One of the things that encouraged me to take up cooking professionally was Anthony Bourdain’s book ‘Cooking Confidential’. I enjoyed his swashbuckling stories and formulated a plan to learn to cook and travel the world, mixing it up with fellow kitchen workers from Mexico to Mauritius, living out of a suitcase, three months here, a week there…But then this was at a point in my life where I’d declared that I had only two ambitions: either to become a pirate (which I rejected when I realised that having a leg amputated was a pretty permanent career move) or to pick a fist fight with a clown. Neither came to anything (not many clowns live in rural France), and as it happens I didn’t get to travel the world either, instead I settled down in Avignon instead with the love of my life; but I did take other ideas from Bourdain, especially his maxim that ‘You always go to work no matter what’. I was particularly struck by his line on the suicide of Vatel (he killed himself when the fish order didn’t turn up in time for the banquet he was organising which his boss was throwing for Louis 14th): “Vatel punked out over a late fish delivery and offed himself like a bad poet. Somebody had to cover his station the next day.” Continue reading →