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A Man and his Piano

A Culinary Alphabet:

B - Breakfast

Maybe it’s an English thing, maybe it’s a guy thing but the meal that really seems to stir the emotions more than any other is breakfast. Sure, an intimate diner a deux, a three star gourmet blowout, fast food or even, God help us, barbecue have their place but there’s nothing like breakfast.

I think I have an explanation. Breakfast involves the application of fantastic comfort foods at the times when we are emotionally least able to resist.

We wake up as children, rub sleep from our eyes and are carried down to the kitchen still glowing and smelling like fresh baked Victoria sponge in our warm jammies. With nothing on our little minds except last night’s dreams, we’re fed boiled eggywegs and soldiers by strong and loving parents. Who could resist?

We grow up and, if all goes well, we'll wake each morning, weakened by post coital glow or a roaring hangover – often both. In this condition, a lover or a kind friend slips us anything from eggs Benedict to warm croissants and again the bond is strengthened.

In maturity our relationships are burdened with complication and there’s rarely time to appreciate each other yet, fresh from sleep and with yesterday’s petty frictions forgotten, a well timed full English can feel like the glue that repairs us.

Now, and best of all, there are mornings when my daughter and I get up together. With Mum asleep upstairs, she’s permitted the illicit luxury of sitting on top of the big prep table while I make her boiled eggs and serve her the froth from my cappuccino in an espresso cup.

" I have measured out my life in coffee spoons” - but I can’t forget the egg cups, toast racks, marmalade drips, butter stains, Rice Krispies and bacon rolls.

I think there’s a lot to be said for mid-life crises. We underrate the evanescent flowering where infantile irresponsibility is momentarily overlapped by wealth and experience. That short and heady time when one is finally rich enough to behave like a child.

When mine hit, I managed to avoid running off with my secretary or joining an ashram, which left me with one remaining option, I decided to buy a vintage Porsche. Due to some characteristically appalling diary management, this hormonal surge coincided with moving in with my future wife. The more astute among you will have spotted the omens of doom in this scenario.

We had bought a house – a superb wreck of a Regency villa in ‘London’s fashionable’ King’s Cross – and were shopping for the equipment for the basement kitchen when I spotted the Lacanche. At the time, the fashion for semi-industrial kit was just breaking but, even amongst the phalanx of stainless steel monsters, it stood out. It was the last model before Lacanche became effete and started making stoves in coloured enamel with bathtaps for knobs. If you’d come across it in a backstreet local restaurant in Rome, Paris, New York or San Francisco any time in the last fifty years, it would have looked perfectly appropriate. It was the Ur-oven.

My partner is a phenomenal cook and shares my respect for no-nonsense kit, but even she was a little nervous.

‘It will stick out beyond the units,’ she opined.
‘We’ll have to block off the second door’, she accurately observed.
‘They’ll never get it down the stairs’, she empirically averred.

Rational argument was pointless against the hormonal imperative of man approaching forty like a runaway truck. She could see there was no way of winning and so, in a moment of treacherous cunning for which I can only blame her innate talent and lifelong training as a negotiator, she said…

‘ Well, I guess it’s the Lacanche or the Porsche’.

I bought a bus pass.

They took six weeks to get it over from France and, as predicted, they had to remove the doors of both the stove and the house to get it in. It stood out, as Raymond Chandler put it, ‘like a tarantula on a slice of angel-food cake’. It was as if someone had parallel parked a troop-carrier next to the sink, dropped the keys down the drain and legged it to Rio. It was a great big bastard but a dream to cook on.

The burners, huge, turned brass things that looked like the afterburner on a Victorian Phantom Jet, could be precisely controlled between a Hollandaise caressing warmth and a searing, blast-furnace maximum which diminished the gas supply of everyone else in the street. There were no markings on the dials – if there had been they would have run from zero to eleven. There were two ovens, one electric for dry heat, one gas for moist, in which, in a hasty codicil, I specified I might be cremated.

The central burner was actually too huge for any pot I owned and, as I couldn’t sublet it as a flare-off nozzle for a North Sea gas field, I added an accessory simmering plate. This may sound like a delicate, filigree trivet but was, in fact, a hundredweight cast-iron slab with a polished top. By moving them around its surface I could seamlessly control the heat on up to five pans.

French cooks refer to the range as the ‘piano’ and now I could see why. Its hulking presence challenged me to perform brilliantly every time I approached it - cracking my knuckles, drawing myself up to my full height and rolling my shoulder muscles. It was an instrument, an altar, an operating table and a piece of precision engineering that made the Porsche feel like the pointless phallic substitute it probably was.
Every single day I entered that kitchen my eyes were drawn to the brooding Lacanche and I loved it more and more. Then we decided to move.

I wouldn’t, in all honesty, have guessed that the two effete young men who viewed the place were into big, oily, heavy machines, but, at some point in the negotiation (handled, of course, by my partner), ‘throwing in the cooker’ became a deal breaker.

I pointed out that the only way you could throw the thing anywhere was off the flight deck of the Ark Royal. When humour failed, I resorted to wheedling and, finally weeping, but it was no use. The house was sold, my beloved piano with it, and for all I know, those fey youths are incubating bloody ready meals in it.

So we moved to a beautiful, rented house in Camden Town. Great location, elegant décor, ample rooms, splendid neighbours and a beautiful kitchen; everything is perfect, save the oven.

At some point, after I bought the Lacanche, the designers of kitchen appliances (may they perish in horrible agonies) began to make Yuppie Bait replicas of real ovens. They are made of stainless steel foil, have countless and pointless burners and emit a disheartening, loose, rattling sound when you walk into the kitchen. Ours is one of these. I toyed with the idea of adding a simmering plate but I know the whole thing would collapse under it. It would be like dropping a paving slab on a takeaway tray.

In a calculated act of vandalism the oven control knobs are mounted loosely on their shanks. If the knob has ten degrees of play either side of centre you can be out in the oven setting by up to fifty degrees but, and here lies the inscrutable brilliance...you don't know if it's under or over.

There is also a timer. A programming device which may once, when toasters had stencils of wheat on them and Hostess trolleys roamed free, have had a purpose. There might, for all I know, still be people who would like to come home to a piping hot casserole after a busy day of executive meetings and three-martini-lunches. I have never met one, though. I would not number a casserole eater among my friends. In this new century, however, a timer retains one useful purpose. It looks, to a two year old, like an eye-level, Fisher-Price, button, beep, flasher thingy and is thus, irresistible.

Even if I can somehow fool the oven into reaching the correct temperature I have no way of knowing when my daughter has programmed it to switch off.

Finally, to complete my anguish, every function on the machine has been made just a little bit less powerful than it needs to be. Not quite seared meat, slightly sunk cakes… It’s impossible to fathom. How could the manufacturers profit from such a mean narrowing of pipe gauges and reduction of flows? I’m paying for the bloody fuel. I can only believe that, after years of being forced to churn out brown enamel and smoked glass monstrosities for our parent’s generation, they just hate food and cooks.

If any landlords are out there reading this, hear my plea. Give us astronomical rents, dodgy boilers, bedbugs, out of order lifts and cockroaches the size of Volkswagens. Give us cold and cold running water, shared lavatories and leaking roofs. Rack us, stack us and charge us tuppence a week for the use of the cruet but please, please, if you have a scintilla of humanity in your icy hearts, don’t lumber us with a crap stoves.

 

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