[Pink Pig Time Machine: May 4, 2015]
As I've doubtless mentioned before, my relationship with British chef Fergus Henderson's food goes back way before he presided over this New York dinner to promote his The Whole Beast cookbook.
It goes back even before he opened his perennially successful London flagship St John in 1994. It goes back to the cooking he did in the upstairs room at the tiny, historic French pub in London's Soho.
It must have been around 1990 or 1991 that the room, long shuttered and disused, was opened up and turned into a private member's club. The pub itself had been in the hands of the same family, father and son, since 1914. The owner in my lifetime, Gaston Berlemont, was no fan of change. The windows in the downstairs bar were perpetually closed. He'd call last orders in the middle of the evening if he was bored. He wouldn't serve pints of beer, partly because the glasses took up too much space, partly because he didn't want a beer-swilling clientele.
French food had been served upstairs many years ago--it figures in Dan Farson's memoir, Soho in the Fifties, but I don't remember the upstairs being open at any time after I started drinking there (under-age, I insist) in the late 70s.
The private members club made little sense (although I duly obtained a membership card), and closed after some months to be replaced by a brave little restaurant operation, serving food so rigorously British that it was almost avant-garde. Cod and mash. Kidneys in caul fat. That kind of thing. The chef was Fergus Henderson.
Given the broader canvas of St John, Henderson rightly became a mild-mannered sensation, the distinctiveness of his cuisine underlined by his book, Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking. The emphasis there should be on "kind of": my parents and grandparents would have recognized ingredients and ideas in his recipes, but this was a dream version of traditional British food. And very good, too. That book was published in 1994, and it took ten years for a revised version to be issued in the United States.
And that's what we came together, upstairs (again) at The Savoy in New York's SoHo, to celebrate.
Fried tripe with vinegar dipping sauce
Grilled ox heart
Marrow bones, parsley salad
Pig's feet with foie gras, bacon and prunes
Lancashire cheese, Eccles cakes
You could have broken windows with the Eccles cakes, which is perhaps how it should be, but it was a splendid feast. I also ate very well, the same week ten years ago, with an omakase with wine pairings at Jewel Bako:
Raw scallops
Tarte of otoro
Kumamoto oysters
Sashimi: yellowtail, otoro, shrimp heads, squid
Fried whole shrimp
Mushrooms en papillote
Sushi: minced mackerel with scallion, uni, seared otoro, sea eel
I'm sure that list of sushi is incomplete. The highlight of the wine pairings was a Guigal white Hermitage.
And then I was packing my bags for a London trip.
Comments