So The Fat Duck is the best Restaurant in the World. A strange concept, can anyone claim to have actually eaten in the entire top ten? One would have to be something of a globetrotter to achieve that. Even I cannot say I have eaten in all these restaurants and so I must take the result on trust.
But I am so glad for dear Heston. Being named after a motorway service station was a handicap many of us would have found hard to overcome. Parents can be so cavalier with names, one wonders what all the young Rollos will feel when they come to realise that their trendy name is based on a cartoon King, or possibly a form of chocolate sweet.
I was of course at school with Heston, although he was in the Lower First whilst I was in the Upper Sixth (Classics). Even then his gift for chemistry, or 'stinks' as we called it, was evident. After he blew up the lab for the fifth time, with the attendant loss of the school hamster, he was encouraged to do his experiments in a small wooden hut behind the cricket nets. Incidentally there was a nasty rumour that the hamster (Mr Snuffles) was not instantly vaporised as Heston claimed but was eaten after being inflated with nitrous oxide. We never found any remains, so no one could be entirely sure.
But where will this trend for food as a chemical experiment take us? Up our own fundaments I fear. No doubt in a few years time the Restaurant of the Year will be the opposite of the Fat Duck - a cave in Tuscany where a half blind old crone roasts locally garrotted wildlife over a slow fire and serves it on plates made from compressed cow dung. These days we laugh at Nouvelle Cuisine, perhaps one day we will pour scorn on the likes of Heston too. We food critics are like music critics; we set them up to knock them down, always looking for a new bandwagon to jump upon.
I myself have begun a new cuisine which I call 'Bouffe trouve', or 'Found food'. Each day I patrol the woods and fields of my country estate to find what has died naturally overnight. This I then present to my delighted housekeeper so that she can make something daring and original from it for supper. Unfortunately demand has outpaced supply and things simply weren't dying fast enough. This caused a problem and guests for dinner became fewer. However after eating a vast quantity of cheese one night, I had a dream which gave me the answer.
My electric fence is designed to deter wildlife from eating my border flowers and vegetables in the kitchen garden. It delivers a small shock to the intruding animal. How much better it would be, my dream told me, if I were to uprate the voltage so that it would kill the animal stone dead and perhaps, if the voltage was higher still, even cook them too! Delirious with excitement at my plan, the very next morning I had the groundskeeper wire up the fence accordingly. He was not, it has to be said, very encouraging. 'Tis a crazy plan yer Lurrrdship,' he grumbled in his charming brogue but I whipped him on and reminded him of his tied cottage.
At first the results were really rather promising: a bag of some rabbits, a small tortoise and the neighbour's daughter's pony. All vermin and all unmourned (the neighbour's daughter did make a small fuss, but it passed over). However this morning I discovered the body of a man who turned out to be our village postman. It was the large sack that finally gave it away, as well as the circumstantial fact that we have received no post at all for the last week.
So as I await a visit from our local policeman, who was really rather rude to me about the whole affair, I have to conclude that starting a new trend in cooking is a risky business. I hope dear Heston has a back up plan for when the tide of fashion retreats from his particular stretch of the beach.
Illustration by: Al Stuart al.stuartcreative@ntlworld.com
