh, even when books like Alinea and publishers like Phaidon (a curse on all their houses) have since raised the bar.

But the book works above all because its a moving and personal story. Today we're familiar with Nobu the culinary magnate, Nobu the HAF chain-restaurant operator (back in 2001 he only had the 13 restaurants...). But the opening pages of the book take us back to a different Nobu. Nobu the indebted young restaurant owner, standing in the snow one Anchorage night and watching his only restaurant burn down:

An unforgettable night

There is one night that for me is unforgettable, one scene that I can't get out of my mind. It is branded onto my eyes. To remember what happened that night is to remember despair. Even now, the memory is as vivid as the events of yesterday. It was the hardest night I ever lived through. But perhaps because of it, I learned to be thankful and to find the courage to take a sure step forward.

Anchorage, in a whirl of light snow. In that increasingly snowbound town, silver with the settling flakes, flames shot up in an orange blaze. I stood rooted under the falling snow, silently waching the building burn down. Having rushed to the scene from a party at a friend's house, I was only wearing a T-shirt, yet I didn't feel the cold, nor anything else. The cinders from the burning building flew up into the sky, and some landed on my cheeks. They must have been hot, but I wasn't conscious of it at the time.

It was my restaurant that was burning; it had only been fifty days since it opened.

In many ways this reminds me about about Thomas Keller's vignette on the importance of rabbits contained in the original French Laundry Cookbook. In brief: Keller wants to find out how to kill, skin a rabbit. Supplier turns up with twelve bunnies, does one and leaves the rest for chef to take care of. Having to kill eleven screaming rabbits in time for dinner service teaches Keller a deeply personal lesson about the cost of his ingredients:

... but that first screaming rabbit not only gave me a lesson in butchering, it also taught me about waste. Because killing those rabbits had been such an awful experience, I would not squander them. I would use all my powers as a chef to ensure that those rabbits were beautiful.

Nobu's Alaskan nightmare is that sort of story, which tells you more about the chef than eating his food ever will.

But back to the book. The other great thing about the book is that its packed with iconic recipes. A decade on we forget how revolutionary a lot of this stuff was. New-style sashimi (drizzled with smoking hot oil at service) and bracing seafood ceviches seem to passe now (in London we've now got a whole restaurant named after the damn stuff!). But in those days it could have been food from the moon.

This is fusion food done right - foreign influences are assimilated but always with Nobu's own zesty style.

Part of this is the words (or, alternately the dodgy translation - note this is an English version of a  volume originally published in Japanese in 1998). A mayo with a dash of chilli oil becomes "Creamy-Spicy Sauce" topping grilled scallops (p37). What looks like an uncooked soy hollandaise (no I don't know how that works either) is rebranded as Egg Sauce, and looks absolutely immaculate napping spinach-wrapped sea urchin (p42).

Part of this is also playfulness - trompe l'oeil dishes of abalone or squid cut to resemble soba (p24) and conchiglie pasta (p82). A slightly gothic deep-fried bone-ring garnishing a sole (p123). And a torchon, not of foie gras but of monkish liver (having once cooked through a kilo of the stuff I can say yes it does have the look and taste of foie gras, but a kind of weird fishiness).

This is a book with personality. And a book that's fun. Even so many years on I still rate it - along with David Chang's Momofuku book - as my pick of the HAF genre.

Enjoy the weekend.


Afterword - Getting hold of Black Cod: As I said the only problem with this recipe is getting hold of the Black Cod; most of the other ingredients you should be able to track down in any Asian grocery (although for Miso you might have to go to a specifically Japanese store). In London at least Selfridges and the Atariya empire sell Black Cod (Atariya even sell it ready-miso-marinated). It's not cheap but costs less than in a restaurant, and the richness of the meat means a little goes a long way. 

No idea about availability on the other side of the pond but I assume its easier to source in North America. It looks like those enterprising Canucks are moving into Black Cod aquaculture - hopefully that will bring prices down further.