Chewing the Fat: Tasting Notes from a Greedy Life by Jay Rayner

Author:Jay Rayner [Rayner, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783352395
Google: 6YoNEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1783352396
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2021-08-30T23:00:00+00:00

Where Ingredients Go to Die

For many years in the 1970s my family went on holiday to a Dorset hotel where, on Friday nights, there was a buffet laid out in the dining room. The centre­piece would always be a huge poached salmon, glazed with mayonnaise and decorated with lobster shell ap­pendages for colour and detail, as if the two creatures had met near some radioactive waste outlet and mu­tated. I remember that salmon very well, and the way a toqued chef stood behind it proudly. I do not recall ever once having eaten it. Even then, with a child’s indiscriminate palate and a hog’s unceasing appetite, I was suspicious of the way the food was displayed. Could something so played with really taste nice? And were the salads that surrounded it not just last night’s leftovers coming around again to say hello?

That suspicion has never left me. As a man who has rarely met a calorie he couldn’t hug, I should love a buffet: all that food, fully out there, on display. It is the plunging neckline of gastronomy. Forget the prose interface with the kitchen of a menu. Here is true choice, presented on so much glazed Villeroy & Boch. The problem is that while in principle buffets are a lovely idea, in practice they are where ingredi­ents go to die.

Nobody ever makes a positive choice to mount a buffet; it is a compromise solution to a volume prob­lem. It is the way to feed a hundred at a cheap wed­ding, where the air is full of regret and disappointment, on quartered pork pies that, after a few hours on the platters, have started to look like the plasticated foods in the windows of dodgy Japanese restaurants. It is curling sandwiches and things on sticks, Scotch eggs the colour of self-tan outside and the mouth-gumming denseness of Sarah Palin within. It is all undressed salad and stale bread and desperation.

Even the ambitious, high-end buffet doesn’t do it for me. I have, on occasion, been forced into the American way of Sunday brunch, at those Los Angeles hotels where the women have eyebrows like grave and acute accents. I have stood, flat-footed be­tween the serving stations, studying the cascades of shrimp on ice, and the hunks of beef bleeding into the chopping-board gutters, and the intense and gifted Hispanic men at the omelette hobs begging for orders, and known that nothing good could come from this. The presentation may indeed be beautiful. They may well have recreated Mount Rushmore from fourteen kilos of oyster on the half shell, a pig and a half of glazed tenderloin and a bathtub’s worth of Hawaiian tropical fruit. But you know, just know, that the way it looks is as good as this meal is ever going to get. For a start there is always the lingering suspicion, espe­cially on hot Californian days, that one of the beauti­fully laid out trays is the hidden snub-nosed bullet in a game of edible Russian roulette. Kitchens are great places to keep food.

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