David Bouchier Essay: The Absent Minded Gourmet

Some people remember every meal they ever ate, good or bad, and can tell you about them all in forensic detail. This is not my gift. Every memorable meal is quickly forgotten. I can only recall with an effort what I ate yesterday. When the dishes go into the sink my memory of the food goes with them. The person I blame for this is Adolf Hitler. When I was growing up during and after the Second World war food was scarce, and strictly rationed and there was almost no variety. In spite of my mother?s best efforts every meal, year after year, was pretty much the same. There was nothing worth remembering about this uninspiring diet, so I remembered nothing, and I have been remembering nothing about food ever since. This makes me anxious. I suspect that I have been cooking the same half dozen dishes for years and years without ever noticing the repetition. One of my favorite dishes is salmon marinated in bourbon, soy and garlic, and served with garlic potatoes and asparagus ? but for all I know I may have been cooking this dish every day since I found the recipe 1991. This could get boring for my more gastronomically gifted family and friends. So the other day I started browsing through our several shelves of cookbooks.But cookbooks tend to be unnecessarily complicated and demand ingredients that can only be found in Manhattan or Marrakech. The color photographs are also discouraging. My dishes never come out looking like that. However, hidden behind the books was a treasure trove, an old file folder in which I used to keep my favorite recipes. This was decades ago when I had a better memory, better digestion, and more critical friends. These old recipes were a kind of gastronomic memory bank. They weren?t very appetizing in themselves, most of them being scrawled on stained scraps of paper or torn from newspapers. [It was easy to identify the ones I had used the most ? they were almost illegible because of food stains.] As a cuisine you could only call eclectic ? in fact it was fusion cuisine, forty years before fusion cuisine was invented. The file allowed me to trace my progress, if that?s what it was, from fairly elementary cooking (how to boil an egg, how to cook all sorts of things in mushroom soup), through the various phases and enthusiasms of my gastronomic odyssey. Here were some recipes copied from a long lost book called The Impoverished Student?s Book of Haute Cuisine including forgotten favorites like Optimistic Casserole and Primordial Chicken. The recipes recalled my brief and unwise flirtation with Indian food, and my rather more successful effort at cooking the Chinese way. I even took a course on that, but could never quite get used to the balance between two hours of preparation and two minutes of actual cooking. I prefer slow cooking food, and was pleased to rediscover the gastroenterologists friend, the three day Cassoulet. I?m astonished in retrospect at some of the very complicated dinner party menus I attempted ? more than once judging by the food stains (or perhaps tear stains) on the recipes ? and at the discovery that things like stuffed mushrooms and salmon souffl? were part of my regular repertoire. Things have gone downhill in my kitchen, and the problem clearly lies with the chef. Fortunately I have this whole new trove of old recipes which are as fresh to me as if I had never seen them before. Tomorrow, perhaps Entrecote a la Bordelaise with Pommes Dauphinoise and braised celery, that sounds good. On the other hand a tasty piece of marinated salmon might be nice.