My mum bought me a copy of White Heat when I first started cooking. I still have it. The black-and-white photographs taken by Bob Carlos Clarke are stunning. He captured this tall, rock-star-looking, cigarette-smoking, scraggy-haired bloke in a striped butcher’s apron, wearing trainers and cleaning the stove. Everything about it was real.
The first part of the book is all stories and photos, but the second part is jaw-droppingly beautiful pictures of food in colour. There are so many brilliant dishes: pigeon; woodcock; a rump of Scottish beef with girolles and lentils; Marco’s version of peach melba; salmon with basil sauce and beurre blanc, and his nod to Pierre Koffmann – a stuffed pig’s trotter. It’s not science-based cooking. People often see cooking as a skill set, but so much of it is about the ingredients. Much of the best food is made in the buying.
As a young chef, I tried to cook most things in the book. The first thing was the nougat parfait. It’s like a set ice-cream. It takes a bit of work but it’s amazing, a beautiful dish. I also chose it because it’s not massively difficult: you can spend a bit of time creating it and then put it in the freezer. Marco’s lemon tart is also perfection. It’s so simple.
The recipes are world-class – it’s three Michelin-star cooking – but the thing about the book is the enthusiasm: it’s emotive. What the home cook should get from it is that cooking isn’t just a chore.
There’s no such thing as a brand new recipe – most things have been done before. Marco didn’t do anything new: these were all dishes he learned to cook from great French or British chefs, but he brought a new energy to them. For me, it’s always been a point of reference for classic things done very well – take the Scotch rump of beef with girolles. There’s always a version of that kind of simple cooking at this time of year at my pub, The Coach.
The first time I came across Marco, I was having lunch with another chef in Restaurant Marco Pierre White; I was 19 or 20. I didn’t meet him, but Marco walked through the room and he had this dynamic aura, it was very special.
When he brought out the 25th-anniversary edition of White Heat, he asked me if I would like to write something. That is up there with the proudest moments of my cooking career. I don’t think many chefs my age would have gone into the industry without this book or would have stayed in it.
It was gritty, it was earthy, it was dirt-under-the-fingernails cooking. It was just like the kitchens I was working in. The book resonated with so many British chefs. It made sense of everything and it made you feel you were part of something revolutionary. Suddenly, it was cool to be working at midnight.
I wouldn’t have the career that I do without White Heat, so appearing in the anniversary edition was special to me.
For me, Marco is the greatest. Without him, I wouldn’t be here.
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