Paul Levy
Dining Out
Steal the Menu: A Memoir of Forty Years in Food
By Raymond Sokolov
Alfred A Knopf 242pp £17.04 order from our bookshop
Growing Up in Restaurants: The Story of Eating Out in Britain from 55BC to Nowadays
By James Pembroke
Quartet Books 315pp £17.50 order from our bookshop
Raymond Sokolov, then of Newsweek, was the first English-language journalist to notice and write about the radical things that were happening in the kitchens of French chefs in the early 1970s. He spotted Paul Bocuse and Michel Guérard well before the rest of us had any idea what was going on – indeed, he ate his first eye-opening nouvelle cuisine meal in 1969 at Les Frères Troisgros in Roanne. What made it so different? First, his saumon à l’oseille was plated up in the kitchen by the chef himself, not served from a silver platter by the waiter; second, the salmon was not the usual thick steak of fish, but escalope-thin; third, cooked only for seconds, it remained moist; and fourth, its sauce not only had no flour, but was very obviously made from the cooking liquid, some butter, very little cream and a chiffonade of sorrel alone.
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