'FLOATING ISLAND"

 

I am writing about my food-as-lifestyle muse, the lovely British chef Rachel Khoo, reminiscing her shows at her little “home restaurant” in Paris and making a beautiful living out of cooking. Certainly, I have written about her before on these pages, perhaps a year or so back, I have followed her on BBC since my New York days, and I am revisiting/binge-watching this weekend just so to be transported to the streets and vibrant culinary markets in France, to feel inspired, and to woo the cook in me. The title of this piece is a dessert she was making in her tiny kitchen with a view for herb-growing window: Classic crème anglaise (chilled custard) topped with a dollop of puffed meringue (the “floating island”) and on the island cute pieces of sweet pralines (a brittle candy using almond slivers stiffened in simple syrup) — and all these pure confections made from scratch, of course. Trained chefs have something personally visible you don’t otherwise see in a restaurant setting, a peculiar something that’s inside-out of them, like wearing a heart on their sleeves, in their ways around the kitchen when they're home. Home-style — the warmth of this — cooking is the ethos of what a formal dining experience hopes to transcend as traditional quality and comfort in reservations-only food. When chefs are home cooking for you, well, that’s the real deal magnified yet humble, you are six degrees special to his heart, at home he pervades in the ambience of welcome, his real self you see as the true romantic to cooking (handed down by family lineage), and that is the very essence and element in the creation of supper in his hands (not from the sous chef or assembled by the rank and file cooks), but through his magic touch favored by ingredients and old recipes.       

I watch Ms. Khoo “to see myself” — a vicarious nostalgia of the old cook I was in New York, a dutiful one I must say, in the name of love: for home food as celebration, for warm gatherings, for bringing out the excitement and seasons in eating. In another episode Rachel, by train, took a half-day trip to wintry Normandy coast and visited her favorite seafood monger to check out what’s delicious in his fresh-catch of the day. Her relationship to the vendor was intimate; she even cooked something quick for his family while waiting for her scheduled train back to Paris; she made mussels braised in fried fennel and dill fronds and liquified in strong apple cider wine, a “soupable" rich-salty-woodsy-decadent glaze coating the seafood using the shell and slurping good! To come up with something perfect and mindful to draw in the beauty of the local quay and the market in rainy weather yet in the grey clouds will be beautiful memories to make; and to achieve a superbly delicious on-the-fly food, not to mention a face of beauty and the beauty of her food— is a distinct gift given by the universe to only a few handful souls. And that is why she’s my muse. She gives food their total credence. And she’s like feeding me, as I have fed my old love, at the table of her heart.