When i was at university I decided I wanted to be a chef. Among my contemporaries, this was an unusual choice. Cooking was not one of the plum jobs that most of us wanted. It is, on the face of it, an unattractive profession. Chefs lead notoriously harsh lives: their work is long, pressured, menial-and badly paid.
But such considerations didn't put me off. On the contrary, they enhanced the appeal of being a chef. I was unhappy at university. The work was hard; the social scene was insular and self-important. Being a chef seemed the perfect antidote to intellectual and social posturing. It promised a seriousness and integrity lacking in my college life.
But my desire to cook was not simply a reaction to being a student. It also expressed an aesthetic ideal. My first glimpse of this ideal came just before the start of my second year at university, when I ate a meal at Pied ? Terre, a London restaurant with a Michelin star. It was a revelation. I had never imagined that such sublime concoctions could be conjured up from everyday ingredients. I still clearly remember my starter. It was a dish of roasted monkfish resting in a frothy, pea-green sauce. The fish pieces surrounded a ball of steamed crab, wrapped in a cabbage leaf. When this parcel was punctured, the saltiness of the crab spread through the sauce, overriding its sweet, mild accents with the pungent taste of the sea. I finished that meal wanting to prostrate myself, weeping, at the feet of the chef who had made it. I felt warm and airy for days afterwards.
After this I developed an intense desire to uncover the secrets of this strange, fabulous art. I transformed my student life into an extended preparation for my assault on the culinary world. My history degree became a hollow pretence, distracting me from my true course. I acquired my real education-in cooking-haphazardly and deficiently. I read cook books, roamed Oxford's markets and delicatessens, prepared extravagant meals in inadequate kitchens. It was an expensive form of auto-didactism; a large part of my student loans were spent on it. When I finished university I was heavily in debt and largely ignorant of history. In place of the usual tales of reckless hedonism, I could only boast of having eaten unusually well for a student.
But somewhere along the way, doubts began to surface. Between my second and third years at university, I spent a few weeks working in a professional kitchen for the first time. It was a good restaurant-not Michelin-starred, but near it. The experience was absorbing and in some ways exciting. I was assigned to the pastry section (you always are, to start with), where a lanky, taciturn South African was responsible for turning out meticulous cakes, tarts, ice creams and breads. I can't remember his name, but he was an imposing character. He had been a crack dealer before becoming a chef, and he hardly slept at all-sometimes claiming that he stayed up all night between 16-hour shifts. Slightly overawed, and often corrected, I helped him make his puddings. I spent much of my time measuring out huge quantities of flour and sugar; in this I was generally successful. But when it came to making ice cream, I found it hard not to curdle the custard bases. Overall, the work was satisfying, if straining. I enjoyed its precision and seriousness. But I could see that endlessly repeating the same recipes might become dull.
What really struck me, though, was the soullessness of the kitchen. The chefs-even the head chef-didn't seem to enjoy what they did. It was just a job. There was little sense of artistry, of self-abnegation to an ideal. My own interest in cooking was regarded with suspicion, even hostility. On my first day the head chef greeted me with the incredulous "College boy wants to learn to cook!"-as if this was the most ridiculous thing in the world. Later he took me aside and advised me, with real seriousness, not to become a chef. "Cooking will kill me," he said melodramatically-but his drawn face testified to a harsh life.
At the time, I dismissed the head chef as a philistine who had come to cooking not out of passion, but through chance or necessity. I told myself that chefs like that would never be really successful. I went back to university and finished my degree. I continued to dine out regularly, to frequent foodshops and cook grand meals. I still thought I might become a chef. But something had been lost; my interest in cooking no longer had the ecstatic, frenzied quality of its infancy. My passion had become a hobby.
When I left university, I spent a few months fiddling about before deciding-stuck for a job one day-to give cooking another try. I didn't return to the same restaurant as before. Instead, I chose a chef who had come to the profession late in life. I reasoned that he would be less workmanlike, more inspiring. His kitchen would be more fulfilling to work in.
I was wrong. Although the head chef himself was an exotic and colourful character, he was rarely there. In his place was a cast of minions who executed his will. Every day they made exactly what he ordered them to make; some of the dishes had been on the menu for years. The same joyless, pressured atmosphere that I had noticed before pervaded the kitchen. Assigned, inevitably, to pastry, I found myself in the one corner where there was at least some spirit. The pastry chef was a large, ruddy Swiss, called Frank. Frank managed to be at once a brute and an imp. He spoke almost no English; my French was confined to a smattering of culinary terms. The deal seemed to be that, in exchange for improving his English, I would be guided through the rudiments of pastry.
Frank was schooled in a tradition which made few concessions to ignorance. For the first few days I was subjected to a relentless torrent of abuse. Everything I did was scrutinised and fiercely denigrated. The precise hand movement I used to convey caramel into tart cases; the number of pieces of apple I placed in the dish for the tarte tatin; my ability to recall the quantities for dishes I had been shown only once-in all these tasks I proved deficient; and I was mocked, shouted at and called stupid. The language barrier did not make things easier. Often Frank's instructions were incomprehensible, or just plain wrong. However, as my attempts to explain this only incurred more derision, after a while I began to accept my fate and decided simply to do my best to follow his wishes.
Gradually, as I became more proficient, Frank's attitude began to change. He started sharing jokes with me; he even apologised when I couldn't understand his explanations. He told me, in a tone of hushed secrecy, that he wasn't really a pastry chef, but had previously owned a restaurant in France. He was only doing this job in order to learn English; then he would open a restaurant in London. He bitched about the other pastry chefs-who were, perhaps not coincidentally, young women. "They don't care," he would intone, with a wink. I was becoming his confidante and co-conspirator. When, after a couple of weeks, he informed me that I had good taste, it seemed that I had well and truly gained his approval.
But no sooner was my potential confirmed in this way, than I was transferred to the vegetable section. There I was placed under a tiny, portly Portuguese, whose English was only marginally better than Frank's, despite having been five years at the restaurant. Familiar despair overwhelmed me as the whole laborious process began again-the constant misunderstandings, shakes of the head and rolls of the eyes. The vat of mashed potato had to be distributed among these pots, not those ones; butternut squashes had to be quartered flesh down, not up; wild mushrooms had to be rinsed twice-once was never enough. Suddenly I saw years of this stretching ahead of me. It was time to get out. After a bout of flu, I telephoned my new head chef to say that I wasn't returning. He expressed little surprise; only Frank, I suspect, regretted my departure.
In truth, my heart had not really been in it this time round. I had begun to see that the sublime, where it exists at all, is to be found in restaurant dining rooms, not in their kitchens. There, amid sleek, unruffled elegance, it is possible truly to delight in food-knowledge of its provenance banished. But kitchens are brutal places. There, one learns the cost of refinement. Professional cooking is about technical expertise instilled through hierarchy and discipline. There is no flexibility and precious little creativity. Surviving in such an environment takes its toll. Chefs have a distinctively pallid appearance. The histrionics of popular legend do take place, but in their proper context they seem more desperate than amusing. Frank may have relished what he did, but he seemed to be an exception.
Was I too impatient? Would I have discovered the artistry I was searching for if I had bided my time and risen higher? Soon after I gave up, I read that the head chef at Pied ? Terre had been sacked. Apparently he had branded one of his staff with a hot knife. This was the man at whose feet I had wanted to weep. Reading this confirmed my impressions of restaurant kitchens; I felt relieved to have abandoned them for good. But there was also a pang of regret. I had once believed-passionately-in cooking as an art form. Now that belief was gone. What would take its place?
