The Reluctant Cannibals
Page 36
Some aspects of molecular gastronomy, for the want of a better term, hark back to the era that was my character Arthur Plantagenet’s area of expertise – ancient Rome. Ban-quets two thousand years ago are described featuring giant eggs or a roast pig that is opened to release live birds. Many of the exotic creations of Heston Blumenthal would not look out of place in such a Roman banquet. For all their attachment to exotic food such as the tongue of the nightingale and fried dormice, some aspects of Roman cuisine are less likely to catch on today. Despite liking anchovy paste on toast, I fnd it hard to imagine that garum, the Roman sauce that Arthur recreates from rotting mackerel in-testines, is terribly palatable. As described in this book, Rome also provided one of hu-manity’s earliest examples of the consequences of excessive exploitation of the natural environment by harvesting the herb Silphium into extinction. One can only hope that its popularity was to mask the taste of garum, in which case the loss would not be too severe.
As well as taking examples from the ancient Roman cookbook De re coquinaria , the dishes presented at the various dinners of the Shadow Faculty have a variety of origins. Some are taken from the pages of historical fgures such as Brillat-Savarin or Auguste Escoffer and these sources are noted wherever possible. Others pay homage to import-ant events in gastronomy, some of general relevance and a few from personal experien-ce. The chartreuse souffé served at the second dinner of the Shadow Faculty is a nod to Professor Kurti’s 1969 lecture though it combines chartreuse with chocolate, which for those of you who have not yet tried it, is a match made in heaven. The full heritage of this dish also draws on my own time at Oxford University (many years after 1969). Back then a young chef called Raymond Blanc, before he became internationally fam-ous, had a small restaurant in a nondescript row of modern shops in an area just north of Oxford called Summertown. His signature dessert at the time was, if my memory is to be trusted, a Grand Marnier souffé that was presented to the table and then the liqueur was added through a small funnel. I’m sure the members of the Shadow Faculty would have been impressed as I was when I frst tasted this wonderful creation. Nicholas Kurti was a great enthusiast of using a syringe to inject food before cooking or eating. For example he also demonstrated injecting rum into mince pies. Injecting an emulsion of truffe oil and Worcestershire sauce into quail’s eggs is my own extension of this technique, the result of an entertaining Friday evening of personal experimentation. These eggs are well worth trying, as are the martini oysters. I have experimented with many of the other new dishes and cocktails invented for this story but many are more conceptual and rather hard to fnd at a local supermarket or even delicatessen, so I have yet to taste beaver tail. I did suggest trying Fugu when we visited Japan a few years ago but, as with the Japanese ambassador in this story, this plan was sensibly vetoed by my wife Jean. Needless to say, Arthur’s own preparation is entirely an exercise of literary imagination!
16 This and the following quotations are, naturally enough, from M.F.K. Fisher’s 1949 translation of The Physiology of Taste .
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