Miles Collins

Pass the raspberry vinegar…….

The 1980’s heralded the arrival of Cuisine Nouvelle, quite the most abused culinary term on the planet. For me, no other decade of food photographs are so easily identifiable as those of the eighties. In the sixties and seventies chefs seemed to cover everything in aspic or call it a French woman’s name and then set fire to it in the restaurant.

So in with the eighties and out with the silver platters and inedible garnishes, replaced by big plates, small portions and, yes, inedible garnishes. It took a long while for chef’s to end their obsession with the cape gooseberry and sprig of redcurrants to garnish everything from starter to dessert.

My cooking began in the eighties and I am for ever indebted to my first Head Chef, Trevor Barker for steadfastly refusing to bow to the latest trends that were sliced starfruit for the lamb or making the chicken dish look like a pina colada. Chef Barker’s cooking was rooted in the school of proper knife skills, proper sauces, proper presentation and proper bollockings, all of which I both learnt and learnt to take.

Chef Barker never did nouvelle, I wanted to, he wouldn’t. I was young and stupid, what I used to think looked amazing would now revolt me. Looking back, chef was twenty years ahead of his time because we’re all cooking like him now except we all think it’s new.

 When it came to service in the restaurants the most important piece of equipment was the cloche, the silver dome used to cover a plate. Waiters would remove said First World War helmet off the plate in front of the customer with sweeping Liberace like movements to reveal a single mange tout, a king prawn and a piece of starfruit and declare it a ’study of land and sea’. The customer would then sit waiting for the rest of the food to arrive which it never did before declaring it excellent in a typically English way and then go home via the Taj Mahal Tandoori. 

Chef’s wanted to stuff everything (including the food) and/or wrap it in filo pastry. I hate filo pastry, it’s god awful to eat in anything other than a pastilla. But worse than filo is the name given to the garlic mushrooms or goats cheese baked in it; ’money bag’ or ‘purse’. They are to food fashion what ’Frankie Say’s’ t-shirts are to haute couture and yet, to this day there are restaurants in my home city still putting these culinary faux pas’ on their menus.

The one trend that I believe began in the eighties was the discovery of a single ingredient that was then spectacularly done to death in or on every conceivable dish. In the eighties it was probably fruit vinegars and filo, in the nineties it was truffle oil and for the new millenium-hydrochloric acid or any other scientific term nobody has ever heard of.

Doubtless I shall write more of my early days as a trainee chef but in the meantime, chef, I owe you one.