However, had a young Pierre Koffmann not been so keen on rugby, British cooking might have been infinitely poorer. In , Pierre left France for England "just for six months," he recalls, "and mostly because I wanted to see France play England at Twickenham. They understood what their diners wanted. In , the cuisine at Le Gavroche was not as refined as it would later become. I drink his coffee at home. I only ever like to work with the finest ingredients, and he does the same.
It has always been very important in my restaurants, too: it's the last taste people have of the meal. By , Pierre had impressed so much that he was offered the job of head chef at the brothers' Waterside Inn, their new venture beside the Thames in Bray.
The cuisine was good but people weren't always there for the food. At the weekends, there was even a disc jockey and dancing: Showaddywaddy, Mud and Sweet. It is difficult to imagine that at the Waterside today. Gradually, Pierre's cooking became the primary attraction, and Michelin stars followed. In , he left to fulfil a dream he had long nurtured and start his own restaurant in Chelsea: "actually, I never had a 'Tante Claire'!
She was the aunt of a friend of mine, and I had never met her. That childhood is at the heart of Memories of Gascony, his beautiful, nostalgic love letter to a rural French way of life that has more or less disappeared. As a boy, Pierre lived in the town of Tarbes, but holidays were spent at his grandparents' farm in Saint-Puy, a tiny village km to the north. His grandmother Camille was an excellent cook, and the book is liberally spiced with Pierre's recipes for the food he enjoyed as a child.
The recipes are superb, hugely evocative of both place and time, but it is the reminiscences that link the recipes together that make it one of the finest books about food ever written. She also, bravely, does all the cooking at home.
