The Times, They Never Stop A-Changin’

Well, we all do it, don't we? Get beyond the age of, say, 40 and the way you were taught things generally remains the way you do them. For many it remains the only way to do them, all others being heresy. In the context of cooking, how easy is it for professionally trained people to move on?

Food fashions, of course, come and go. Sometimes that's because classics become clichés; however, if they are true classics they may well reappear. Take a bow, prawn cocktail and our recently featured crêpes Suzette. Other dishes, thankfully, will surely never come back. From fifty years ago I have a copy of The Readers' Digest The Cookery Year. It features some very famous writers, including Margaret Costa, Kenneth Lo and Jane Grigson. But I really can't envisage us tucking in any time soon to Liver with Dubonnet and Orange or Shrimps and Mushroom Flambé featuring potted shrimps and flaming brandy.

But with one exception I'm thinking less about dishes or ingredients, and more about cooking styles. (It occurs to me that there could be a plethora of articles about the change in available ingredients over the past fifty years.) Is it too dangerous to start by talking about colour? Contemplating meat, I don't recall seeing pink stuff on restaurant plates in Britain in the 70s. In a well respected cookery book which describes itself as a cookery bible, the suggested cooking time for beef sirloin is 20 minutes per pound. Doing the sums, that's 80 minutes for a 4 pound joint, which they also suggest you brown first. I would cook mine for 50, and even at that, the Masterchef lot would probably say I'd overcooked it. And the notion of serving pork pink? People still believed you'd get tapeworm.*

What about flour? (As an aside, I remember a very grand restaurant whose menu featured a heading Farinaceous Dishes. That included pasta, which is, and rice, which isn't.) Yes, we continue to have a classic roux as a base for many sauces, and yes, we may well dust meat with flour before browning to give body to the gravy in our steak pie. But if you have a sauce that is too thin? Surely, you turn up the heat and reduce it down. If I'm making something like a coq au vin or a beef bourgignon, I'll sieve the sauce into another pan, let it bubble to a rich unctuous consistency then add a generous knob of butter before replacing the meat and veg. The classic books, on the other hand, will tell you to whip in little bits of beurre manié, a 50:50 mixture of butter and flour. As your sauce cools, the scum on the top is a dead giveaway. I don't think anyone does it these days, at least not with a meat based sauce. Chefs will also tell you that increasingly often they are dealing with customers who have, or claim to have, a gluten intolerance.

Let's stick with fat. Our ancestors used butter and fried things in lard. The 1970s saw the rise of margarine. Better for you than evil cholesterol rich butter, we were told. And, they said, you can't tell the difference. (I can, and I bet you can too.) To this day I have a dear friend who swears by it for cakes, and L uses it for her excellent oatcakes. Left to my own devices I wouldn't have the stuff in the house. Many are going back to butter and even lard. Mind you, our great breakthrough was our discovery in the 1970s that olive oil could be used other than for soothing sore ears. I kid you not, outwith specialist Italian groceries, you could then buy it only at your local pharmacist.

And, sticking to dairy, let's consider the rise and fall of cream. For a nation delighting in escaping the shackles of rationing, nothing shouted luxury louder than cream. Poured into soups with gay abandon, adorning most sauces in the chef's compendium, and slathered over puds, whether poured in generous portions, or whipped up in piles. I moved away from that ahead of the game because of L's allergy, but as soon as I did I felt I was a better cook, allowing natural flavours to sing rather than muting them with dairy. A good sauce with a hint of cream can be a thing of beauty, but that's not what 70s styles were about. Every now and again you will stumble on a restaurant living in the past - eastern Europe is a good place to look. I promise that the experience will seem odd.

Thankfully, most professional kitchens evolve. If at your own stove you find yourself telling your children to do it this way, because that's the way my mum did it/we've always done it that way, perhaps it's time to take stock. Unless, of course, you're Italian and that's the way your nonna did it. Italian grannies usually got it right.