New books by Raymond Blanc and Pierre Koffmann retell the truth that British food came back from the brink. If it were not for the émigré chefs, I hate to think what we would be eating in British restaurants now. Fishfingers à la King, with pea jelly ring? Such horrors existed, or let’s say they were perpetrated, in the 1970s, by Sainsbury’s recipe cards, the Good Housekeeping Institute and in the books of that serial offender
Robert Carrier.
An embarrassment of showboat dishes are in Anna Pallai’s 70s Dinner Party: The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly of Retro Food (Square Peg, £9.99). Stuffed grapes, potato salad log (don’t ask), cherry pineapple bologna — this is actually a sausage main course; tomatoes stuffed with aubergine and kiwi. Kiwi? It is a book of photographs and wry, very funny captions. It takes pride of place in my loo, a reminder of what did not happen.
Koffmann and Blanc, both French, are very different. Koffmann trained in France before coming to Britain in the 1970s, while Blanc, the grandson of a famous French woman chef, taught himself to cook. Both men are brilliant, both influential not just for their cooking but because they have since trained at least a couple of generations of British chefs — so saving our food culture from being Robert Carriered.
Pierre Koffmann, the superlative draughtsman whose heart is in the provinces, refines for us the bones of French cooking in Classic Koffmann: 50 Years a Chef (Jacqui Small, £30): terrines, boudins, pots-au-feu, cassoulet and his famous stuffed pig’s trotters, but also escabeche, brandade, oeufs-à-la-neige and mousse-au-chocolat madeleines, which I cannot wait to try.
Raymond Blanc’s book Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons (Bloomsbury, £50) is huge.
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