Welcome to a strand of my cooking that you may not be familiar with. I’m probably best known for the dishes I serve at the Fat Duck, like hot and iced tea, nitro-poached vodka and lime sour, and jelly of quail with crayfish cream, all of which are extremely labour-intensive. I love the technical challenge of such dishes and the thrill of taking an idea and turning it into something that is wonderful to eat, but I’m not into complexity for its own sake. I’m a self-taught chef, and I know just how frustrating and perplexing cooking can be. So I’ve always been keen to demystify the process. For some time I’ve wanted to write a book that has both exciting recipes and all the background information that explains how they actually work. A book that makes people feel really at home in the kitchen. This is that book. There are plenty of classics like onion soup, roast chicken, prawn cocktail, Scotch eggs, pork scratchings, shepherd’s pie, lemon tart and, of course, my triple-cooked chips. There are simplified versions of Fat Duck dishes like red cabbage gazpacho, scallop tartare with white chocolate, and bacon and egg ice-cream. And there are dishes that will, I hope, surprise and delight, like a salad that looks like a garden, complete with vegetables growing in edible soil, and a cinnamon and vanilla ice-cream that can switch from one flavour to the other. Most of the recipes are no longer than a page, and most of them require no complex technology. (Though I couldn’t resist slipping in some stuff for the cook who wants to push the boat out, like whisky ice-cream made with dry ice, and a chapter on the sous-vide method of cooking, which I’m convinced is the way we’ll all be cooking in the near future – you heard it here first.) I was bitten by the food bug at sixteen, when my parents took me to a three-star French restaurant, and I learned to cook from books, preparing versions of the French classics over and over again. What drove me nuts 6
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