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Bruce’s Cookbook

Bruce Poole

For Anna,

Charlotte, Isabel and Francesca

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Preface

Life Before Chez Bruce

Onwards

Soups, salads and charcuterie

Gnocchi, pasta, polenta and risotto

Meat

Fish and shellfish

Desserts

Stocks, sauces, sides and fundamentals

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

I think it is probably fair to say that a good proportion of readers tackling cookery books written by professional chefs do so with some degree of trepidation. The glossy photographs may appeal and so might some, or even most, of the recipes, but how much of the book’s material will be doable at home? Will the ingredients be readily available? Will the techniques required be too advanced and will attempts at said recipes end in sorry, sodden and salty failure? Well, let me assure you, in my experience there are plenty of cooking nightmares lived out daily in even the most highly regarded restaurant kitchens. We under- and overcook things, burn pastry occasionally, tempers rise as soufflés fall and errant dishes get chucked towards the bin – invariably with indecent velocity. The distinction to be made at professional level is that our failures never reach the paying customer and it is only when dishes are practised and refined that the ability is grasped to knock them out with the necessary degree of speed and skill. If your earnest attempts at some of the food in this book turn out a little less appetisingly than you had hoped for, please don’t despair, and take heart in the notion that, for you to be a good cook, the broth might get spoiled a few times along the way. In short, we all make mistakes, but what we need to do in cookery, as in any other worthwhile activity I guess, is to apply some common sense and learn from them.

Life Before Chez Bruce

My parents were both teachers and as a family we all profited from long school holidays. Before Dad bravely branched out solo as a portrait painter, we relied on his salary from Wimbledon School of Art and although we were rich in time during the long summer break, there certainly was not enough cash around to send our family of five away on fancy, exotic holidays. Luckily, my parents took the view that it was better to experience longer journeys in a caravan than shorter, hotel-based trips. This meant that we were able to go away for at least a month at a time and over the years we visited France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, northern Italy, Austria and what was then Yugoslavia – my two brothers and I scrapping and arguing pretty well the whole way. Conditions weren’t always easy or comfortable (particularly for Mum and Dad – it can’t have been much of a holiday for them on occasion), but we had many memorable and enjoyable adventures.

France became our main country of choice and, interestingly, the vast majority of my own memories of these holidays are based around food. I am no longer able to separate one French campsite from another, or even, sadly, one stunning medieval town from the next, but my first experience as an eight year old of eating rabbit (braised with white wine and mustard, served with sauté potatoes) at a dusty, roadside Routiers café in Provence was etched razor-sharp in my little brain. I remember eating snails, coq au vin and frogs’ legs for the first time too and, far from providing the squeamish stuff of childhood dining nightmares, I recall them being delicious. Melons, courgettes, aubergines, figs, paté and apricots were all firsts for me on these trips and, to stock up the caravan’s galley before moving on, we would visit local food markets, practising our crude linguistic skills as we went. I remember the boulangeries and the faded, crumbling, fake mosaic fascias of the charcuterie and butcher shops, their beaded curtains rattling lazily in the hot sunshine.

My parents’ sterling efforts at instilling some culture into their squabbling kids did not go entirely wasted and the magnificent splendours of the Loire châteaux of Chambord, Cheverny, Amboise and Azay-le-Rideau all left their mark. But no more so than the fascination I experienced at the window of one of Tour’s exclusive patisseries, as I gazed mesmerised by the jewel-like chocolates and exquisite pastries on offer. I had never seen anything like this before in Blighty and the sheer quality and breadth of food available in Europe, and particularly France, made a big impression on me.

At the age of thirteen I went to boarding school and in one startling moment it dawned upon me that food at school was not going to be like the stuff Mum cooked at home. All kids complain of school food – mine are no different – but the tosh we endured was truly terrible. I recall scrambled eggs and tinned tomatoes for breakfast. This is a combo I actually enjoy today, but the egg component of this school preparation resembled a raft of cold, yellow polystyrene, so overcooked was it. In fact, I am convinced that nicely seasoned polystyrene would have tasted better. One particularly odious lunchtime main course was entitled ‘Chicken à la King’ and, without exception, the realisation that this little number featured on the day’s bill of fare at the dining hall brought howls of protest from us all. Its name made us snigger too, as it was evidently neither a dish fit for royalty nor did it contain any chicken. There were, however, huge hunks of skin floating amid the thick floury sauce and one had to trawl carefully through it to avoid them.

The conspiracy theorists amongst the boys (and there were many) dreamt up the patently untrue notion that the school’s Catering Manager was as corrupt as could be and the fact that he drove an improbably flash, new car was all the proof we needed that he was on the take. Clearly, we surmised, he used to go to the considerable trouble of buying hundreds of whole chickens, boning and skinning them under the cover of night and using the flabby detritus for us hapless, hard-working and undernourished kids. The real meat he would siphon off by means of his car’s capacious boot and sell at a tidy profit. We were on to his evil shenanigans and had the sting to catch him all planned out. Somehow we just never got around to following this through and all thoughts of revolution were soon forgotten once we were booting a football around the muddy playing fields or jumping up and down to the latest AC/DC album in our dormitories.

I do not recall being particularly into cookery at this time. I quite liked making cakes at home and my love of drop scones, chocolate rice crispy cakes and melting moments probably stems from this era or before. At school we certainly ate a lot of toast and the stocking up of one’s tuck box took on immense importance and was carried out with military precision at the end of holiday periods. I took a year off between school and university, five months of which were spent travelling around South America where I remember most of the food being stodgy, very hot and cheap. I do recall working out the exchange rate of Ecuadorian pesos to reveal that an avocado cost the equivalent of 2p. By this stage I was also drinking quite a lot of beer and I was made-up to learn that a litre bottle cost about 18p. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that I did not root out this fantastic continent’s finer dining establishments and that, as an impressionable eighteen year old, I was far more interested in Brazilian skirt and cheap lager than proper restaurants.

The subsidised beer theme continued at university. During my three years at Exeter, I not only met the lovely girl who would later become my wife (Anna), I also started to discover a real interest in cooking. The kitchen facilities in the rented accommodation I shared with my mates in the middle year were not dissimilar to the conditions encountered by the cast of The Young Ones, but I used them to knock out respectable spaghetti, risottos and roast chicken and I even had a crack at a bouillabaisse once. To attempt this scary-sounding Provençale fish soup, my friend Gary and I visited an Exeter fishmonger to obtain the ingredients, one of which was a whole John Dory. We had never seen one of these before and, judging by the rank and smelly condition of this grubby specimen, neither had the cowboy fishmonger. We binned the dory (and ended up binning the bin), but the soup turned out a treat. To conclude this memorable culinary soiree, the dessert chosen was made from a recipe I found in a throw-away supermarket cookbook. It came by the unpromising title of prune whip. I like to think that my menu-writing skills at least have improved since those halcyon beer-fuelled days and nights.