Haute Cuisine

...and what Michel Bourdin did at the Connaught

Disciples of Auguste Escoffier - master of haute cuisine - are not much in evidence among this year’s listings of what those in the know consider the world’s best restaurants. Moi? No idea: I’m a home-cook, not usually in such rarified surroundings.

The UK rates just two mentions in the top fifty, both in London - Kol (British-Mexican) and Ikoyu (West African) - neither of which would bring gladness to heart of the begetter of Haute Cuisine. Nor indeed would the pre-eminence of Spanish gastronomy at first, second and fourth places in the list. France rates a modest four listings in total, including a facing-saving no 3 for Table run by a self-taught, late-blooming chef-proprietor, Bruno Verjus, among whose signature dishes is a chocolate-filled tarlette with capers and caviar.

Clearly things have changed in the restaurant world since Michel Bourdin retired in 2001 from running the kitchens at the Connaught. Bourdin reighed over the most classic of haute-cuisine kitchens at one of London's grandest hotels. As a teenager I’d occasionally, while on temporary release from my dismal boarding school, join my maternal grandparents at lunch in the restaurant: roast beef from the trolley from my grandad, and sole veronique for my grandmother and me.

My own direct experience of haute cuisine (the grandparent’s fortune didn’t last, so that was the end of that) was the reason that in 1986 I spent a full working day as an observer in Maitre Bourdin’s kitchen. At the time - early in my career as a cookery writer with a column in a huntin’ shootin’ magazine - I had just published European Peasant Cookery, the book I had been planning for much my adult life (you’ll find the story in Family Life). The book was due to be published in the US as The Old World Kitchen retitled for reasons - as editor Fran McCulloch explained - of acceptability. ‘Peasant’ wouldn’t cut the mustard with America’s aspirational book-buyers, many of whose families had escaped rural poverty in Europe, however enthusiastic the reviewer in The New York Times. And by the way, she continued, the chapter on herrings was out.

I was still, however, hoping for a change of heart with the title of the US paperback. Fran had a reputation for unorthodox decisions that sometimes paid off. To justify the basic premise of my book - that peasant cookery (seasonal, local, appreciative of excellence in raw materials) had more in common with Escoffier’s faites simples than with Martha Stewart’s elegant dinner-parties - I needed backup. Acturally, I needed Michel Bourdin, The Boss. Which led to an invitation to spend a working day in the kitchens of the Connaught under certain conditions: no photos (sketchbook and paints acceptable); arrive at 8 am with the day-staff, depart at midnight, when The Boss goes home.

A fully-staffed haute-cuisine kitchen such as Bourdin’s was already rare in the 1980’s, even in France. A grand hotel in the old tradition, the Connaught was expected to provide customers with a regularly-changing choice of thirty dishes at lunch and dinner, including English classics such Lancashire hotpot and steak-and-kidney pudding. Everything was made in-house. The kitchen was also expected to provide two good meals a day for the same number of staff as customers, adding 250 extra platefuls twice a day. Which allowed the junior members of the team to develop their skills as cooks by learning, much as in the peasant kitchen, to prepare good food with the tougher cuts of meat and elderly vegetables and make good use of leftovers to please their fellow-workers, most discerning of all.

By time I clocked-in on time at 8 a.m (whites and rubber soles obligatory), Maitre Bourdin had already finished the morning conference with his sous-chef, Michael Aldridge, and was phoning suppliers with notepad the ready. Twelve hours later The Boss is still on the intercom, orchestrating dinner. I, on the other hand, am as limp as a dishcloth, as befits a woman with no other qualification than a certificate in housemaiding, result of six-month stint at the Eastbourne School of Domestic Economy circe 1960.

Michel Bourdin’s influence on the chefs of the UK was not confined to the kitchens of the Connaught. He established the British branch of the Academie Culinaire de France in 1980, and brought in Richard Shepherd of Langans, Guy Mouilleron of Ma Cuisine, Pierre Koffman of Tante Claire, Anton Mosimann, the brothers Roux. At home in the Connaught, Bourdin was The Boss of a brigade that numbered over thirty chefs and apprentices, rotating daily, working in the hotel’s subterranean larders, sculleries and marble-slabbed pastry-rooms. The entire brigade - sous chefs, chefs de partie and down the line from trainees to kitchen-porters - was men-only, with the exception of three female sous-chefs who worked in the pastry-section behind glass doors and were not, on The Boss’s orders, required to manoeuvre round a crowded kitchen carrying red-hot oven-trays loaded with thirty kilos of roast bones for the petite marmite, sowing confusion and distraction all round.

Right. The tranquil areas of any professional kitchen are the cold larder - assembly-point for meat pies and what Mrs Beeton calls ‘made dishes’ (aka leftovers) - and the patisserie, tasked with the serious business of pastry-rolling for boeuf wellinton and coulibiac as well as the frivollities of the dessert trolley - strawberry mille-feuille, profiteroles filled with creme patissiére, bread-and-butter pudding, raspberry trifle, chocolate mousse, sachertorte, not forgetting the famous tarte au citron - favourite of the Queen Mother - that was always on the menu.

At peak serving-time, roughly midday till tea-time, passions were running high, so I keep well away from the action, hiding behind a pillar with my sketchbook. There’s less than a second between an omelette baveuse and a rubbery yellow bolster - and heaven help the sous-chef who delivers the latter. The Boss’s right hand man, Jourdan Accouche - Seychellois, wrists like a Wimbledon tennis star - works his magic on hot-pans - copper sauté-pans dancing on gas-flame volcanoes, adding a blob of butter and a slither of cream (haute-cuisine loves butter and cream).

Meanwhile The Boss watches and tastes - and chefs really do taste, all the time, a teaspoon dipped into an enormous copper stockpot with a bouillon so thick reduction, I’d guess, of half a bullock and a whole flock of chickens. Tomorrow there’ll be boeuf bourguignon for lunch for the staff, and maybe a poulet au riz for supper. Maitre Bourdin packs it in at midnight. And so, older and wiser, do I. And no, I never managed to persuade editor Fran (she told me she tried - she really did) to correct the title in the US. You win some, lose some.

p.s. A handsome new hardback edition of European Peasant Cookery is available from Grub Street in the US as well as UK. Just saying….

p.p.s. Beloved paid subscribers will shortly be in receipt of recipes for two (or possibly three) basic sauces of the French kitchen.