A Line Cook's Guide to Purée and Existentialism

Featuring a carrot purée that'll knock ya socks off

Vladimir: Let us not waste time in idle discourse! [Pause. Vehemently.] Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed… Let us make the most of it before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! … What are we doing here, that is the question… We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

From Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

I remember when I was about 22 or 23, sometime toward the end of graduate university, listing the jobs I would do if I could live my life over.

Can you imagine that? Just 22 and feeling as though the next 60, 70 years were already set in stone.

What a guy.

I was studying English Literature then and trying my best to appear intelligent and surprising and original. Both to myself and the far more intelligent people I studied with. My MA thesis was about Samuel Beckett, my favourite writer then and now. It consisted of several esoteric readings of Beckett’s Trilogy, a collection of novels he published in the fifties. To the detriment of my own sanity, I spent months exploring the book’s relationship with psychoanalysis and the self, post-structuralism and Deconstructionism. I was reaching for ideas that were new, ideas no one had thought of before, ideas that would set me apart.

The process really took its toll.

Once I finished and realised further doctoral study was as appetising as a bowl of batteries cooked in piss, I started applying for work experience in book publishing. Editorial, production, marketing. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that book publishing made sense. After 20 years of schoolin’, book publishing seemed a nice and sensible graduate choice.

But if I could have my time again, I decided aged 22, it was restaurant chef I’d choose to be.

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I was 29 when I did start working as a restaurant cook. By that point my friends had become well-paid lawyers and accountants. I, meanwhile, gave up a perfectly good marketing career to go back to square 1.

Square 1 turned out to be in a basement kitchen on London’s Great Portland Street. And, as a commis, the lowest rung on the kitchen ladder, my main jobs included unpacking deliveries, peeling various root vegetables, and making purées.

Well, not really making purées. At least not from start to finish. The part of the process for which I was responsible was the literal puréeing part. The blitzing of vegetables other real cooks had prepared in a high-powered blender called a Vitamix.

Eventually I was allowed to start seasoning the purées as well. The basement prep kitchen, being summer, became increasingly sauna-like as the day progressed. With my blended and seasoned purée I would go upstairs to where the head chef worked. I would ask him how the seasoning was.

He would always tell me to add more salt.

But, eventually, after what feels like weeks in my memory but was likely less, he said it was “spot on”.

I can’t tell you how happy that made me. And I know that probably sounds pathetic. A 29 year old getting excited because a 24 year old head chef told him he put enough salt in some mashed up carrots?

But I’m not ashamed and I’m not exaggerating. You see, I was finally doing something that mattered to me. And, as I learned then, finally doing work that means something, really ends up meaning everything.

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For reasons I’ll share in the coming weeks, I recently sat down with a restaurateur and his head chef for a few hours. Among quite a few things, we discussed a particular variety of potato for an entire 15 minutes. I loved that. But the part of the meeting I’ve been returning to was when he asked me what I’d cook for him and his chef if they were to ask me to do so there and then.

The question took me by surprise. I hadn’t anticipated being put on the spot. And my emotional reaction was one of defence. What do I say? I asked myself. What should I say to satisfy them?

This is the same reaction I’ve had when being asked questions in office meetings over the past few years having retired from the kitchen. In such work meetings, I always have my professional “hat on”. I assume the identity of someone who can do that job, and answer questions the right way. Though they are hard to tell apart, me and the professional office hat me really aren’t the same person at all.

After a few moments having been asked what I would cook, I stopped thinking about what the best answer might be. Instead I just told the truth. And I did that by answering what I’d want to cook for myself.

I said I’d take a fillet of fresh rainbow trout. I’d brine it for 20 minutes in salt and sugar to firm the flesh and season it really well. I’d roast it and boil some potatoes in salted water with a few dill stems for the subtle flavour they impart. To finish it off I’d make a butter sauce. I’d start with a lick of cream to stabilise it because I’m not a French culinary puritan and season it with the brine I’m preserving dill flowers in at home before emulsifying a hideous amount of butter in it.

That’s what I’d cook, I told the guy. That’s the simple food I love. The food I’d always choose to cook, whoever asked.

He said that sounded spot on.

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Now I’m increasingly old and not too bothered about proving whatever intellect I may or, most likely, may not in fact have, I enjoy Samuel Beckett’s work on a simpler level. I enjoy it for how funny it is. And, despite how miserable most people find it, I enjoy it for the hope I find in it.

The standard response to Beckett is to label his work existentialist, pessimistic. Worlds without inherent meaning full of shadowy figures doomed to nothingness.

I just don’t see it that way.

When the tramp Vladimir and his partner Estragon spend an entire two-act play waiting by a road for a character called Godot who never arrives, they do so having chosen it. “We are not saints”, Vladimir says, “but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?”

I find hope in that idea. Finding the “appointment” in our own lives, and having the courage to keep it.

That’s why sharing recipes here, as well as my stories, means so much to me. Having stopped cooking in restaurant kitchens, I realise this place is where my appointment, the thing that has professional meaning for me, still exists.

I thank you, particularly if you’ve read this far, for that.

And with all that in mind, we come to what I am sharing today. What follows is the way I was taught to make two very delicious purées.

I was taught this in a London restaurant almost ten years ago, the restaurant where I felt for the first time I really had kept my appointment.

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The carrot purée to end all carrot purées

(Makes about 300g)

Ingredients
50g butter
8 medium carrots (about 500g)
50ml + 25ml water

Method

Heat the butter in a pan and gently cook the carrot slices with 50ml of water (lid on the pan) until they become tender. This isn’t quick. Be patient and let it take about 20-30 mins on a low heat.

Once they are tender, increase the heat to moderate and continue to cook until the water evaporates. The carrots will look translucent and glazed in the cooked butter.

With the water cooked away, progress to slowly caramelise the carrots in the butter. They will begin to break down, shrink with the concentration of the moisture, and almost turn a little jammy. The carrot sugars will start to caramelise and the smell will become buttery and sweet.

Leave to cool for a few minutes, then put in a blender or food processor. Blend with 25ml water until smooth and a thick but still “spoonable” consistency. Add a splash more water if required. Be careful of how much of the deep, yellow butter from the pan you use. Too much may cause the purée to split. If this happens a touch more water blended with it can help. Any leftover butter must be saved as a dressing because it is so good.

Then season with salt, though, in my experience, it shouldn’t require much.

The flavour is so concentrated. So rich. It is sweet but deeply savoury, almost nutty, and really very special. Wonderful served with roasted chicken or venison.

Bright green, creamy and aromatic courgette purée

(makes about 300g)

Ingredients
400g courgette (about one medium courgette)
1/2 tsp whole fennel seed
40g butter
1 small onion
2 tbsp frozen spinach (or equivalent of fresh)

Method

Peel your courgette and save the skins.

Cut the courgette in half, then quarter each half, then slice a few millimetres thick. Slice the onion.

Heat the butter and fennel seeds together until you can start to smell the aroma of the seeds, they don’t need to colour, then add the courgette and onion.

Cover with a lid, and cook on a low heat for about 25 minutes until the courgette is broken down and translucent.

Then cook gently for a further 10 minutes, you don’t want it to start browning, until much of the excess liquid has reduced away. Then take off the heat to cool down a bit.

Meanwhile, blanch the courgette skins for 1 minute until vibrantly green and immediately “refresh” in very cold or even iced water.

Squeeze the water from the skins and add them to a blender with the spinach and about a quarter of the cooled courgette. Blitz this really thoroughly until the skins and spinach are entirely broken down. Doing this with only part of the courgette flesh helps fully purée the skin and release the green colour. Then add the rest of the courgette flesh and continue blending with a pinch of salt until really smooth.

The finished purée will be silky, creamy, and, because of all the care you took with the skin, beautifully green.

I love serving this with fish, but it also makes for a great pasta or gnocchi sauce when cut with a little pasta water.

Gnocchi with a courgette sauce

See you next time,

Wil