From my cookery column in The Field, sometime in spring of 1987, after I'd received permission from Michel Bourdin, RIP Feb 3rd 2023, to spend a full working day in his kitchen - 8 am to after midnight - as an observer (with sketchbook). After publishing European Peasant Cookery, my first serious cookbook, I felt the need to understand how haute-cuisine actually works."Michel Bourdin, Head Chef at the Connaught just off Grosvenor Square, is The Boss. Haute cuisine is alive and well and making everything in-house in a state-of-the-art kitchen in a basement just off Grosvenor Square. No nonsense with boil-in-the-bag and Black Forest gateau: here are Escoffier's classic stock-pots simmering in copper cauldrons, salmon so fresh the sea-lice shine dark on the silver skin. Kitchens like those of the Connaught are now rare, even in France. They not only provide the hotel's 250 paying customers with a choice of 30 daily dishes, including an old English favourite like Lancashire hotpot or steak-and-kidney pie. They also have to feed the staff of a large London hotel: domestic catering, with all its problems, for a further 250 people daily. Here, says the great chef, lies the real secret of training the apprentices and commis chefs: varied and delicious meals for the staff have to be contrived from the tougher cuts of meat, the leftovers and vegetables which have passed their peak of perfection. M. Bourdin had already had his morning conference with his lieutenant, sous-chef Michael Aldridge, and was phoning his suppliers when I arrived at 8 am. Twelve hours later he was still at the intercom orchestrating the service of dinner - and I was as limp as one of the dishcloths all chefs wear tucked into their snow-white aprons. Such an empire is to the ordinary housewife's kitchen as a transatlantic liner to a rowboat on the Serpentine. Thirty chefs and apprentices staff the subterranean larders and sculleries, the stoves, ovens and the marble-slabbed pastry-room of the hotel. There are only three women among them. After a day in the Connaught's kitchens I know why. You'd need the muscles of a heavy-weight boxer to manoeuvre safely round a crowded kitchen carrying a red-hot oven-tray loaded with 20 kilos of roast bones for the petite marmite. A trainee chef would be grateful to shipped off to the more tranquil atmosphere of the cold larder, where the meat and assembled dishes are prepared. Or might take refuge, as I did, in the cool calm of the patisserie, where Graham Dunton makes beautiful strawberry mille-feuille and traditional desserts - crisp-topped bread-and-butter puddings and raspberry-layered trifles. The other kitchens send in salmon couliabiac and mushroom-stuffed lamb fillets to be enveloped in his airy puff pastry or brioche doughs. At peak serving-time, passions run high. There is less than a second between an omelette delivered perfectly baveuse - moist and frothy within - and a rubbery yellow bolster. Sous-Chef Jourdan Accouche, a Seychellois with the wrists of John McEnroe, is the star of the saute pan: hands and faces glisten against white linen as copper pans are whipped off dancing flames. At one end of the stove, a great pan of simmering tomatoes reduces to a dark sweet essence alongside a stockpot bubbling with a bouillon so thick with minced chicken a wooden spoon will stand up in it. Everyone tastes all the time - and chefs really do taste. Fingers, hands, lick and smack - not a teaspoon in sight. The acquisition of the Chef de Cuisine's tall hat takes the most talented aspirant ten to fifteen years' hard labour. Or so it should, if the British division of the Academie Culinaire de France has anything to do with the matter. The home-team has been Michel Bourdin's baby since its establishment in 1980. All the famous chefs are members: Richard Shepherd of Langans, Guy Mouilleron of Ma Cuisine, Pierre Koffman of Tante Claire, Anton Mosimann, the brothers Roux. The Academy runs an annual competition that leads to awards for excellence. Standards are almost impossibly high. None of the comis-chefs made the grade last year, in 1986. M. Bourdin owes his allegiance directly to Escoffier, the father of haute cuisine, which means that he expects a reduction of half a bullock, bones and all, to form the basis for a litre or two of beef consommé. That other stalwart of the French tradition, Maurice Edmond Sailland writing under the pen-name Curnonsky, concluded in the last of his 32-volume La France Gastronomique, that "a nation's gastronomical level should be examined by tasting both the products of the best private kitchens and restaurants and the dishes from the kitchens of the peasantry. Somewhere in between lies the true level of excellence". Which is why I'm glad that I took the opportunity to spend a day in Michel Bourdin's kitchen. Classic French Lemon Tart
Tarte au citron
Tarte au citron
Tarte au citron
From my cookery column in The Field, sometime in spring of 1987, after I'd received permission from Michel Bourdin, RIP Feb 3rd 2023, to spend a full working day in his kitchen - 8 am to after midnight - as an observer (with sketchbook). After publishing European Peasant Cookery, my first serious cookbook, I felt the need to understand how haute-cuisine actually works."Michel Bourdin, Head Chef at the Connaught just off Grosvenor Square, is The Boss. Haute cuisine is alive and well and making everything in-house in a state-of-the-art kitchen in a basement just off Grosvenor Square. No nonsense with boil-in-the-bag and Black Forest gateau: here are Escoffier's classic stock-pots simmering in copper cauldrons, salmon so fresh the sea-lice shine dark on the silver skin. Kitchens like those of the Connaught are now rare, even in France. They not only provide the hotel's 250 paying customers with a choice of 30 daily dishes, including an old English favourite like Lancashire hotpot or steak-and-kidney pie. They also have to feed the staff of a large London hotel: domestic catering, with all its problems, for a further 250 people daily. Here, says the great chef, lies the real secret of training the apprentices and commis chefs: varied and delicious meals for the staff have to be contrived from the tougher cuts of meat, the leftovers and vegetables which have passed their peak of perfection. M. Bourdin had already had his morning conference with his lieutenant, sous-chef Michael Aldridge, and was phoning his suppliers when I arrived at 8 am. Twelve hours later he was still at the intercom orchestrating the service of dinner - and I was as limp as one of the dishcloths all chefs wear tucked into their snow-white aprons. Such an empire is to the ordinary housewife's kitchen as a transatlantic liner to a rowboat on the Serpentine. Thirty chefs and apprentices staff the subterranean larders and sculleries, the stoves, ovens and the marble-slabbed pastry-room of the hotel. There are only three women among them. After a day in the Connaught's kitchens I know why. You'd need the muscles of a heavy-weight boxer to manoeuvre safely round a crowded kitchen carrying a red-hot oven-tray loaded with 20 kilos of roast bones for the petite marmite. A trainee chef would be grateful to shipped off to the more tranquil atmosphere of the cold larder, where the meat and assembled dishes are prepared. Or might take refuge, as I did, in the cool calm of the patisserie, where Graham Dunton makes beautiful strawberry mille-feuille and traditional desserts - crisp-topped bread-and-butter puddings and raspberry-layered trifles. The other kitchens send in salmon couliabiac and mushroom-stuffed lamb fillets to be enveloped in his airy puff pastry or brioche doughs. At peak serving-time, passions run high. There is less than a second between an omelette delivered perfectly baveuse - moist and frothy within - and a rubbery yellow bolster. Sous-Chef Jourdan Accouche, a Seychellois with the wrists of John McEnroe, is the star of the saute pan: hands and faces glisten against white linen as copper pans are whipped off dancing flames. At one end of the stove, a great pan of simmering tomatoes reduces to a dark sweet essence alongside a stockpot bubbling with a bouillon so thick with minced chicken a wooden spoon will stand up in it. Everyone tastes all the time - and chefs really do taste. Fingers, hands, lick and smack - not a teaspoon in sight. The acquisition of the Chef de Cuisine's tall hat takes the most talented aspirant ten to fifteen years' hard labour. Or so it should, if the British division of the Academie Culinaire de France has anything to do with the matter. The home-team has been Michel Bourdin's baby since its establishment in 1980. All the famous chefs are members: Richard Shepherd of Langans, Guy Mouilleron of Ma Cuisine, Pierre Koffman of Tante Claire, Anton Mosimann, the brothers Roux. The Academy runs an annual competition that leads to awards for excellence. Standards are almost impossibly high. None of the comis-chefs made the grade last year, in 1986. M. Bourdin owes his allegiance directly to Escoffier, the father of haute cuisine, which means that he expects a reduction of half a bullock, bones and all, to form the basis for a litre or two of beef consommé. That other stalwart of the French tradition, Maurice Edmond Sailland writing under the pen-name Curnonsky, concluded in the last of his 32-volume La France Gastronomique, that "a nation's gastronomical level should be examined by tasting both the products of the best private kitchens and restaurants and the dishes from the kitchens of the peasantry. Somewhere in between lies the true level of excellence". Which is why I'm glad that I took the opportunity to spend a day in Michel Bourdin's kitchen. Classic French Lemon Tart