Back once again in the age of the dinosaurs

A sardine dish from Venice and a visit from the police.

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I am not apologetic in the slightest to the locals of Venice for the heresy that I have written below, as I believe I have indeed made their dish better than how I initially found it.

And that is my humble opinion.

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West Berkshire, October 2024

Something very special that hails from the Veneto region, is Sarde in saor. A plate of sweetly pickled, warm sardine fillets, softened caramelised onions, sharp vinegar and plump sultanas.

Now if I were obeying the rules of Italian cookery (which I don’t) I would add pine nuts. Instead, I like to use almonds, fennel seeds and strips of roasted lemon peel, trimmed thinly of its bitter pith so it curls, twisting, golden and shiny as it cooks with the fennel seeds. I finish with the toasted whole almonds, cut into four and then a dusting of fennel pollen.

The heresy.

As I make it.

I was first shown this dish, (one that has always remained very special to me), whilst working in a well-known London kitchen a long time ago, where I was a Sous for a couple of years. A kitchen where our head chef would regularly and energetically throw the copper sauté pans across the kitchen at us, if and when we made a mistake.

They were usually hot, full of whatever was on the go at that precise moment, or whatever he could grab, and would whizz past your head or across the stove landing with a loud clang and a clatter, banging and hissing into whatever was in front of you, on occasion ricocheting off you mid trajectory, usually covering you in hot foie gras fat, pigeon jus or a garnish of something warm and buttery.

Chef would often work himself into a terrible rage, usually just before lunch service, fuelled by multiple espressos and the perceived inefficiencies of others, whilst pacing around the central island where we all nervously stood at our sections, him winding himself up like a clockwork toy, leaving us wondering if, much like the day before, he would send us all down on ten covers.

Mo had suffered a slight breakdown the night before, so we were one chef down.

He’d convinced himself that MI5 had been trying to recruit him in his local supermarket on his way home earlier that week along with something to do with ‘the spiders’ that nobody quite understood, culminating in him selecting one of my large chopping knives from the bench, pointing it straight at Joss and slowly walking backwards out of the kitchen mumbling something about cameras, edging nervously step by step, up the spiral stairs and out of the back door into the dark west London night, never to be seen again.

Perhaps he went to work for the security services after all?

Grégoire, an excellent pastry commis (who incidentally looked like Fred West, and a fact confirmed by a police officer no less) was so terrified of service, that he once went missing for two days.

Now it must be said that Greg had some peculiar habits, none of which shall be mentioned here, and so if he was late for a shift, although thoroughly inconvenient, we wouldn’t be overly worried (some of you who read this might be familiar with the alleged ‘ahem’ incident of the wardrobe in the hotel room, and for those that weren’t privy to what went on in those heady days, then it’s best left untold).

Two days on the missing list however was unheard of.

We ended up telephoning around the hospitals on the second day in case he had ended up in the emergency room, so worried we were, eventually reporting his disappearance to the police.

A weary-looking sergeant arrived in the restaurant with a young constable in tow, to ask us where we thought he might be, what he looked like and if any peculiarities might give any clue to his whereabouts. Seeing as Greg was in fact the spitting image of the UK’s most notorious serial killer, one Frederick West, we thought it best to enlighten the officers as so striking was the resemblance we thought it only pertinent to share, as a chap who so closely looked like the man responsible for those terrible murders in Gloucestershire all those years ago, and a face burned into the minds of the British public, should be quite easy to find if indeed he was actually missing.