Cookbook Survivor: Keith Floyd, A Feast of Floyd
Saturday's Child Has Had a Few Glasses of Wine
So, first off, if you’re not one for delayed gratification, stop reading now and check in tomorrow, because I’m not cooking this until Sunday—I’ve got somewhere to be today.
Also if you’re someone who thrills to the (fairly small) number of cases where I toss something out, I’m very unlikely to do that to this book, because I have considerable nostalgic affection for it even if I never ever use it as a cookbook. I believe in contingency, though: maybe I’ll change my mind through experience.
Keith Floyd, I suspect, is almost entirely unknown to contemporary American audiences and is still extremely well-remembered by UK audiences of a certain age. When he died in 2009, the UK celebrity chef Andrew Worral Thompson said of Floyd that he’d made all subsequent TV cooking hosts possible in the UK and I think that’s basically right. If you ever watched Floyd back then, you’re entirely aware that a lot of subsequent UK food personalities are riffing off of some aspect of his on-camera persona.
That persona may not have been very far from his off-camera one. In most of his shows, he drank a bit of wine on-screen while cooking or travelling, and generally seemed like a lightly tipsy raconteur whom you’d love to sit and catch up with but you’d also never lend money to or rely upon if you were in great need. A scoundrel, but with some faintly melancholy hanging around him. (And clearly not much of a spouse, with four divorces behind him before he died.)
I watched Floyd during the first stage of my dissertation research many years ago. I lived in a ramshackle row house in North London in a teeny little one-room bedsit, with all the other rooms in the house being rented by Australians on their walkabout. The heat ran by coins, as did the shower in the basement. If I forgot to get a big roll of 50 pence coins before Sunday, I was generally in for a cold night until I could get to an open bank the next day. I rented a television (and paid my license fee with some amusement). This was back in the days of broadcast TV, so sometimes the choices were pretty thin: snooker, anyone? But I enjoyed Floyd a lot. I particularly remember one episode of a series where he was travelling in the US, stopped in a soul food cafe in Memphis, and impishly offered to make a sauce for the fried chicken. The bemused chef-owner allowed him to, he improvised a cream-and-bourbon sauce with some chicken fat and they tolerated the result.
Floyd’s cookbooks, I have to say, aren’t very good, and I could see that even way back when I bought this one. They’re all over the map in terms of the kind of food, without any defining sensibility or vision. (A fair number of recipes are based on dishes from the restaurants of friends and acquaintances, which he properly credits in the text.) A few past ventures into the book haven’t yielded good outcomes. Still, I have it and the point of this column is to push me to use what I’ve got and see what comes of it. So tomorrow I’ll be making an East Asian-inspired flank steak and maybe something else—there’s a recipe for duck breasts with mango that seems interesting enough. It may survive as a nostalgic keepsake of those months in a little bedsit, but perhaps it’ll end up moved from the cookbook section to somewhere else on my shelves.
Kind of nostalgic for this too!
I had the Floyd in Africa book but we rarely cooked from it because the measures were all British and had to be tediously converted. It was a fun cookbook to poke around in, though.