by Nigel Slater
Mrs Pearman’s house was a home in every sense of the word. A place where a daughter or son would suddenly turn up without warning, expecting, and getting, supper or Sunday lunch. Where every piece of furniture seemed to have a history and where every family event was faithfully recorded in photograph albums. It was warm and happy, untidy and cosy. There was always a jug of garden flowers on the kitchen table and milk in the fridge. And like all good homes Mrs Pearman’s also had an overriding smell of golden retriever.
Like the dedicated Brown Owl that she was, Mrs P. cooked everything in her pressure cooker. Not just winter soups and stews and bean hotpots, but EVERYTHING. If she could have washed her drawers in it she would have. ‘It’s because you cook everything together and only use one gas ring’ was her perfectly reasonable excuse, but I did wonder if it was simply that she got a buzz out of cooking in a tightly corked pot that threatened to explode at any moment.
No matter what aficionados may tell you, the downside of a pressure cooker is that everything that comes out of one tastes the same. There is a pressure-cooked ‘flavour’ that permeates every onion, swede, haricot bean and lump of meat, every jam sponge and rice pudding. I grew to love Mrs P.’s pressure cooking as much as I loved her chaotic, warm and comfy home. Her vegetable soup for Saturday lunch; her Tuesday liver and mash; the Wednesday steamed syrup sponge and the Sunday boiled gammon and mashed parsnip. I loved her morning coffee and her night-time cocoa, her Monday salads with their steamed potatoes (even with their little black eyes) and, above all, her gorgeous Friday hotpot. But there is no getting away from the fact that whatever you cook in a pressure cooker it always, always tastes of Irish stew.
Black Forest Gâteau
Getting a holiday job between college terms meant the difference between Saturday shopping at Oxfam (threadbare Crombies, brown nylon slacks with dodgy yellow stains on the insides of the pockets) and shopping at Number One, Worcester’s only men’s ‘boutique’ (tear-drop collar shirts and velvet jackets). Frankly, there wasn’t much else to do in Worcester on a Saturday afternoon. Number One was rumoured to have a two-way mirror in the changing room so that the owner, a rather exotic Marc Bolan look-alike, known fondly as Pete the Poof, could watch his customers trying on their jeans. Everyone knew he always gave you a size too small so that he could watch you squeezing your packet into them.
I got a job at a grand hotel just outside the city. We had all trooped round it on a college day out and I knew at once it would be a world away from the Sun. With all its velvet drapes and little gold banqueting chairs, the hotel had the sort of glamour I had previously only seen in brochures and magazines. My first day there was at the time of an unimaginably over-the-top wedding, where the bride and groom arrived by horse-drawn coach like a scene from Cinderella, the horses complete with fluffy white plumes on their manes. I was right: nothing could be further from my week at the Sun, especially when the bride came round after lunch with sugared almonds for every member of staff. Even then, nothing could quite top the excitement of knowing that Noel Gordon had been there that afternoon, filming an episode of Crossroads.
I had never held a silver salver with twenty portions of tournedos Rossini on it before, let alone one with a border of pommes duchesse and tomatoes stuffed with peas. Standard Midlands wedding breakfast it may have been but it was as near as I had ever been to that sort of food. This was silver service, where the waitresses walked round the room with hot salvers of food on their arm, then deposited it on the guests’ plates with the help of a large spoon and fork. I coped with the first course, a sort of prawn cocktail with brandy in the dressing served in Paris goblets, and by the time the main dish had been served I knew that spoon and forkery was for me. What is more, I just loved putting a plate of food in front of someone.
Dessert was a series of giant baked Alaskas studded with sparklers which were lit just as the lights in the dining room were dimmed. Twenty-two waitresses and I trooped out in a fizzing, spluttering daisy chain to the strains of the ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’, and made our way through the maze of long tables lit only by the light from the fireworks that cascaded from our giant puddings. ‘I can smell my uniform singeing,’ hissed one of the old ducks, who obviously felt that this act of pyrotechnics was beyond the call of waitressing duty. ‘I’m going to demand danger money next week. I don’t know why they can’t just have cheese and biscuits.’
The waitresses loved having a lanky, spotty male, who wore his hormones on his sleeve, in their midst. The chefs, who uniformly wore stubble and oversized clogs and all looked like they washed their hair once a year, couldn’t understand why a guy would want to ‘waitress’ instead of cook. From day one they called me darlin’.
Banqueting food was somewhat predictable fare, a rota of the aforementioned tournedos Rossini, duck à l’orange or Montmorency, chicken Kiev, rack of lamb (accompanied without fail by tomatoes stuffed with peas, carrots and sweetcorn), beef Wellington and in summer cold salmon. Vegetables were invariably petits pois à la Française, and desserts (we never called them puddings) were pavlova, charlotte russe, trifle, chocolate soufflé (the mousse version that was set with gelatine, rather than the oven job) and the most popular, Black Forest gâteau.
Starters were prawn cocktail and soup, which was invariably watercress. For some reason watercress was considered posh. Nine out of ten weddings involved prawn cocktail, beef wellington and Black Forest gâteau, which for some reason we called Gâteau Forêt-Noire. Or gatta-forrey-nwwarrr, as the waitresses referred to it in thick Midlands accents. I used to pray that someone would decline their squidgy cake, so I could wolf the cold chocolate sponge, the super-white whipped cream and the chocolate flakes that covered the sides – chocolate sprinkles were considered a bit downmarket – but very few ever did. In Midlands eating-out circles, ending your meal with a slice of chocolate gâteau was a point of honour. Staff food was taken in a canteen thick with cigarette smoke, an unending round of chicken and chips, followed by whatever was left from the various dessert trolleys.
I suppose I was taken in by the apparent luxury of it all: the velvet drapes, the vast high-backed sofas and the potted palms. A bit of red velvet goes a long way to a boy brought up with G-Plan. After a week or so I started to spot the flies in the ointment. An ancient chef the size of a toby jug who used white bread in the trifle because he couldn’t be bothered to make sponge. ‘Bah, they’ll never know and if they do they’d be too embarrassed to say.’ The wine waiters who ‘miscounted’ the number of bottles of champagne sold at weddings and who could later be seen humping crates of it over to staff quarters. The waitresses who filled empty bottles of Malvern water from the cold tap before a ‘function’ and the platters of smoked salmon tea sandwiches that were padded out with finely grated carrot. I’d seen filthy food before but this was something new, a world where customers are treated as being stupid enough not know the difference between salmon and carrot. This was also the first time I had witnessed food prepared in such quantity (prawn cocktail for two hundred wasn’t unusual) or worked with chefs who all seemed barely old enough to drive. This was also the first time I’d been in a situation where sex was as much on tap as Watney’s Red Barrel.
To say there was an atmosphere of promiscuity at the hotel was like saying they make a bit of cheese in Roquefort. Sex oozed from every brick in the hotel’s walls. The staff quarters, a good hundred yards from the hotel, was planet party, a place where the strains of Pink Floyd and Madman Across the Water were to be heard twenty-four/seven and where you were more likely to get a dose of the clap than a decent night’s kip. It would have been almost impossible not to get laid. I was put into a small two-bed room with a blond, baby-faced wine waiter called Tim, who seemed to possess nothing more than three wine books, a bottle of Fabergé Brut and a single pair of socks. After a supper that consisted of three slices of stolen Black Forest gâteau and a bottle of Schweppes bitter lemon, I snuggled down to sleep, only to spend the rest of the night awake while Tim humped a part
icularly sweet, mild-mannered waitress like he was trying to get into The Guinness Book of Records.
Seafood Cocktail
By now the prawn cocktail’s glitzy image was beginning to tarnish, even in the Midlands. Every restaurant, even the local pub, had it on its menu, just above the trout with almonds. Some tried serving it in a tall-stemmed hock glass, others in a champagne saucer. People ordered prawn cocktail because they thought it was posh, and restaurants loved it because it was a money spinner. But it had worked its way downhill and its time had come.
In an elaborate attempt to prolong its popularity, and therefore their profit, some smart restaurateurs got the idea of the seafood cocktail. This had the obligatory prawns but also the new luxury of squid and bottled mussels. The lettuce and Marie Rose sauce remained, but the addition of a miniature rose made from tomato skin wound round and round in the form of a rosette and perched next to the parsley sprig was all new. It was prawn cocktail all dressed up for a ball. Or in this case a dinner-dance.
Every Saturday there would be at least two ‘functions’, usually weddings, and during the week a number of conferences to be catered for. This was mass catering, but with knobs on. The tables were laid with glittering silver, the flowers a match for Chelsea and the little red velvet and gilt chairs made even the fattest of guests feel elegant. But after only a week I could see through it.
Tim had forbidden me to tell anyone who he was shagging. ‘Tell anyone and I’ll kill you,’ he threatened. Nice guy. The simple truth was that she had a boyfriend who was a mate of all the other chefs, who she would go back to at the end of her summer job at the hotel. But for the time being she would spend most nights with Tim. Everyone knew they were friends, even that she stayed in our room, but no one guessed they were sleeping together.
One lunchtime I had been sent to the kitchen to help out because they were short-staffed. Six of us were making seafood cocktail for the biggest wedding we had ever catered for. Huge washing-up bowls held defrosted prawns, long white sacks and rings of squid, and bottled mussels, rinsed of their vinegar. I had made the secret sauce. Which as anyone who has ever been within twenty feet of the catering industry knows is nothing more than salad cream, tomato ketchup, Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco. I was busy stirring a gallon of sauce into the rings of squid and little pink prawns when Martin, one of the grubby bunch of chefs, asked if he could borrow my melon-baller. ‘I didn’t bring it down, it’s in my room. If you want it you’ll have to go and get it,’ I said, literally up to my elbows in Marie Rose sauce.
He returned from our room with the melon-baller looking smug. Or at any rate smugger than usual. ‘Who’s Tim shagging then?’ he said.
‘No one,’ I snapped, remembering my room-mate’s threat.
‘So whose is this then?’ he said, swinging a used condom round in his hand, stretching it – somewhat dangerously I thought – like a catapult.
‘Dunno,’ I lied. I made a grab at the condom. The chef threw it over to one of the others, I jumped up for it. Missed again. They continued throwing the condom back and forth while I made pathetic attempts at snatching it back, like a puppy being teased with a ball. The last time I looked the condom was sailing through the air above the bowls of cocktail de crevettes, sauce Marie Rose.
‘Where’s that fucking seafood salad?’ yelled the head chef as he marched in, the head waiter hot on his tail and two hundred bib-and-tuckered wedding guests waiting for their starter. ‘Yes, chef. Ready, chef. Yes, chef,’ we chorused. Within seconds champagne glasses were filled with shredded lettuce, prawns, squid and vinegary mussels, garnished with the obligatory rose and the sprig of parsley, and out they went to the wedding party by the hundred.
The guests munched politely. ‘Who’s got Tim’s rubber then?’ said Martin. There was a silence, followed by a short argument about who had it last. Martin admitted throwing it in the air just as chef had walked in, yet no one seemed to have caught it. No one had seen it land. We checked the floor, the table. We all stood there, just staring at the empty bowls that had held the seafood salad. Someone sniggered.
‘I want to see every glass and plate that comes back,’ yelled Martin as we all ran to the wash-up in time to catch the first of the waitresses bringing back a tray of dirty crockery. But with the exception of the odd stray tomato rose and unwanted sprig of parsley every glass was scraped clean. Every plate returned empty. Every last prawn, mussel and ring of squid had been eaten.
La Steak Diane
The jewel in the hotel’s crown was Aphrodite’s, a small, formal French restaurant ‘done out’ in deep purple and gold. For those of us who worked in the banqueting rooms or the cut and come-again carvery, Aphrodite’s remained something of a mystery. The small tables were set with silver that glistened in the candlelight, and the waiters – dark, exclusively French or Italian and impossibly cute – moved around the tables with that easy professionalism that can spot a woman about to leave the table or a cigarette that needs lighting seconds before it happens. The place ran like a well-oiled engine. None of us from the plebeian quarters of banqueting were allowed to so much as peep behind its velvet-curtained entrance.
I longed to taste the food whose scents wafted through when Aphrodite’s purple curtain swooshed open to permit a guest to enter or leave. The smells were the results of the chemistry you get when you mix brandy, shallots, cream and French cooks together with the fumes from a metholated spirit lamp. This magical whiff was the result of the then fashionable habit of cooking food in front of the guests, in a shallow copper pan over a silver spirit lamp set on a side table.
The most exalted of all lamp cookery was the making of steak Diane – batted-out slices of beef, fried with butter, finely chopped shallots, brandy, stock, smooth mustard, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce and, invariably, though quite incorrectly, cream. The smell from the spirit stove as the chopped shallots were being softened in the melted butter was one that is for ever imprinted on the memory of anyone who has ever been to such a restaurant. Once the brandy had ignited (a trick which never failed to impress the gin, tonic and peroxide crowd) the steak was plated, the sauce poured over and the dish put in front of the customer while the food was still sizzling.
This was show-off cooking of the highest order. Its point was to be as rich, flamboyant and alcoholic as possible. The average meal went something like this: a round of gin and tonics in the lounge bar, followed by a bottle of Asti Spumante with the first course – usually crab bisque or prawn cocktail; a bottle of Mouton Cadet with the steak Diane; and then crêpes Suzette – an equally alcohol-laden recipe of pancakes flashed at the table in brandy, orange and lemon juice and marmalade – hotly followed by brandies warmed over the spirit stoves. God alone knows how anyone got home.
I so wanted to taste that steak Diane. I could have made it myself in the staff kitchen but it wouldn’t have been the same; the chichi splendour of Aphrodite’s seemed an essential seasoning. In a somewhat desperate attempt I booked a table under an anonymous name for me and a sweet, doe-eyed waitress called Linda, who for some reason had become besotted with me. She had already proved herself to be up for pretty much anything. The waiters in Aphrodite’s seemed from another, distant world and were unlikely to recognise a couple of staff from the banqueting rooms. We turned up in our best clothes – she looked fabulous in navy-blue and white Laura Ashley, a black Alice band in her hair and enough make-up to qualify for the job of Buttons in a provincial production of Cinderella. I was less convincing, though I had shaved off the pathetic tufts of bumfluff that sprouted from my chin and of which I was strangely proud; I even went so far as to buy a new shirt specially for the occasion. I also doused myself in enough Eau Sauvage to bring tears to the eyes of anyone within six feet.
We walked briskly, heads down, through the hotel lobby and down the thick red stair carpet to the restaurant bar, trails of Christian Dior following close behind. We took our table, a tiny one slap bang in the middle of the room, where we were handed menus t
he size of Switzerland. Barely bothering to look at the display of dishes I ordered confidently for both of us, like I had done it a thousand times before. ‘We’ll start with the seafood pancake and a crab bisque, then we’ll both have the steak tartare with creamed spinach and pommes allumettes. Oh, and a bottle of Beaujolais Villages, thank you.’ I couldn’t wait.
The seafood pancake was rich but quite the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. Tiny prawns and juicy mussels wrapped up in a soft pancake, the creamy sauce slowly oozing out as I cut through the crêpe. Once our plates were cleared the waiter, who was, to be honest, being a bit over-friendly with my girlfriend, pulled up his little side table. Another waiter brought several dishes on a white-clothed tray and laid them down one by one.
I am not sure exactly when I realised I had ordered steak tartare instead of steak Diane. I remember believing that the raw minced beef, the raw egg yolks and the Tabasco sauce would somehow manage to become my longed-for steak Diane right up to the moment the waiter proudly put the results in front of me. I looked down at the plate of raw, pink mince with the two perfect golden egg yolks in the middle, like birds in a nest. I suddenly realised that I could hear every voice in the room, even whispered conversations several tables away, loud and clear, yet I couldn’t hear a single word my girlfriend was saying. I felt cold, then hot, then cold again. The little egg yolks seemed to be looking up at me, laughing. Then everyone was laughing. My father’s face flashed across my plate, laughing. Little beads of sweat began to appear on my brow. My head started to swim. I felt as if I was drowning in a cocktail of Christian Dior and the fumes from the spirit stove on the next table. ‘Are you all right, you’ve gone all white?’ said Linda.