On each table in The Fat Duck is a little pile of cards that diners are invited to fill in and leave behind. On them, Heston asks us to record a food memory. It is an wonderful concept. A lot of the quirky dishes and mise en bouche at The Fat Duck are variations of kids’ sweets and simple, playful foods: popping candy, miniature packets of parsnip cornflakes, bacon and egg ice cream that actually comes out of an egg. Heston is toying with our minds, using taste and texture to invoke memories of our childhood and (presumably, though surely not for everyone) flood our minds with happy thoughts.
I left behind gooseberries as my ‘food memory’. I would pick them from the bushes in the garden of our old house and eat them like sweets, as well as having them in delicious crumbles. The taste of a gooseberry, especially a sour one that hasn’t quite ripened yet, will always remind me of the house I grew up in, its garden, and of my childhood, free from all the cares in the world.
Today I retrieved a similar memory from the annals of my short past. I was on white bread duty. Having made soda breads yesterday, and been mesmerised by the white yeast bread on Friday, I decided to attempt my first ever proper bread. It wasn’t until the first kneading stage that the memories began to stealthily return. It occurred to me that I had done this before. I didn’t know how to do it of course, but there was something about the texture of the dough: its springiness and elasticity. There was something about the smell of the yeast and the warm moist droplets that formed on the bowl that had covered it. I had definitely been here before.
I couldn’t tell you how old I’d have been when my mum would have let me help her bake the weekly bread rolls on a Saturday morning, but she did. And I remember it. Making scones the other day, I felt a faint, almost imperceptible sense of déjà vu. I didn’t quite realise it at the time, but now I do. His is how we slowly recall things, how we bring them back to life from the dark recesses of our minds. One memory succeeds in forming itself, making itself recognisable, and it encourages another to emerge from the fog of time. Now I know for sure that I had been there before too. The smells, the tastes, the textures. The little bits of mixture left in the bowl. And I suddenly feel guilty for shit canning my mum’s cooking for all these years. She started this.
All this reminiscing doesn’t stop me from thrashing around the kitchen like a madman. My teacher foolishly shows me a method of kneading that involves repeatedly and aggressively slam-dunking the dough into the worktop. It looks slightly less likely to give me carpal tunnel syndrome than the traditional method, so I get stuck in. About twenty seconds later I am asked to stop, not just because of the noise, but I think things may be in danger of falling off the walls.
Whilst my dough is getting some much-earned rest in a cupboard somewhere, I crack on with the sponge cake we were ‘shown’ yesterday. I get all my dry ingredients together: 6oz flour, 6oz sugar and a teaspoon of baking powder. I cream my butter until it is almost pale (very important). Next instruction: beat the sugar and butter together. Er, would that be the sugar that I have here in this bowl with the flour? So now I am making the sponge cake and some lemon squares.
Back to the bread. Rolling it out for the plait I am in full flashback mode. It rises once more to double its size, and I egg wash it and sprinkle on the obligatory poppy seeds. It finally emerges from the oven, and when it has cooled a little, I taste it. It tastes wonderful. Light yet firm and with a faint saltiness that somehow lifts its freshness to new levels. And it looks almost good enough to eat.
I weigh up for the cake again and crack on. It goes in the oven with no further dramas. But the delay means I won’t get to fully load it with cream and fruit, since only the first two ready in the kitchen will have that honour. By the time I am finished it looks good, but it tastes great. In demo today our favourite instructor is waxing lyrical in his own inimitable style about cake. He is extolling the virtues of these particular recipes and the cakes they produce. “They will blow you away,” he says. Then he pauses and thinks again, as is his wont. “More importantly, they will blow your paying customers away.” He pauses once more. “Well, maybe not away, hopefully they will blow them away in a circular fashion, so that they come back and buy some more.” Genius. And he is right.
The secret is in the colour. The sponge cake I baked today is almost yellow inside. Somewhere else in the kitchen is the same cake, made to the same recipe, with exactly the same ingredients. It is very pale, almost white, inside and it tastes inferior. Why? Because they’re not exactly the same ingredients. The anaemic cake is made using free-range eggs and mine is made using fresh organic hens’ eggs from the farm. Want your cakes to be so good that they blow people round in circles? Get yourself some hens.
Hens. Hens that lay eggs. Eggs. We know I don’t like them, but we don’t know why. Locked away with all those other memories, is one more. I am about five years old. I am sat at the kitchen table in our old house. In front of me is a boiled egg in an eggcup and a little plate of toasted soldiers obediently lined up waiting to be dipped and gleefully devoured. Somewhere between then and now, something must have changed. I just don’t remember when.
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