Toast (21 page)

We made sauce mornay endlessly at catering college, as we did glossy-brown sauce Espagnole, demi-glace and bland, floury sauce béchamel. We made potatoes into little balls – ‘Parisienne' they called it; we turned carrots and potatoes into six-sided barrels then made pommes duchesse with the trimmings. College was obsessed with classical French cooking, especially the ‘mother' sauces and their variations and garnishes, the details of which we had to know by heart like the nine times table. Why we couldn't just look up the correct accompaniment for a serving of caviar in a book was beyond me. All that mattered to them was that we knew how to garnish caviar with finely chopped egg
yolk, finely chopped egg white, finely chopped onion, finely chopped parsley. None of us had even seen real caviar. More to the point, most us never would.

If we made a flour and butter ‘roux' once we made it a thousand times. By the end of our first term most of us could make sauce mornay in our sleep. We could also have rattled off a sea of sauce Véronique too, which was a pity because there hadn't been much call for fish in white sauce with skinned grapes since 1935. Going through the entire repertoire of fancy-schmancy classical French cooking was one thing, the total refusal of the college chefs to acknowledge French bourgeois cooking was another.

I wanted to learn, no, to
eat
moules marinière, boeuf bourguignon, cassoulet, confit de canard, salade Niçoise, pissaladière, coq au vin, Saint Émilion au chocolat. Instead, we made sauce mornay, and béchamel and Véronique and Espagnole, and learned every garnish in
Larousse.
I left catering college with an unsurpassable knowledge of French classical cookery. The fact I didn't know how to roast a chicken, grill a steak, make a chocolate mousse or even make a decent green salad was quite irrelevant. What was even worse was that it took me twenty years to learn that caviar is infinitely better with nothing but lemon and crisp, lightly buttered toast.

Yet there was someone who understood. Joe Yates worked only part-time at the college, taking an afternoon class called, somewhat cringingly, Continental Cookery. Joe was sixty and he looked it: round-faced, his skin was
creased from years of standing over a hot stove at his family restaurant a few miles away. Joe swore, to the amusement of the girls in the class. Not just the occasional bugger or sod but fuck and shit and bollocks and balls, which got a chorus of giggles every time. He told us endless jokes, rude rather than dirty, and once told us that he refused to give Elizabeth David one of his recipes because the last time he wrote out a recipe for her the doyenne of food writers had failed to credit him. (In her later books she became scrupulous about such matters.) He used a different language from the other chefs who, in fairness, had to stick to a strict and hopelessly outdated syllabus.

Joe talked of lasagne, of gnocchi, fettucine and saltimbocca. He cooked with fresh basil and bay and fennel and mint, he used olive oil instead of butter, and garlic that was plump and white not wizened and beige. Unlike the other chefs he let us taste the food we made, not just from a teaspoon ‘to check the seasoning' but by the forkful, everyone standing around and tucking in. His cooking smelled different: aromatic, enticing, almost heady and, as I said, we were allowed to eat it.

One afternoon we turned up to class to be told that Mr Yates had suffered a heart attack that morning and wouldn't be returning. It was like someone had opened a door in a long, dark wall, a door that had let in a shaft of brilliant sunlight. Then they had slammed it shut.

For those students who didn't live near to college there was help in finding somewhere to stay. You were interviewed briefly by a welfare officer, who would look at you through squinting eyes then match you to a suitable family, insisting that ‘They are just the sort of people you need, I'm sure you'll fit in.' Rent was paid either by your parents, a council grant, or in my case, by taking a part-time job. I was sent to live with Mr and Mrs Pearman, a surly, retired geography teacher and his devoutly Christian wife, who lived in a rambling, slightly shambolic pink house on the outskirts of the city. I loved them from the second I clapped eyes on them.

Mrs Pearman was the sort of warm, large-chested woman you wanted to hug but never quite did. She did the church flowers and ran the Brownies, and made pudding with every meal. Anything you did that she disapproved of – swearing, being late for meals, forgetting your key, farting (‘I HEARD that!' she would bellow) – was brought up at breakfast, starting with ‘Dad says…' She put me in an attic room, once occupied by her sons, with a student called Bruce, one year my senior. The two of us fought from day one.

Mrs Pearman's house was a home in every sense of the word. A place where a daughter or son would suddenly turn up without warning, expecting, and getting, supper
or Sunday lunch. Where every piece of furniture seemed to have a history and where every family event was faithfully recorded in photograph albums. It was warm and happy, untidy and cosy. There was always a jug of garden flowers on the kitchen table and milk in the fridge. And like all good homes Mrs Pearman's also had an overriding smell of golden retriever.

Like the dedicated Brown Owl that she was, Mrs P. cooked everything in her pressure cooker. Not just winter soups and stews and bean hotpots, but EVERYTHING. If she could have washed her drawers in it she would have. ‘It's because you cook everything together and only use one gas ring' was her perfectly reasonable excuse, but I did wonder if it was simply that she got a buzz out of cooking in a tightly corked pot that threatened to explode at any moment.

No matter what aficionados may tell you, the downside of a pressure cooker is that everything that comes out of one tastes the same. There is a pressure-cooked ‘flavour' that permeates every onion, swede, haricot bean and lump of meat, every jam sponge and rice pudding. I grew to love Mrs P.'s pressure cooking as much as I loved her chaotic, warm and comfy home. Her vegetable soup for Saturday lunch; her Tuesday liver and mash; the Wednesday steamed syrup sponge and the Sunday boiled gammon and mashed parsnip. I loved her morning coffee and her night-time cocoa, her Monday salads with their steamed potatoes (even with their little black eyes) and, above all,
her gorgeous Friday hotpot. But there is no getting away from the fact that whatever you cook in a pressure cooker it always, always tastes of Irish stew.

Getting a holiday job between college terms meant the difference between Saturday shopping at Oxfam (threadbare Crombies, brown nylon slacks with dodgy yellow stains on the insides of the pockets) and shopping at Number One, Worcester's only men's ‘boutique' (tear-drop collar shirts and velvet jackets). Frankly, there wasn't much else to do in Worcester on a Saturday afternoon. Number One was rumoured to have a two-way mirror in the changing room so that the owner, a rather exotic Marc Bolan look-alike, known fondly as Pete the Poof, could watch his customers trying on their jeans. Everyone knew he always gave you a size too small so that he could watch you squeezing your packet into them.

I got a job at a grand hotel just outside the city. We had all trooped round it on a college day out and I knew at once it would be a world away from the Sun. With all its velvet drapes and little gold banqueting chairs, the hotel had the sort of glamour I had previously only seen in brochures and magazines. My first day there was at the time of an unimaginably over-the-top wedding, where the bride and groom arrived by horse-drawn coach like a scene from
Cinderella,
the horses complete with fluffy white plumes on their manes. I was right: nothing could be further from my week at the Sun, especially when the bride came round after lunch with sugared almonds for every member of staff. Even then, nothing could quite top the excitement of knowing that Noel Gordon had been there that afternoon, filming an episode of
Crossroads.

I had never held a silver salver with twenty portions of tournedos Rossini on it before, let alone one with a border of pommes duchesse and tomatoes stuffed with peas. Standard Midlands wedding breakfast it may have been but it was as near as I had ever been to that sort of food. This was silver service, where the waitresses walked round the room with hot salvers of food on their arm, then deposited it on the guests' plates with the help of a large spoon and fork. I coped with the first course, a sort of prawn cocktail with brandy in the dressing served in Paris goblets, and by the time the main dish had been served I knew that spoon and forkery was for me. What is more, I just loved putting a plate of food in front of someone.

Dessert was a series of giant baked Alaskas studded with sparklers which were lit just as the lights in the dining room were dimmed. Twenty-two waitresses and I trooped out in a fizzing, spluttering daisy chain to the strains of the ‘Sugar Plum Fairy', and made our way through the maze of long tables lit only by the light from the fireworks that cascaded from our giant puddings. ‘I can smell my uniform singeing,' hissed one of the old ducks, who obviously felt
that this act of pyrotechnics was beyond the call of waitressing duty. ‘I'm going to demand danger money next week. I don't know why they can't just have cheese and biscuits.'

The waitresses loved having a lanky, spotty male, who wore his hormones on his sleeve, in their midst. The chefs, who uniformly wore stubble and oversized clogs and all looked like they washed their hair once a year, couldn't understand why a guy would want to ‘waitress' instead of cook. From day one they called me darlin'.

Banqueting food was somewhat predictable fare, a rota of the aforementioned tournedos Rossini, duck à l'orange or Montmorency, chicken Kiev, rack of lamb (accompanied without fail by tomatoes stuffed with peas, carrots and sweetcorn), beef Wellington and in summer cold salmon. Vegetables were invariably petits pois à la Française, and desserts (we never called them puddings) were pavlova, charlotte russe, trifle, chocolate soufflé (the mousse version that was set with gelatine, rather than the oven job) and the most popular, Black Forest gâteau.

Starters were prawn cocktail and soup, which was invariably watercress. For some reason watercress was considered posh. Nine out of ten weddings involved prawn cocktail, beef wellington and Black Forest gâteau, which for some reason we called Gâteau Forêt-Noire. Or gatta-forrey-nwwarrr, as the waitresses referred to it in thick Midlands accents. I used to pray that someone would decline their squidgy cake, so I could wolf the cold chocolate
sponge, the super-white whipped cream and the chocolate flakes that covered the sides – chocolate sprinkles were considered a bit downmarket – but very few ever did. In Midlands eating-out circles, ending your meal with a slice of chocolate gâteau was a point of honour. Staff food was taken in a canteen thick with cigarette smoke, an unending round of chicken and chips, followed by whatever was left from the various dessert trolleys.

I suppose I was taken in by the apparent luxury of it all: the velvet drapes, the vast high-backed sofas and the potted palms. A bit of red velvet goes a long way to a boy brought up with G-Plan. After a week or so I started to spot the flies in the ointment. An ancient chef the size of a toby jug who used white bread in the trifle because he couldn't be bothered to make sponge. ‘Bah, they'll never know and if they do they'd be too embarrassed to say.' The wine waiters who ‘miscounted' the number of bottles of champagne sold at weddings and who could later be seen humping crates of it over to staff quarters. The waitresses who filled empty bottles of Malvern water from the cold tap before a ‘function' and the platters of smoked salmon tea sandwiches that were padded out with finely grated carrot. I'd seen filthy food before but this was something new, a world where customers are treated as being stupid enough not know the difference between salmon and carrot. This was also the first time I had witnessed food prepared in such quantity (prawn cocktail for two hundred wasn't unusual) or worked with chefs who all seemed barely old enough
to drive. This was also the first time I'd been in a situation where sex was as much on tap as Watney's Red Barrel.

To say there was an atmosphere of promiscuity at the hotel was like saying they make a bit of cheese in Roquefort. Sex oozed from every brick in the hotel's walls. The staff quarters, a good hundred yards from the hotel, was planet party, a place where the strains of Pink Floyd and
Madman Across the Water
were to be heard twenty-four/seven and where you were more likely to get a dose of the clap than a decent night's kip. It would have been almost impossible not to get laid. I was put into a small two-bed room with a blond, baby-faced wine waiter called Tim, who seemed to possess nothing more than three wine books, a bottle of Fabergé Brut and a single pair of socks. After a supper that consisted of three slices of stolen Black Forest gâteau and a bottle of Schweppes bitter lemon, I snuggled down to sleep, only to spend the rest of the night awake while Tim humped a particularly sweet, mild-mannered waitress like he was trying to get into
The Guinness Book of Records.

By now the prawn cocktail's glitzy image was beginning to tarnish, even in the Midlands. Every restaurant, even the local pub, had it on its menu, just above the trout with
almonds. Some tried serving it in a tall-stemmed hock glass, others in a champagne saucer. People ordered prawn cocktail because they thought it was posh, and restaurants loved it because it was a money spinner. But it had worked its way downhill and its time had come.

In an elaborate attempt to prolong its popularity, and therefore their profit, some smart restaurateurs got the idea of the seafood cocktail. This had the obligatory prawns but also the new luxury of squid and bottled mussels. The lettuce and Marie Rose sauce remained, but the addition of a miniature rose made from tomato skin wound round and round in the form of a rosette and perched next to the parsley sprig was all new. It was prawn cocktail all dressed up for a ball. Or in this case a dinner-dance.

Every Saturday there would be at least two ‘functions', usually weddings, and during the week a number of conferences to be catered for. This was mass catering, but with knobs on. The tables were laid with glittering silver, the flowers a match for Chelsea and the little red velvet and gilt chairs made even the fattest of guests feel elegant. But after only a week I could see through it.

Tim had forbidden me to tell anyone who he was shagging. ‘Tell anyone and I'll kill you,' he threatened. Nice guy. The simple truth was that she had a boyfriend who was a mate of all the other chefs, who she would go back to at the end of her summer job at the hotel. But for the time being she would spend most nights with Tim. Everyone knew they were friends, even that she stayed in our
room, but no one guessed they were sleeping together.

One lunchtime I had been sent to the kitchen to help out because they were short-staffed. Six of us were making seafood cocktail for the biggest wedding we had ever catered for. Huge washing-up bowls held defrosted prawns, long white sacks and rings of squid, and bottled mussels, rinsed of their vinegar. I had made the secret sauce. Which as anyone who has ever been within twenty feet of the catering industry knows is nothing more than salad cream, tomato ketchup, Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco. I was busy stirring a gallon of sauce into the rings of squid and little pink prawns when Martin, one of the grubby bunch of chefs, asked if he could borrow my melon-baller. ‘I didn't bring it down, it's in my room. If you want it you'll have to go and get it,' I said, literally up to my elbows in Marie Rose sauce.

He returned from our room with the melon-baller looking smug. Or at any rate smugger than usual. ‘Who's Tim shagging then?' he said.

‘No one,' I snapped, remembering my room-mate's threat.

‘So whose is this then?' he said, swinging a used condom round in his hand, stretching it – somewhat dangerously I thought – like a catapult.

‘Dunno,' I lied. I made a grab at the condom. The chef threw it over to one of the others, I jumped up for it. Missed again. They continued throwing the condom back and forth while I made pathetic attempts at snatching it back, like a
puppy being teased with a ball. The last time I looked the condom was sailing through the air above the bowls of cocktail de crevettes, sauce Marie Rose.

‘Where's that fucking seafood salad?' yelled the head chef as he marched in, the head waiter hot on his tail and two hundred bib-and-tuckered wedding guests waiting for their starter. ‘Yes, chef. Ready, chef. Yes, chef,' we chorused. Within seconds champagne glasses were filled with shredded lettuce, prawns, squid and vinegary mussels, garnished with the obligatory rose and the sprig of parsley, and out they went to the wedding party by the hundred.

The guests munched politely. ‘Who's got Tim's rubber then?' said Martin. There was a silence, followed by a short argument about who had it last. Martin admitted throwing it in the air just as chef had walked in, yet no one seemed to have caught it. No one had seen it land. We checked the floor, the table. We all stood there, just staring at the empty bowls that had held the seafood salad. Someone sniggered.

‘I want to see every glass and plate that comes back,' yelled Martin as we all ran to the wash-up in time to catch the first of the waitresses bringing back a tray of dirty crockery. But with the exception of the odd stray tomato rose and unwanted sprig of parsley every glass was scraped clean. Every plate returned empty. Every last prawn, mussel and ring of squid had been eaten.