Re-reading this cookbook as I idly prepared the main dish I chose, I found Floyd’s personality recognizable not just as a reflection of his television shows but as a kind of public archetype of the 1980s and early 1990s. In some ways he reads like a kind of mash-up of Robert Hughes, Christopher Hitchens, and Julia Child—there’s a swagger, a naughty-boy contrarianism, a sort of fight-me-bro attitude, but also that theatrical embrace of good food, technique and a gourmand’s embrace of the possibilities of the edible.
For example, starting up a section on meat, there’s a whole weak third-order Swiftian fantasy about a Vegetarian Revolutionary Terror overthrowing the Kingdom of Meat, there’s a recipe for avocados where he starts by saying he hates avocados, and so on. But then there’s some really loving writing about the dishes that are plainly close to his soul, including cuisine from Provencal France.
On a full (if quick) read-through of the whole book again, I ended up feeling that if I had really wanted to cook to the heart of his own cuisine, I’d have made one of the recipes with offal, which seem to really stir him and make him feel the force of his own culinary passion.
But it’s an interesting document of its times, too. There’s “recipes from far away”—a colonial formulation if there ever was one—that are an interesting marker of UK chefs welcoming certain cuisines into the temple of food. And it’s interesting how different US cookbooks of this era are when they do the same. Floyd gives zero fucks whether you know what the ingredients are or know much about the cuisine. The recipe I’m making tonight is basically a Chinese-styled hotpot and he says as much, but it includes among its ingredients fermented red bean curd (and “soya paste”, which I took to be miso rather than fermented soy paste of the Korean sort) and there’s zero advice on what these are or where to get them. That’s the book’s general approach—the recipe on making stuffed pig intestines would be a complete mystery to anyone who hadn’t cooked with offal before. Whereas I think US cookbooks of the late 1980s and early 1990s felt they had to tell you where you could get this stuff and also do a bit of a sort of multicultural genuflection to show respect for the cuisine being borrowed. The beginning of the “Chinese” section of the book just has Floyd saying a bit of generic rubbish about how you can just cook Chinese food quickly and thus can get out there and drink with your guests without being stuck in the kitchen, and also a note about how you could finish up with a bit of pineapple fritter—just use some batter or other, like a tempura one, you know how to do that, right? So just do it.
It’s sort of charming and annoying and sometimes right on the edge of something else a bit less palatable all at once. But also the whole book is just a damn mish-mash, as I said earlier.
I chose the hot-pot not because it was particularly characteristic of the book—as I said, I’m not sure anything is besides the offal recipes or maybe the roast beef—but because I had flank steak that needed to be prepared. Flank steak is our favorite cut of beef, maybe of meat generally, around here, and normally we just marinate it in red wine, garlic and soy sauce—a recipe I grew up with—and broil it, with a thin cut across the bias to make it not so tough. Sometimes I grill it with a spice rub and then I have to cut it really thin.
This cooks it for an hour, which seems a bit much—closer to ropa vieja, the Spanish dish that I quite like but is not otherwise beloved in this household. I cut it a bit short, 45 minutes. I fiddled with the broth a teeny bit—he calls for white sugar, I used palm sugar; I’m going to put a bit of lime juice in at the end for some acid; I used some white wine as well as sherry. (I’m out of Shaoxing wine, which I do try to keep around even though it’s a bit difficult to find.) And I added some heat to it—his recipe has absolutely none and that seems off. At the end, I added a spot of a cornstarch/warm water mix to thicken a bit.
It was fine, but I think it’s the sort of thing that I’d rather make from a recipe where the author really knows the source cuisine and can spruce this up a bit.
Seems like you are working with a pre-historic source that should be donated to the British Museum. And yet eating well.