Parfait de mousse de foie de volaille aux framboises does sound nicer, doesn’t it? In fact, and yes I’m showing my linguistic prejudices here, all menus sound better in French than English.Crème anglaise or custard with that, madam? Vichyssoise or cold leek and potato soup?It’s an easy choice.This chicken liver and raspberry mousse is pretty easy; a little cooking, some assembly required, there you go.Start with your chicken livers; no need to do much to them, just put them into a frying pan and heat them through in a little melted butter. I did this with 600 grammes of livers.Next, the slightly difficult part: mix them up them force them through a sieve. Yes, against their will if necessary.I cook them in a saucepan so I can mix them up with a hand blender and then sieve them; if you wish, you could use a frying pan and then a blender, which I never use. Blenders are something else to go wrong, less versatile than a hand blender and much harder to clean to boot. But it’s your choice.It takes a while to do this and it it pretty messy. There are other ways to do this, but this is the easiest overall. Traditionally when cooking chicken livers you trim them by cutting out the veins and cells and crunchy bits before frying them off, and if you’re putting them in a salad then that is what you should do.However, to get the perfect parfait you do need to ensure no nasty bits are left in them, so you sieve them anyway. So cut out the first bit and do this anyway = 10 minutes of your life back, you’re welcome.I put my sieve on top of a close-fitting stainless steel bowl and force the livers through using a wooden spatula. It works well, but you could use plastic or silicone scrapers if you prefer. The object it to get all the meat through and leave behind the stringy bits.In the bowl I’ve already put two 250g packs of butter, on salted one unsalted. The mousse will start to melt the butter, making it easier to mix them up. Once you’ve finished sieving the livers, add in 500g of raspberries and 100ml of raspberry vinegar. Then you mix it all together to a smooth paste.You can do this with a wooden spoon or even your hands, and your resulting parfait will be denser; I use a hand mixer and it makes the mixture quite airy and light.Scrape around the bottom and sides of the bowl with a spoon a couple of times to ensure it mixes well, then put it into individual ramekins, large ramekins, whatever you want depending on how you want to portion this up.Then cook it in a bain marie for 30-60 minutes at 150°C – until the temperature inside gets over about 75°C. For the bain marie I use a regular oven dish into which I pour a kettle of boiling water. Bains marie ensure that whatever your cooking’s bottom doesn’t get over 100°C, so it doesn’t cook to quickly or too much and dry out.Allow the resulting parfait to cool down after cooking before refrigerating; I keep it for 3 days in the fridge or 3 months in the freezer.Spread on toasted sourdough, it’s delicious. 

Cooks are, by and large, not People Persons. Waiters, sure, they like people well enough to be able to look them in the eye, smile and not laugh when you ask stupid questions.

Cooks, mostly, can’t do that. They want to shoulder-barge you out of the way so they can get to peeling the potatoes or gutting the fish or dressing their plate. What they want is to make you some nice food, for you to enjoy it, and then for you to go home.

What they don’t want is for you to tell them how they should have written the menu. That you’d like the beef but with the sauce from the lamb. And the vegetables you think should be served with the fish. And on the side, please. Put the sauce on the side. In a pretty little pot. So I can dip my fries in it. Because now that you think about it you’d prefer fries to mashed potato. Even though there are no fries anywhere on the menu.

Can you not read? Was it not clear on the menu? You won’t like the rosemary jus with the beef, and the steamed spinach isn’t suitable for the beef or the lamb. And we don’t have a deep-fat frier.

And then you ordered your beef rare but send it back because it’s not cooked enough. 

Cooks want you to arrive at the beginning of service. Come at 7, if that’s when the restaurant opens. 8 at the latest. 9 if you must, but order quickly. If it says that last orders are at 9:30 pm, don’t turn up at 9.29 and expect the kitchen to love you for your custom. Expect them to grunt and moan and whinge about your lack of consideration.

And if you do turn up one minute before the end of service, don’t hum and haw over your order and not be able to decide. And don’t, whatever you do, order the tasting menu if you arrive so late.

Of course, most people won’t know about any of this wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in the kitchen; that’s why restaurants employ waiters. But certainly in restaurants where staff work limited hours for very low wages – see my earlier article on this topic – if you stop the kitchen getting out by, say, 10pm when their wages finish, they won’t be happy with you.

What you won’t get is the mythical spitting-in-your-food treatment; I have never, ever witnessed this in all my years cooking. And you won’t get lower quality food than someone who treated the kitchen with respect – cooks live to serve good food, period.

But there will be a few people more in the world who don’t like you very much.

The example I always quote is from Christmas, 2009. The restaurant where I was working was closing on Christmas Eve after the lunch service for three days. Chef had already left to go on his Christmas vacation, so there was just me and the dishwasher to do the lunch service. Which, as we’d told the owner repeatedly, would not be worth doing; most French people do NOT go out to eat lunch on Christmas Eve.

So we hadn’t stocked the kitchen with anything fresh, the ‘Menu du jour’ was what was left in the fridges together with anything interesting we could find in the freezers. The salad of the day was bamboo shoots from a can, mostly. We did three covers, clients leaving the hotel (which was also closing for three days) as soon as we opened at midday.

Then we did nothing; we cleaned the kitchen, changed the oil in the fryer, cleaned again and stood around, the two of us moaning about how stupid it was to open on Christmas Eve.

Until 1.27pm, when I saw two cars pull into the car park behind the hotel and eight – eight! – people get out and walk towards the restaurant. I called the Maitre d’hotel and warned him that we didn’t have any food, certainly not enough for eight people and, anyway, it was closing time.

Unfortunately the restaurant owner caught the arrivals at the door, welcomed them and seated them and gave them the à la carte menu, from which they ordered liberally. Foie gras, pigeon, bull steaks, fish. Starters, puddings, wines, everything. I listened to the order in dismay as the owner read it out and told him, flat out, that we didn’t have two thirds of the dishes he’d allowed the clients to order and that, in any case, it was now 1.45 pm.

But he insisted we serve them, that we defrost everything necessary and serve the group who, it turned out, were old friends of his from his previous workplace whom he’d invited over for lunch.

‘Invited’ in French means that you don’t pay. So we ended up working one and a half hours unpaid overtime on Christmas Eve to serve a group who weren’t even paying for their meal.

And yes, I hated them but yes, I did cook perfect meals for them. Complaining all the time.

Cooks like to complain.

I got into a conversation the other day about warming plates. Nowadays it’s automatic and I always do it. Before I cooked professionally, it was pretty rare – special occasions only, and then only if I remembered.Something else that mystified me was: When should you put a lid on saucepans? When boiling potatoes? When making soup? When browning onions for soup? When making stew? And if so, why? Or why not?In fact, all it takes is a little common sense, like so much in cooking. If you’re heating things up to cook them – boiling potatoes, making soup – then put the lid on. It reduces the cooking time and reduces the energy you need. If you’re trying to colour something, or reduce it down – caramelising onions for soup, or thickening a sauce – then leave the lid off to let the steam out. If you keep the lid on then, duh, it won’t reduce.

When you’re making mayonnaise, or stirring crème anglaise, or holding a baby on your hip while working in the kitchen, you may wish you had an extra hand or two.I learned this trick while trying to make mayonnaise in one of my first restaurant kitchens; the example you see here is me making crème patissière at home. The problem with both these recipes is that you need one hand to do the whisking, a second hand to pour the oil (for mayonnaise) or hot milk (for set custards) and a third one to hold the bowl into which you’re pouring stuff still.So. Take a heavy saucepan and set it on a teatowel on your work surface. Line it with another teatowel. Jam the mixing bowl into the teatowel-lined saucepan so it stays put.Now, you can pour with one hand and whisk with the other without the bowl moving around.

I used to use regular ice cube trays to freeze stock, but it gets complicated in summer in particular when you want to make regular, water ice cubes and accidentally slip some beef stock into your rosé.So now I use ice cube bags. It makes it very simple to use one or a few cubes at a time to add into a cup-a-soup, a sauce or whatever. Here I’m using a dozen chicken stock cubes or so to give some more flavour to the scrapings from the roast chicken tray on Sunday.And yeah, I know I’m not the first person to recommend this but I still think it’s worthwhile.