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Fine Dining: The Secrets Behind the Restaurant Industry

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Jack Rasmussen

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“If Jane was a romantic, Margaret was more high-impact-- if she wasn't throwing feasts at the flat, she was at the Ivy down the road. After working as a critic for Gourmet and the Good Food Guide, she opened a restaurant, Lacy's, which closed down after a karmic run of bad reviews. Food writers still haven't learned their lesson on this particular count, and I'd like to clear things up: it is much easier to go from restaurateur to cookbook author then the other way around. At home, though, Margaret was a great cook. She also had the gift of being a great shopper. She frontloaded the effort so that when she got into the kitchen, she could focus on the basics of the cooking itself. You could say she wrote a template for bougie cooking culture today, where it's about the produce stores you go to, as much as what you do with the ingredients at the end. One of her columns was all about black pepper, mustard and salt. Good pepper steak will have the aromatics of cathedral incense-- a warm anchor note, a resinous edge, harmonic iterations of spice and musk, and a more piquant heat laid over the top. If you're going to cook, you need to consider the geometry of Maldon salt and learn how to deploy French mustard correctly in lapin moutarde. The average British cook at the time was probably using pre-ground pepper and a reflexive pinch of salt. Nobody did an opening gambit like her. 'No self-respecting sardine would dream of being seen more than twenty miles north of Cherbourg,' she'd write. 'There has been a ridiculous rumor around for some years that puddings are out of fashion and likely to stay so,' she wrote. 'Nothing could be further from the truth. It is simply wishful thinking on the part of housewives and slimmers.”

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Book:All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now
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“For any recipe writer, the mark of success isn't teaching people how to cook well, it's showing them how to think well about food, of which 90 per cent is just about having the confidence to disagree. Margaret got into the history of things, explaining that flummery-- a jellied fruit cream-- used to be set with the shavings of the horn of a young deer, and then was made using the gelatinous powers of simmered calves' foot, and then with isinglass-- a collagen derived from the swim bladder of a fish. In the end, she gave you a more down-to-earth raspberry syllabub recipe with Sauternes, rosewater and cream. Margaret could give a detailed appraisal of tinned foods or she could convince you-- like she convinced me-- that a cheese soufflé isn't just a reasonable proposition but in fact an easy midweek lunch. 'Why should people enjoy cooking?' Margaret would say, because she knew it was her job to put forward a case.”

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Book:All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now
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“Margaret and Jane didn't really get non-European food, even at a time when cooking from former and contemporary colonies-- India, Hong Kong at the time, Jamaica, Trinidad-- was working deeper into the canon. And they could be out of touch-- Margaret's bon viveur lifestyle, Jane's cottagecore cave house in rural France. Like a lot of food writers, Jane was interested in a fantasy kind of peasantry, but not the actual realities of shopping in a Tesco now.”

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Book:All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now
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