CityLife

Michel Roux - the icing on the cake

Michel Roux

EVERY morning, as I left my cottage opposite the Waterside Inn, on my way to work at Bray’s other famous restaurant I would meet Michel Roux.

We never said much more than good morning to one another but I remind him of this when I meet him in the bar of Great John Street Hotel, in the vain hope that he might remember me.

He doesn’t, of course, but he is charming and talkative, and politely enquires as to how I enjoyed my time in Bray and of my current whereabouts.

He’s heard of Ramson’s (Mary Ellen's current employers in Ramsbottom) and we have a pleasant time reminiscing about Sharrow Bay in the time of Francis Coulson and Brian Sack. Industry gossip over, he begins to tell me about his new book on pastry.

He’s here, ostensibly, to host a dinner and Q&A session as part of the Food and Drink festival, but it is the book that he wants to talk about.

 I had a horrible feeling that this was yet another celebrity chef cookbook, churned out to make a bit of cash. I should have known there would be more to it; Michel Roux is known as one of the godfathers of the modern British restaurant scene.   

Dark ages  

Along with his elder brother Albert, he has held 3 Michelin stars at the Waterside Inn for the last 23 years and has been largely responsible for the revolution in British dining over the last 30 years.  

I ask him, for a laugh, what he made of our restaurants when he first came to Britain. “I don’t want to be rude but it was the dark ages. There were two subjects which could not be discussed, the first was food and the other was sex. It was even bad manners to discuss food at the dinner table!”  

I can only imagine his despair at the sorry state of British food at that time, and his pride now seeing how far we’ve come.   F

or him, the book is a summary of a career spent working with the same five basic ingredients - flour, eggs, butter, sugar and salt- in their infinite combinations.  

Definitive guide  

He began training as a patissier at age 14 and says that some of the recipes in the book are the very same that he was learning over 40 years ago.  

He tells me the book came about firstly because no one else had produced a definitive guide to pastry, but also because “very few can have my knowledge and put it in writing, and present it.”  

He proudly tells me that he wrote every word and that the hands in the how-to pictures are his. “A ghost writer can’t deliver my philosophy, explain what I feel. It’s my life.”  

Lost pastry skills  

Like many restaurateurs, he laments the lack of basic skills being taught to trainee chefs and hopes the pastry book will go some way to redress this.    

From a marketing point of view he has all angles covered; “It is not only for the trade. In the good old days everyone had one or two dough recipes.”  

In a similar vein to Jamie Oliver’s current crusade, he wants to give back to people these lost pastry skills and, therefore, the ability to cook healthy and economical food.  

Ease of recipes is very important to him, “it must be easy to follow. It can be educative but it mustn’t give a headache.” (I wonder if this is a sideways swipe at Heston, whose lengthy recipes are a joy to boffins like me but are understandably painful for others).    

It would be an over-statement to say the book was his legacy; that would be the thousands of chefs that he has trained and who have gone on to greater things, to wit Pierre Koffman, Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay.  

Icing on the cake  

Although he must be fairly content with a life’s work that takes in three Michelin stars, revolutionising British cooking, the title of Meilleur Ouvrier de France en Pâtissier and an honorary OBE, it seems that this book is the icing on the cake.  

He feels that in writing it and sharing his wealth of experience, “I have done a bit for gastronomy, the young [chefs] and people at home.”