Love Bites: Marital Skirmishes in the Kitchen. Christopher Hirst
‘Grr!’
Eventually the slotted spoon emerged from its hidey-hole and Mrs H hauled out her dripping creation. ‘My poached egg isn’t anything like yours,’ she groaned. ‘Look at that yolk. Completely hard. Mind you, I had a hopeless instructor. You shouted at me.’
‘When did I shout?’
‘Buckingham Palace! Slotted spoon!’ She drew a small figure with black fringe, toothbrush moustache and upraised arm in my notebook. ‘How do you think you rated as a teacher?’ she continued. ‘I’ll tell you how many marks you got out of ten.’ Mrs H made an O with her forefinger and thumb and squinted at me through the hole.
I felt it was time to return to her poached egg.
‘It’s quite nice but a bit, er…’
‘Watery and all over the place, you mean. I’ve done them before and they’ve consistently spread. I can’t get them into a nice little lump like you.’
Then I did a poached egg.
‘See – that’s perfect,’ said Mrs H when I got it out. ‘It’s all nice and round. You can just tell the yolk is going to be perfect. How annoying.’
‘I think I might have given you some elderly eggs.’
‘You might blame the eggs, but I say rotten maker, rotten teacher.’
Still, I might have been even more demanding as a tutor. Considering the beautiful simplicity of a poached egg, it is remarkable how much complexity some experts have managed to bring to the topic. Culinary titan Joel Robuchon says you should boil your eggs in their shells ‘for exactly thirty seconds’ before chilling them in iced water and starting an orthodox poach. This is supposed to ‘firm up the surface edge of the white a bit’, but in my view it indicates a chef who has had a battalion of sous-chefs doing his poaching for him for years.
Michel Roux recommends that you fish your egg out of the pan after one and a half minutes and ‘press the outside edge to see if it is properly cooked’. The picture in his book resembles someone pressing home a point by prodding the waistcoat of a rotund gent. ‘Now, see here, Carruthers…’ If the egg is not sufficiently poached, you put it back in the water. Roux does not say if you have to do more waistcoat-prodding to the egg after its second appearance, though I presume so. Some recipes say that a three-minute boil is sufficient, though I’d advocate four minutes if you stick to a bubble-free simmer. A slotted spoon helps no end when it comes to extracting the egg. Scooping out your egg with an ordinary spoon means waterlogged toast. Some authorities suggest that you should rest the egg on a towel to dry off, rather like a holidaymaker on the beach.
Many recipes suggest a dollop of vinegar in the poaching water to help keep the egg together, but Mrs H doesn’t like the resulting vinegar tinge and she could be right. Anyway, a really fresh egg doesn’t need any assistance in coagulation. Culinary scientist Harold McGee dispenses with vinegar since it ‘produces shreds and an irregular film over the egg surface’. His solution is to pour off the thin white that causes poached egg untidiness before simmering, but I wouldn’t bother. Michel Roux advocates post-poaching tidying. ‘Trim the edges with a small knife to make a neat shape. This will also cut off the excess white that inevitably spreads during cooking.’ Trimming poached eggs strikes me as cheffiness. As Mrs H will confirm, I am not a great devotee of neatness.
Mrs H’s recipe for cheat’s eggs Benedict
Our lovely friend Carolyn Hart was so knocked out with this dish, which I served at my birthday brunch party, that she included the recipe in her book called Cooks’ Books. Because I cooked for around thirty people, it involved the use of an egg poacher (you can handily whack out four servings at a time) and fresh ready-made hollandaise sauce from the supermarket. If the muffins are pre-toasted and kept warm (ditto the bacon), you can rapidly serve quite a crowd, although the quantities given below are per person. I heat the hollandaise in a double boiler at the gentlest simmer whilst poaching the eggs. A child still at the age of pliability is useful for handing round the eggs Benedict to your guests while you try to fend off greedy whatnots demanding seconds. A pitcher or two of Bloody Marys aids the party spirit.
1 toasted muffin
2 grilled rashers of good-quality back bacon (your choice of smoked or unsmoked)
1 poached egg
1 generous dollop of gently heated hollandaise sauce
After variously toasting, grilling, gently heating and poaching the four ingredients, assemble the cheat’s eggs Benedict in this order on top of each other: muffin, bacon, poached egg, dollop of hollandaise. Don’t forget to save some for yourself.
DESPITE HAVING SCORED some notable successes in the breakfast area, I began to experience a twinge of dissatisfaction. A boiled egg is fine in its way, but it does not generate the ovations and rave reviews that male cooks crave. It is not enough for our dishes to be nutritious, tasty and satisfying. They should also produce a storm of applause, amazement, even adulation. ‘Bravo! Bellissimo! Wunderbar!’ Extreme examples of this phenomenon are commonplace in the higher echelons of the gastronomic world. It always strikes me as curious that when, at the end of a banquet, the chef appears from the kitchen, he is greeted with a round of applause. Where else, outside the theatre, does anyone get such acclamation for doing his everyday job? Do we clap a road-layer when he completes a particularly fine bit of motorway? Or the refuse collector when he empties our bins with aplomb?
There was another less egocentric reason for expanding my culinary repertoire. Three years into our relationship, I went freelance and began working from home. Mrs H continued working on the other side of London. On her return journey, she would often call in Reggie Perrin-style, ‘Only just reached Victoria. Points failure at Acton. Have pipe and slippers waiting.’ It was obviously unfair to expect her to start bashing away in the kitchen when she staggered through the door at 8.30 p.m. My gallantry was given additional impetus by the hunger pangs I began to feel three hours earlier.
Starting with salads, I moved on to pasta, stews and casseroles (all remain gastronomic mainstays at Hirst HQ). Eventually, the day came when I graduated from hob to oven. Like a small, super-heated theatre in the corner of the room, its productions are more likely to elicit acclaim than something scooped from a saucepan. Mrs H was certainly impressed by my efforts. ‘I’d come home completely drenched to find the house full of delicious smells and you with a spoon in your mouth having a tasting session. Even though bits of mashing potato were often flying through the air, it was very welcome.’
Mrs H was referring to my slightly feverish construction of fish pie. ‘I remember that it always contained large quantities of cockles. A bit odd but rather delicious.’ She was also fond of my robust version of coq au vin: ‘Your great glug of brandy made it very sustaining. I had to go to bed immediately afterwards.’ Pheasant casserole in a Calvados and cream sauce was even more satisfying. ‘After a single bowl, I felt as if I might go pop!’
All good stuff that provided much in the way of the requisite congratulation, acclamation, etc. The response to my next production was more ambivalent. While not exactly a flop, it received a mixed review. ‘I remember coming home and there was this Desperate Dan-style thing on the kitchen table,’ Mrs H recalls. ‘It was a vast pie with a patchwork lid. You stood behind it covered in flour and exuding pride from every pore.’
Well, yes, maybe I did generate a hint of righteous self-satisfaction at my first substantial baking achievement. ‘It was certainly substantial,’ says Mrs H. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bigger pie. In some parts the pastry was very thick, in other parts it was so thin that it disappeared. Still, it tasted OK if you ignored the very doughy bits. My problem was with the inside. I don’t like sweet pies and