Miles Collins

How not to arrive at a Pro Cookery Competition

I’ve decided to write another post on my experiences competing in pro salon culinaires whilst the memories I’ve dragged from the furthest part of my mind still float around.

Salon culinaires which are held on a national level means that the chance of them being on your proverbial doorstep are slim, or out of the question if you live in Cumbria as I did in the early nineties. If, for some reason you want to take part in one then move to London, Manchester or Birmingham. If you cannot see the venue from your home or place of work then don’t enter the competition.

You see we never thought about the ‘nitty gritty’ when we competed, we were blinded by the thought of trophies, medals and certificates, (to make our CV look good hotel stand out from the crowd) we were hungry for success and in our desire to fullfill our Head Chef’s orders we dashed off across England in our new white jackets with our names sewn on them.

The way to win a medal at a salon culinaire is to cook and/or present something which is so precise the judges cannot fault it. Most of the competitions we entered were ’static’, that is to say they were cold dishes with the emphasis on decoration rather than eating quality. Hot ‘cook-off’ culinaire’s are a different animal all together.

Here’s the problem, cold presentation means that 99% of what you display is made in your own kitchen prior to competing (they are not intended for eating) and then transported to the competition venue. Sounds easy enough, that’s what we thought.

First competition was held in a polytechnic in South Yorkshire, (restraint on place names and people allows me to be more honest!) for reasons which escape me we had to have our dishes ready for judging by 8.00 am. My companion in all things competing told the head chef that the time restriction made it impossible for us to compete due to the distance from our place of work. We would need two hours to unload the equipment and set the displays up, bear in mind that although two of us went we were also entering three of our other chefs, including head chef entries. That meant five entries.

That meant getting there at 6.00 am! “No problem” said chef, “Leave here at 2.30 am and you’ll be fine” Nice one, so I finished dinner service at 10.30 pm, went to pub until 11.15, went to bed until 1.15 am, went back to kitchen to load the people carrier with half of the kitchen’s equipment. I hadn’t had a day off for two weeks and spent every afternoon between shifts working on the competition so you can imagine I was a little weary.

Our chariot for the journey was a Renault people carrier. It belonged to one of our bosses who happened to be a devout born again Christian. Nothing wrong with that unless you are a beer swilling chef stood next to Noah’s Ark covered in ‘God is Love’ stickers trying to chat up two female chefs from Manchester. He took three of us to a culinaire once, self, a football hooligan and the other, a sex maniac with the sole intention of converting us. “Guys, here’s a great tape of an inspirational preacher”-we were slumped in the back, knackered, hungover and hell bent on shooting him at the earliest opportunity. He wanted God to save us, we wanted God to save us-from him.

It’s 2.30 am, I am so tired I choose to open one eye at a time, despite my best efforts I have that early morning bad breath, I make an Afghan goat herder look sexy. We load the van with our pots, pans, knives and display mirrors, all wedged into trays we’ve stolen from the butcher. The night porter asks us to keep the noise down, we ask him which of his testicles he wants removing first. We drive off into the night.

We start driving, two of us in the Pope mobile with miles of dry stone walls and sheep dung ahead of us. We amuse ourselves by abusing the chef in his abscence, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are on in the background, they want us to repent, we want to turn back. We take a corner like Michael Schumacher wearing a blindfold, the sound of crashing kitchen equipment wakes us up. I look over my shoulder with my right eye, the left one is on strike. “That’s one less to worry about” said I, resuming my horizontal position with feet pressed against windscreen. “What’s gone?” said driver/senior chef. “The terrine” said I with a new found sense of carefree abandon.

There then followed a brief, fleeting silence followed by a long, high pitched swear word. That wasn’t any terrine, that was chef’s….