Wednesday 6th April 2011
Laura Malcolm, the novelist and prober of the French, gave a dinner. She and her husband, Matt Driver, the media brilliance, although an employee, but earning more than loathed Robin Smallmeal, head of landfill in this country or whatever, are honorary Poor Little Rich Gays for their suffering and endurance (they burn on the bare hillside of love) and their mania for detail in the home – even though cleaning is despised.
Laura’s menu! There were other guests – the Multis, my private architect, Bruce MacBain, his partner, Tancredo Viamare, and Esmé Manning, the actress, not seen for ages! I shrieked with excitement and she shrieked back, but then no more. I had a brief conference with Bruce about pipework – the menu swept all before it, I’m sorry to say.
Nothing else remains.
The detail! The 1st course was three-part: speciality bread, Michel Guérard’s chicken liver terrine (the livers almost whole) with an onion confiture; then Ottolenghi oxtail with a complex parsley accompaniment and bulgur wheat, but finally, finally….a six-part dessert, taken from the current series of Masterchef.
Laura’s menus are always absolutely new.
An orange cake with a pomegranate ice cream styled into individual shapes, two salsas, one of pomegranate seeds, the other of carmelised oranges, then caramel shards and at the last a syrup of orange and pomegranate.
So, ordinary members of the public, learn!
By the way, should you think of copying this menu, you will require a Bruce MacBain interior in which to consume it: £200,000 and Miroslav, our adored Polish builder, in for two years.
By which time, it will be out of date.
As Laura says: what better way of keeping life’s horrors at bay.
I think she means death’s horrors, unless the terrible furnace and merciless exposure of love.
So we roar on, blazing, to the grave.
Laura Malcolm's Six-Part Dessert: Note the Glorious Absence of Plate Styling
The Caramel Shards
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That plate-styling is quite high-end by my standards. Though Matt always says, crushingly, that my presentation lets me down.
Rather wounded by your suggestion that our interior could become out of date. Bruce MacBain will agree that good modern design will NEVER look out of date. Timeless and Classic must be our watchwords.
No, I meant the food would be out of date, not the interior, which of course is timeless. I’m sure after our day there will be little trails of earnests on a Saturday going from one carefully preserved Poor Little Rich Gay interior to another, peering from behind ropes at the unbelievable still life.
Re: plate-styling – I’m against it. I think Matt’s being just a touch Earls’ Court. Even Angus Willis, who styles food for money, has roughened his edges in recent years. Australian Vogue, which championed this kind of fancification, went out of business.
Poor Little Rich Gays like detail, but not fancification: it’s a fine line.
Thank goodness for that. Food being much cheaper to replace than interiors. However the chicken liver terrine is very old-fashioned, peasant French cookery fondly recalled by Guerard and published in his 1978 Cuisine Gourmande. Stolen from the Papermac office shelves in 1982.
I thought the chicken liver terrine was looking and feeling completely new, even if old. The stolen recipe book could be the foundation for another ‘stolen’ dinner, modelled on the one attempted by some Oxford undergraduates known to Paul Taylor of the Independent formerly. Their aim was to give a dinner at which simply everything had been stolen. The rules were very strict: plan came unstuck when one of them was arrested leaving Harrods with food-mixer under coat.
Solange tells me she worked with the original cake inventor from Masterchef. She lives in Dorset, apparently. I am not sure how Solange knows this as I was quite certain she worked for me exclusively. It may be time for her to go.
I too have been driven to the verge of extinction by staff. I caught my Solange applying the vac with upholstery attachment to the front of a chest of drawers. Is there a society to which they all belong with the purpose of wrecking their employers’ mental health?