2018 will in future be known as the year of the Great West Norwood Cookbook Cull. But which books to get rid of, and which to keep? The Random Recipe Adventure will help us decide (you can read a bit more about the premise here). Each week, a book will be taken from the shelves, examined, and cooked from. Losers go to Oxfam – winners stay on the shelves, with a promise that they will no longer be neglected quite as much as they have been for the last decade or so.
WEEK 20
The book
La Tante Claire – Recipes from a Master Chef by Pierre Koffmann (and Timothy Shaw)
How/where/when did I get it?
Bought in the early nineties, at a time when I was in thrall to the Michelin rosette.
Have I used it since then?
I feel sure I must have cooked from it at the time, probably for a show-offy dinner party. Those were the days.
What did the Random Recipe Generator throw up?
I’m going to come clean with you on this one. The Random Recipe Generator is the three of us choosing a random number. We then look at the recipes on those pages and decide which one we’d most like to cook. On this occasion the three recipes were: frogs’ legs soup with watercress, deep-fried snails in pastry, and calf’s brain fritters. Probably all delicious (although I remain mystified by the French love of snails – not from squeamishness, but simply because when I’ve ever eaten them they’ve been more like tyre rubber than anything you’d voluntarily put in your mouth), but for various reasons not for us.
I made Dauphine potatoes.
So, what about it?
Here’s the thing about cheffy cookbooks: they are very often really terrible to cook from. Chefs have professionally-equipped kitchens, an army of sous- and commis-chefs to do all their prep work, and years of professional training and experience. We, the general public, have none of those things. When Pierre Koffmann slices a carrot, it takes three seconds and the slices slide from his knife like a carroty ballet; when I do it, it’s more as if ‘carrot slicing’ has become a round in The Generation Game.
All this is fine if the cheffy books in question take into account the limitations of the amateur cook and their kitchen. And, to be absolutely fair, Koffmann is much better than most in this regard. Perhaps he overestimates my ability or desire to bone a pigeon or strip down a calf’s tongue, but that isn’t really the point.
Koffmann is a legendary chef, and the book is written and presented with his customary attention to detail. As well as all the fancy stuff (Tournedos à l’archiduc, for example, a dish Koffmann describes as ‘one of the old classical recipes whose very name makes you think of the Belle Époque and the world of the palace hotels’), there are nods to the basics of good classic French cooking – stocks and sauces and custards and such like. You get the impression that the recipes have been tested, not necessarily for specific inclusion in the book, but just because he’s cooked them all a thousand times, probably more. (I have, on two memorable occasions, eaten his food, and both those meals were among the best I’ve been lucky enough to eat. They were also the most expensive, but that’s hardly surprising.) This book, a mixture of his life story, anecdotes from the cooking trade, and recipes from his restaurant La Tante Claire, is very good.
But the plain truth of it is this: I have no need for this book. A quarter of a century has passed since I bought it, and in that time my ambitions as a home chef have contracted more than somewhat. Koffmann’s story is interesting, and the anecdotes are fun (including the one about the earnest Frenchman who used to come into the Tante Claire kitchen after every meal he ate there and lecture the bemused Koffmann about how he’d done cooking wrong), but I honestly can’t ever see myself cooking Braised stuffed quails, Saddle of young rabbit stuffed with foie gras, artichokes and truffles, or Lobster mousselines with coral sauce.
This is a book for lovers of haute cuisine who want to look behind the curtain, to get a glimpse of what makes a great chef, to have a go at it themselves in the comfort of their own home. That was me twenty-five years ago; it isn’t any more.
A lovely book, but not for me.
Anyone want it?
(PS The potatoes were excellent. Of course they were. A tub of potatoes and a metric fucktonne of double cream – what could possibly go wrong?)
The Verdict: Keeper or Chucker?
Chucker
I believe snails exist only as a vehicle for garlic butter. I won’t eat frogs’ legs because I am mildly phobic about live frogs and don’t want to double down. Willing to try calves’ brains as I’m a passionate eater of offal, but possibly squeamish about preparing them (I once carelessly bought a whole frozen rabbit in a French supermarket, and could only behead it by covering the head with a tea towel while I wielded my cleaver), and anyway they’re now nigh on impossible to get.
I agree re snails, and in any case one can have garlic butter without resorting to rubber-chewing.
And I too love offal, but in recent years it has started to hate me (gout). Woe.
I feel inspired to dig out my copy of Mrs Beeton and try the larks’ tongues in aspic.
We haven’t got a Waitrose in this god-forsaken, far-flung outpost of the realm – perhaps you could point me in the direction of a purveyor of the necessary ingredients?
Thank goodness! At last! I’d chuck anything with snails (or frog legs) in it. My sister married into the local Greek-Cypriot migrant community and her late MIL loved snails. She was an otherwise excellent cook. I could never understand it. They do a good version of the potatoes though