Miles Collins

Getting ripped off at a salon culinaire….

I enjoyed mixed success competing in national cookery competitions in the early nineties, a couple of golds,a few silvers, the odd bronze and a highly commended which sounded good but was rubbish really. Most of my competitions were display entries rather than live ‘cook-off’s’ against fellow chefs, this required more work before hand and somehow you seemed more at the mercy of the judges than you did in the live arena.

I was rarely in a good mood at these events, I rarely wanted to be there and I rarely had time for the judges ‘expert’ opinion-well, in fact, never. You see I was inevitably knackered by the time I got there, the conditions for setting your work up were bloody awful, something always got damaged in transit and we always got drunk whilst waiting for the result.

The same professional chefs body ran most of the competitions, their badges were there for all to see, I never bothered joining it, I never took to the ‘college’ mentality they embraced, it seemed all crisp chefs whites, tall hats and measuring jugs to me. I was a chef from the school of ‘throw the recipe book in the bin and cook it as you see it’ and it always worked for me.

This particular salon was held at a college in a town somewhere in West Yorkshire, England. The exact location doesn’t matter, it was still another early start for yours truly working and living in Cumbria. When we got into the arena I said to my Sous Chef ‘this has got college written all over it’, he groaned in agreement. This meant that the majority of the awards would go to the college students taking part rather than the professional chefs long since left catering education.

Now I’m not saying the judging was fixed but, curiously, the decisions made by the judges seemed to favour the students of any college from which one of the judges was also a lecturer. Here’s an example:

My entry was a cold chicken starter. The rules clearly stated that the display should only contain poultry and vegetables as garnishes, the use of seafood, shellfish etc would disqualify the entry automatically. They did this because glazed shiny langoustines was a favourite competition garnish at the time.

So I display my stuffed ballontine of chicken with morels, baby vegetables and all that, feel confident, look at the other entries in my class and declare myself the winner. Let’s get drunk in the working man’s club across the road…

Come back at three o’ clock stinking of beer and scampi fries to find I’ve got silver. Mildly annoyed I look to see who’s won gold. Oh, a student. But hang on, his display has got eight crevettes on it. My blood begins to boil, ‘Where’s the ******* judge?’ my sous chef, seeing the possibility I might punch someone in a big hat points him out. ‘There he is!’

‘Can you explain your decision here’ I said, breathing seven pints of Yorkshire bitter over him. He starts to mumble, my mirror could have been better polished or something. I then point out the faux pas of the winning entrant and poke him in the chest with the competition rule book. He’s sweating buckets, I’m sweating alcohol. I am then told that the entrant was a student who had tried very hard. ‘You’re his teacher, aren’t you?’ I snarled. ‘Er, yes’ he admitted. ‘Stick your medal’ I said as politely as I couldn’t.

As we left I noticed a very fine example of a horse’s head sculptured from fat. It was a work of art. ‘Look at that’ I said to the sous chef. ‘Yeah’, he said, ‘I’ve seen it before, it won gold at the London Olympia last month, the guy who did it has been competing for years’ I look closer, it has, understandably, won a gold medal but the entrant is a teenage college student. My sous chef is staggered, no way has a student done that. I photographed it and compared it to the sous chef’s photograph from the London competition (one of the biggest in the world) and it was the same. The college had borrowed it and changed the entrant’s name to push up their tally of medal wins.

‘Never again’, I said, and I didn’t.