Taste: My Life through Food(29)

I recently watched an episode that took place in a small home kitchen that he had commandeered in Provence. The sequence begins with a continuous six-minute take, something you would never see on a cooking show today. Floyd starts out with a sip of wine as he shows us a sink full of fish he has bought at a local market for a Proven?al fish stew he’s about to make. He directs the camera operator to get a shot of this and a shot of that as he describes the types of fish, then directs the fellow to follow him, colander of fish in hand, as he moves over to the stove, explains the base for the stew, dumps the fish in a pot, adds some hot water, then swiftly moves over to the oven, takes out a chicken that is roasting, explains the manner in which he has prepared it but tells us how the matron of the house told him he had done it improperly, and then says he doesn’t really care what she thinks and he doesn’t really know everything about French cooking anyway as he deftly makes his way back to the stove where in four separate pans simmer the ingredients of a ratatouille, explains each one individually, then combines them and wraps up the sequence with a sip of wine and a comment about needing a break. He does all this for six minutes straight without a pause. If you have ever tried to film yourself, or have someone film you, preparing even the simplest recipe while talking to a camera, you will know that it is close to impossible to do it without having to cut and reset countless times. It is most likely that you will make mistakes again and again and will eventually have to edit the bits and pieces together later on. To sustain a take for six minutes and keep it interesting and entertaining is a feat I challenge any of today’s television chefs to attempt. Is the production quality of Floyd’s show the greatest? Hardly. But his energy, excitement, and profound knowledge about what he’s doing, along with some impressive handheld camerawork, makes for an incredibly dynamic and entertaining cooking show.

In one episode he is hunkered down with the Royal Navy somewhere in Cornwall and cooks Portuguese man-of-war (a dish I had never heard of that combines pork, onions, tomatoes, and a variety of mollusks) in rectangular pans over a makeshift stove of mud and bricks on a characteristically miserable gray English afternoon, while slurping rum from a teacup. The whole sequence, which is composed of only a few shots, happens very quickly and is as wonderfully entertaining as it is bizarre. Do we know how the dish tastes? No, we don’t. But does it really matter? Not to me.

Floyd made us feel like any one of us could make any of the dishes he made even with the most rudimentary kitchen kit, the most primitive fire source, in the worst weather, in the middle of fucking nowhere, while swilling just about anything alcoholic from a tin can. Besides being entertaining, whether he was roughing it or cooking in the kitchen of a Michelin-starred restaurant, Floyd was incredibly informative, and you walked away from each show feeling that you had actually learned something about the history and culture that were the root of the dishes he prepared with such assurance. He did this without being precious or pedantic, spitting out the information quickly as he chopped, stirred, sautéed, basted, and of course, in his words, “slurped.”

He died at the age of sixty-five of a heart attack. Too many years of smoking and excessive drinking took their toll on an autodidactic cook who taught real chefs more than a thing or two and gave great pleasure to many food lovers all over the globe. What Keith Floyd did by taking the cooking show out of the studio into the streets, onto the seas, and up to the mountaintops changed the face of food television for better and forever. Those of us in that world should take a lesson from his irreverent improvisatory style and follow in his peripatetic footsteps.



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I remember my acting teacher George Morrison telling us that audiences love to watch people eating, drinking, or smoking on stage and screen. This always stuck with me. As usual, he was more than right. Having seen countless films and plays since my college days, I know there is indeed something very compelling about watching someone carry out a very necessary mundane task. It humanizes them and therefore allows us to connect to them. It’s probably one of the reasons why people love food movies and there are so many cooking shows on television now. Also, we want to see the process, either because it’s something we love to do ourselves or because it’s something we aspire to do. But we also want to see the reaction to the result of the process because we aren’t there to taste it ourselves. Was all that effort worth it? Could I do that? Does it taste as good as it looks? Or, perhaps most important, does it really taste as good as they’re saying it does?

This is a bit of a bugbear of mine. Whether it is an actor, a chef, or a cook, I think you can always tell when someone isn’t really tasting something. You don’t even have to look that closely to see that this happens too often on the excessive number of cooking shows that inundate today’s television. It seems that before whatever is being eaten has touched the tongue of the chef/host/cook, they are rolling their eyes in ecstasy, moaning and shaking their head as if it’s the most delicious thing ever to have crossed their lips. To make matters worse, before they have even finished swallowing, the word “perfect” is sanctimoniously whispered.

All I can say is, no. No. Sorry. I don’t believe you. There is no possible way that you are actually tasting whatever you ate that quickly and that whatever the hell you made is actually that extraordinary. And who the fuck ever, even brilliant chefs, makes something that is “perfect” right out of the gate every time? More often than not, there is something not quite right. It’s too sweet, or not sweet enough, or needs more salt or pepper or oil, or there’s too much… whatever! To see someone adjust seasoning or comment on what has worked or doesn’t work in a dish is a thousand times more interesting and instructive than their giving themselves a clearly false pat on the back for their culinary genius.