COOKING art or craft?

I was in a book shop recently and saw a book by Escoffier called “le guide culinaire” or the culinary guide in English. The strap line for this book was “the art of modern cookery” This got me thinking whether modern cookery or indeed any cookery is an art form at all. I have been asked many times whether cooking is art or craft and it is a difficult one to answer.



I still have a book that was bought for me in 1989 called “the art of Anton Mosimann” (anyone still remember him?) flicking through the pages now, it is very noticeable that the focus of the food is very much a visual one. Mosimann was very much a pioneer of Nouvelle cuisine which dominated the 80’s restaurant scene. Nouvelle Cuisine was about making food lighter and healthier by getting rid of flour based sauces and replacing them with reduction based sauces or jus that are still common today.

Nouvelle Cuisine is often remembered for its small portions even though these small dishes were supposed to be eaten as part of a larger menu. There are lots of restaurants today that serve several smaller courses as part of a larger menu. Brighton’s own Graze restaurant is one such restaurant, as is Maze in London and almost every fine dining restaurant in the country serves a “tasting menu” made up of several dishes. Could it be that Nouvelle Cuisine was ahead of its time?



It is easy to understand the art element of Mosimann’s cooking with dishes that are delicate and colourful. He uses gold leaf and many different coloured plates. It is only when you read the recipe that the craft side of it comes to the fore. Cooking involves years of training and in many cases an apprenticeship is involved. The idea is you learn your craft from a talented chef and then introduce your own ideas and approaches when you have the skill.


Anyone who has made a layered terrine or boned and stuffed a duck will know that the craft element is very important, as is science. A cook has to know why the soufflé will rise when the egg whites are whipped and not when the egg whites are over whipped. Why do egg yolks in mayonnaise thicken when the oil is added?

Art is also less obvious in modern styles of restaurant. Today the onus is very much on the provenance of the ingredients used and by the simplicity in which said ingredients are cooked, in order to show off their flavour best. It is probably fair to say that farmers and growers are considered the true artists today. I also think we need to look at the nature of art itself, surely art is supposed to be a one off and not to be replicated. Surely restaurant food by its very nature needs to be replicated day in day out, a dish in a restaurant eaten on a Monday needs to look and taste the same on a Tuesday and a Wednesday.

My own view is that cooking is mainly craft with a smattering of art, not dissimilar to furniture or jewellery making. Fast food restaurants cater for the mass market as do furniture warehouses. It is only when you go to hand maid bespoke furniture that you see the true craft and I suppose art as well. You only have to look at a really well made hand crafted piece of furniture to appreciate art and craft together.

I also think that art is a personal thing, give 10 chefs the same ingredients to cook the same dish and you will get 10 different interpretations of the same thing. There are chefs like Mark Hix, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Fergus Henderson and Simon Hopkinson who advocate a more simple robust style of cooking and presentation and there are chefs like Heston Blumenthal, Gordon Ramsay, Marcus Wareing and Tom Aikens who prefer a more delicate arty style. I suppose ultimately it’s the customer who decides which is preferable.

Everyone Loves Roast Chicken!

Roast chicken is one of those dishes that most people have learned to cook in their time. It was probably one of the first things I cooked with my mum, along with the beef gravy or maybe a jam tart with left over pastry.

We eat more chicken in this country than any other meat and it is difficult to find a more versatile animal. The pig can offer perhaps more dishes but pigs are harder and more costly to produce and pigs don’t lay eggs!

One of my favourite cookery books by Simon Hopkinson is simply called “roast chicken and other stories” and if you type roast chicken on Google you get 1 million 210 thousand hits.

The most popular restaurant dish in Britain we are told is Chicken Tikka Marsala. I am sure that chicken contributes as much to these sales as the Tikka Marsala element in this dish. Would Mutton Tikka Marsala be as popular?

You can now get many different types of chicken in the supermarkets from the often frowned upon value chicken to the Rolls Royce of chickens “Poulet de Bresse”
The Poulet de Bresse comes from the Bourg en Bresse region of France between Lyon and Geneva. The Poulet de Bresse chicken has its own Apellation d’origine controlee certificate. This means it is protected to the same extent as some of Frances most famous wines.

You can buy 2 value chickens in a supermarket on special offer for £5 but the Bresse chicken will cost about £30 - £35. The price difference is indeed great but is it worth paying the extra?

Generally rare breeds of all animals take twice as long to reach maturity and are half the size of their extensively reared counterparts. These 2 points contribute most to the expense of the raw product. The other and perhaps most important thing to consider is then taste. The more expensive chickens will have a much firmer and more gamey taste than the cheaper version but that might not always suit a pallet that is used to the more tender watery bird.

At the restaurants we buy our chickens from a farm in Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex. This farm produces free range chickens which reach maturity in 16 weeks and is about 3 miles from The Ginger Fox. These chickens are very good quality and have travelled very little in order to be on our menus. In the restaurant business it is always more cost effective to buy whole animals or fish and butcher yourself than to buy joints or fillets (in the case of fish). The problem with this is that you need the skills necessary to deal with whole carcasses and the flexibility of menu to cope with different dishes.

We will buy say 20 chickens at a time and then joint the birds and come up with various dishes in order to get the most out of each bird. Recently at The Ginger Dog we came up with following specials out of our chickens.

The breasts would be plainly roasted and served with a crispy potato cake, buttered runner beans and a roasted garlic cream. The legs we marinated in vegetables, thyme, bay leaf and red wine for up to 5 days and then braised. The cooking juices were then reduced for coq au vin. This dish was placed on our £10 menu and served with mash potato. In the past we have also roasted the legs with “40 cloves of garlic” to recreate the famous French classic bistro dish.

The chicken wings were salted for 2 hours and then cooked slowly in duck fat for 2 hours. The bones were taken out of the wings and then the wings were served with the sautéed livers from the chicken in a salad dressed with Cabernet sauvignon vinegar as a starter.

Finally we made a chicken consommé with the carcasses which we roasted in the oven and then clarified. We served the consommé with some bacon dumplings and a little drizzle of truffle oil.

This practice is the best way to ensure that everything is used up, that little is wasted and that the restaurants can be competitive in this market. This can also be done at home with leftover roast chicken being used in risotto with a stock made from the bones.

Posted by Ben Mckellar

Menu Change

It's that time of the month again.

We generally change our menus every calendar month in all the restaurants. The logic behind this is to keep the food as seasonal as possible and also because as we run small menus, it gives our regular customers something new to try. We think its better to run small menus that change often than have big menus that change little. If a menu has twenty main courses you can usually tell the food will not be as fresh as you want. The most important thing for a good chef is to get produce in daily and then sell it by the end of service that night.

Lots of celebrated and busy restaurants do not change the menu at all or very rarely. When was the last time you went to your favourite curry house or Chinese and found that Chicken Tikka Marsala was no longer on the menu? When we go to ethnic restaurants we generally know what we are going to order before we arrive.

Other restaurants are so well known for certain dishes that customers make special journey just for that particular dish. The Tour d’Argent is Paris is famous for its roasted duck with a sauce made from pressing the carcass in a silver press. The restaurant gives you a certificate telling you which number customer you are in ordering the duck. They have so far sold over one million ducks.

There is another restaurant in Paris that serves just one starter and one main course. Le Relais de L’Entrecote in St Germain will only serve a walnut oil salad to start and Sirloin steak for main course. We went one evening because we just followed the queue which extended onto the street. The only question they ask you about the food is how you would like the steak cooked, as some of you will no doubt know, most steaks in Paris come in shades of rare. The meal we had was great and the atmosphere terrific.

We try to stagger the menu changes at our restaurant so that either Pamela or myself can be there. The Fox menu changed on Wednesday and the others change next week. We try to get all the staff to attend. This is a great opportunity for staff to see what they are going to be serving and also gives them a chance to ask questions on particular dishes, is the chicken free range? where do the scallops come from? are sweetbreads testicles? that sort of thing. It is also valuable for chefs to get some feedback from people who like food before dishes go on the menu.


Most good chefs see a finished dish in their head and then work back from that to create the dish. The dish might look great on paper and work well in the head but until you actually cook the dish you don’t know how it will taste. There are a few basic rules that we try to stick to when writing menus, a soup, a red meat and white meat, a chocolate pudding, a salad and so on.

We get market reports from most suppliers and generally get the heads up when new produce become available. Nurturing good relationships with suppliers is very much part of the head chefs job. At this time of year the food tends to be a little lighter in style with fewer heavy sauces. Peas, broad beans, mint, new potatoes, new season lamb, rabbit, Wild sea trout, berries and stone fruit should all feature heavily. Maybe a chilled sweet corn soup with crab as a starter or chilled raspberry soup with vanilla ice cream for dessert.

At The Ginger Fox tasting we had a near full house turn out which was a surprise in itself considering England were playing Slovenia. Everyone was happy with the menu and hopefully it will be well executed by the kitchen. The Sweetbread starter and stuffed Rabbit main course proved popular with us but we will have to see which dishes sell well with our customers.