A tin of beans

Friday Fragment #1

I’m convinced that the more years one spends in and around the world of food, the longer one craves the food pleasures that are simple; the food experiences that are more easy and laid-back. One finds comfort in nostalgia, not novelty. Over a decade ago, I designed and art-directed Phil Howard’s book which celebrated twenty years of his two-Michelin-starred restaurant, The Square. Over two volumes and in excess of five hundred (or was it six or seven hundred?) pages, Phil committed the best of his culinary career to paper. (Phil wrote out the entire book in Bic biro. He was a cerebral writer, not the sort of chef who jotted down ideas for an editor or ghost writer to then do the rest.) It was the only book that, upon reading its first recipe, ever gave me a chill – in awe of what Phil would accomplish if he managed to write another one hundred or so recipes in this same fashion. If I remember correctly, that first recipe was a crab pasta dish within which he detailed meticulously how to extract the chlorophyll from blanched parsley to mix into a dough. It took almost a full page to explain, and he hadn’t yet even mentioned the crab, the mousse or the lasagne that I think it would turn into. Phil wrote knowing that a whole generation of chefs would be learning from his innovation and expertise and so he wrote clearly and he wrote in great detail. Yet for all of that knowledge and intellect, some of the book’s most impressive wisdom could be found in a number of small essays that he supplied to dot around the recipes. And in one of those he mentioned that a bowl of cornflakes is capable of delivering the most optimal tasting pleasure, for it never fails to reward you with the exact thing you want from it. The combination of that cereal and milk are a wonderfully rich and measured eating experience. Chef Atul Kochhar (who used to share the same Mayfair postcode as Phil) once relayed to me how he would return home late at night from the restaurant and savour a cheap slice of processed cheese between two slices of white bread, because it delivered exactly the taste and eating experience he craved most in that moment. And again, we can all relate to that specific need and reward. And so it was with my lunch of today: beans from a tin, spread over hot toasted bread, embarrassed immediately by too much butter. Always precisely the thing I want to eat, meeting all the expectations I have of it: food that will satisfy and leave one replete.

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