When it comes to food, I like my meals simple. Steak with salt. Chapati, rice and dahl. Cake without cream. Fried egg with lashings of butter on a thick slice of sourdough toast.
I appreciate when my television chefs are fuss free, too. Which is why I’ve never particularly been a fan of Heston Blumenthal.
I’ve always thought Blumenthal had an unnecessarily complex relationship to the idea of taste. Theatrical. His , like his food, are always thematic. There is always a story. A drama. Sometimes even a costume.
A friend of mine well versed in fine dining had the experience of eating at Blumenthal’s in 2015. She loved so much about it. She loved the concept and the aura and the esteem of being one of so few to sit at his Melbourne tables.
The dishes she was a lot less sure of. Some were amazing. Some were simply confronting. Some failed in the execution.
In other words, she enjoyed a dining experience that was entertaining, thought provoking and – occasionally – pleasurable.
But is this eating? Is this food?
By asking that question, of course, what I’m really asking is whether food as Blumenthal imagines it could ever relate to me. This year, I discover an answer to that question.
A little while back Blumenthal made an appearance on to speak on Melbourne’s hosting of the 2017 world’s 50 best restaurants announcements.
I didn’t see the program. But the next day, looking for information on another piece I was writing, I came across a published in criticism of Blumenthal’s previous night’s live appearance.
Driven to find and watch the full segment I was – at video’s end – moved to completely redefine my understanding of what Blumenthal’s eccentricity brings to our everyday understanding of food.
“This might seem a little bit tangential,” he begins, before going on to ultimately explain that we make a mistake in intellectualising our relationship to food, because the value in food is primal and sensory.
But the real gift in watching those five minutes of television is in seeing how Blumenthal gets to that explanation – that he gives us a peek inside his house of belief so that we may see the fantastically opulent ideas with which it is furnished [check out our Heston Blumenthal recipe collection ]
In here, we can see the odyssey he’s taken to remove food so far from its predictable taste and appearance that it is sometimes no longer just food at all, but rather an edible narrative whose ingredients are comprised of culture and experience and emotion and memory – an experience that is deeply personal.
And because Blumenthal is out there creating those links between food, experience and culture (alongside prestigious alum such as or ), they become cemented as something that we, as individuals can tap in to – that we DO tap in to – when it comes our time to eat and to cook.
Doubtful?
The reason we, as home cooks, push for organic and for fusion and for local and for cross-cultural in our kitchens is because the vanguard has been pushing boundaries on those fronts for years .
This constant re-orientation of what we think about how and what we eat is what keeps us engaged with understanding ourselves in relation to the world in which we live.
It’s what connects us to food and food to us.
Heston’s outlandishness today is our expanded culinary framework of tomorrow.
In the interests of our own potential and experience, I’ve come to hope that Blumenthal’s weird and wonderful landscape of food ideas keeps being sown.
Watch Heston as he explores the best of British food and adds that eccentric Blumenthal touch - or find more of heston's Great British Food on .
