Only the bravest of food critics would dare to write their own cookbook. Having spent your career nit-picking and complaining, and mocking the efforts of hard-working chefs and restaurateurs, why would you expose yourself to similar treatment from your victims?
Jay Rayner, who is one of Britain’s most respected — and best-known — food critics and now also writes for Financial Times, got around this problem by writing a book that is a homage to the best chefs he has encountered in the UK and further afield.
It is peppered with recipes that pay tribute to some of the nicest nosh he has scoffed, though Rayner does not claim to produce 100% identical dishes to those he has been served. A keen home cook, he understands that some of the laborious and painstaking preparation and technical skills that are commonplace in a well-staffed restaurant kitchen would be too challenging in a home kitchen.
If it tastes good, it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t resemble a work of art.
The book begins with a recipe for upgrading a basic Bombay mix, one of the most enjoyable snacks. The secret is simple: just add a good quantity of nuts.
“Why am I giving you these instructions,” he writes. “Because Nights Out at Home is a collection of stories about restaurants, the fabulous meals eaten in them and recipes emerging from them. If I’ve done my job properly, reading it will make you hungry.”
And it did.
From puddings to pastries, curries to sauces, he delves into the finest culinary traditions, homing in on favourite dishes and providing recipes for cooking them at home. Often there are shortcuts, but sometimes — if that is what it takes — the reader is given time-consuming instructions.
However, I would venture that this is one of the few cookbooks that can be read and enjoyed without the need to cook any of the recipes.
Raynor’s skill as a foodie — recreating dishes that he has enjoyed, often with the assistance of the chefs who first devised them — is more than matched by his skill as a writer.
Almost every recipe is preceded by an essay about the restaurant where he first tried the dish, why it was so appealing, as well as a meander through some of the other restaurants he has visited, other dishes and other fascinating background.
There are also essays about being a food writer, whether he should be worried about being a large lad with a big behind, and an insight into the not-always-helpful advice from his family as he worked his way through the recipes, with them as the human guinea pigs.
I don’t think I have eaten in any of the restaurants he mentions, but it doesn’t matter. He has — and his skill is in sharing his impressions, describing the food, getting our taste buds stimulated.
The recipes are diverse and there should be something to appeal to everyone.
He gives instructions for preparing the ultimate cheese toastie, for making a Caesar salad and a crispy duck salad.
Inspired by the sauce and chicken livers served in UK branches of Nando’s, we have his take on peri-peri sauce and peri-peri chicken livers. Of course, you can buy the authentic Nando’s sauce easily enough — in supermarkets in the UK as in SA — but his version is more chunky, with instructions for calibrating the heat.
One of the more basic recipes in the book is for mashed potatoes. However, this is no ordinary mash — it is Joël Robuchon’s pommes purée. And Robuchon was a French three-starred Michelin chef who transformed the humble spud into a thing of wonder. The secret? A “one-to-one butter-to-potato ratio, which makes it so astonishing”.
Your cardiologist might frown at the equal quantities of potato and butter that are prescribed, but you will purr like a cat at its silky, creamy indulgence. It is no wonder that versions of this recipe are still used a lot in restaurants, though few are likely to alert their calorie-conscious customers to the abundance of buttery brilliance that each spoonful of spud will hold.
Until reading this book, I was wedded to something I had been told when I lived in Hong Kong: that a sign of a good Chinese restaurant was a high proportion of ethnic Chinese diners at its tables, and ditto for Indian, Italian, Greek, Portuguese and so on.
However, Rayner debunks this myth, particularly when the ethnic restaurant is situated in a foreign land. He suggests that communities may cluster there not necessarily because of superb and authentic cuisine but because it is a place for the community to get together, gossip and stay in touch. There is a danger the food may not be very special at all. Just familiar and comforting.
With his characteristic wit, the author is dismissive of people who eat the most unappealing food in an effort to track down authentic cuisine. We should remember that some dishes were created because people were poor, only had access to offal and the cheapest cuts of meat, and had to make do with what they had. Authentic isn’t always yummy.
“The Authenticity Addict is convinced that everything they have ever eaten at home is in some way a fake — apart from the snot and gristle concoction that is jellied eels — and that only by travelling the world and eating exactly what the locals eat can they really connect with the culture they are visiting. This means they end up consuming some of the nastiest food items ever devised, although they will always claim to really, really, like them: stews made from goat intestines, with the bitter tang of bile and urine; braised cow’s udder in gravy; pressed pig’s ear in vinegar.”
Raynor is also unimpressed by people who dine out without making the most of a convivial meal — those sad folk who don’t want to share a banquet in a Chinese restaurant but only want to order and consume a single item. “I get extremely tetchy if someone I’m eating with in a Chinese restaurant insists that they get to order dishes only for themselves. Mate, you’ve come to the wrong party. Here, we share. That’s how Chinese food works. Didn’t you know? Oh, you’ve ordered the sweet and sour pork. That, you can keep to yourself.”
While he has eaten in some of the finest and most expensive restaurants in the world, Rayner is refreshingly unsnobbish. He likes KFC, unashamedly orders takeaway fast-food burgers — and offers a recipe for his own version of a pie from a leading British bakery chain called Greggs, which is well known for its sausage rolls and pies, has attractive pricing (in British terms) and is found on almost every high street.
Rayner’s recipe for a steak bake is based on the Greggs version, which he reverse-engineered, though his version has more expensive ingredients and is quite time-consuming to make, despite resorting to ready-made, supermarket-bought pastry.
I had to know the one thing this food critic doesn’t like at all — and was surprised when he confessed that it is tinned baked beans.
This is a very well-written, researched and cleverly conceived cookbook, offering as much to the casual reader as the keen home cook. Its author comes across well, with a self-mocking sense of humour but also a willingness to inspire and encourage you to try a recipe. Even if it just involves adding a few handfuls of nuts to your Bombay mix.
There can’t be many writers who do not enjoy seeing their work in print (or online), and Rayner is beautifully self-deprecating about this: “I might see my words on a piece of promotional material in a restaurant’s window. Sometimes, if it was especially positive, they might slap up the whole review. I’ve noted a marked tendency to put framed copies of the very positive ones on the walls of the men’s toilets, above the urinals. I’ve often been given the chance to re-read my work while having a pee. I think the choice of location shows an admirable and appropriate degree of respect for the critic’s work.”
Nights Out at Home is now a treasured addition to my collection of much-thumbed, much-loved, much-referenced, much-stained cookbooks.
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