Untwist the Food Classics

“You’d never get away with this in London.” My friend and I are sitting in a tiny restaurant in Old Nice, amazed by what we have just eaten. La Merenda is a thirty-year-old restaurant, seating no more than twenty at its small tables, serving a short menu of local Niçoise dishes: Tarte aux oignons de Menton – a thin, yeast-based crust spread with sweet, cooked onion; a dark and glossy daube de boeuf; and panisse – a pillow of fried polenta. It may not sound remarkable, but the restaurant – as I discover on repeated visits – is packed for every sitting.

La Merenda does not take credit cards, and several diners simply sign for their food on account. They come, if not every day, then many times each week.

It is closed at weekends, because the chef likes to enjoy his own time. To book you have to put your head round the door and ask – and this ties in with my friend’s point: Would such a place in one of the great dining capitals survive even for a week? Serving mainly brown food in a not-too-comfortable setting, and not taking phone calls? I love it, not because it is a French provocation for tourists, but because of the purity of the food; the truth in the taste of it. The dishes are as close to their roots as they can be, loved by generations, on a menu that only changes with the seasons.

I fear that such food has become irrelevant, or shortly will be; because while a chef or restaurant’s reputation was once spread through a critic’s word of mouth, now the process happens word of eye, so to speak. To be relevant, a plate of food must be photogenic or Instagrammable. Worse, the instinct is to alter or ‘twist’ a recipe just to make it interesting. I challenge you to watch any TV cooking show, with the possible exception of Rick Stein’s, and not hear the dreaded words, “This is my twist on…”

From shepherd’s pie to tarte tatin, osso buco to Eton mess, authentic recipes are twisted every which way, though very rarely made better. As a technical art, cooking is rarely improved by redesign. If a new model of a motorcar did not work, no one would want to drive it. But with food, it seems interest is only sustained by novelty.

By now anyone who loves the heady visualisation of food on social media or television would be forgiven for judging me a Luddite. Yet I have no problem with the millions of food photographs circulating on Instagram or Twitter. But if you come, as I do, from a generation who read about food, rather than just looked at it, then protecting prototypical food traditions – the roots of cooking the world over – is important. The cookbooks on my mother’s shelves rarely had images. She cooked as told to by writers whose research in the Fifties and Sixties brought authentic European
provincial cooking to British readers.

Praise for Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, Marcella Hazan and Claudia Roden might have become clichéd, but it cannot be underestimated what a revolution these cookery writers led. As a writer two generations on, I relied on these books, too, and took more guidance from their followers: Alice Waters, Anna del Conte, and even the great Eighties TV star, Keith Floyd.