Seduction cuisine for bachelors, by Alex Renton
When I first started to cook for women, I was impressed by a pasta-for-dummies book that featured the simple sauce — a dressing, really — aglio, olio e peperoncino (garlic, oil and chilli). The blurb ran: “This exquisitely simple yet elegant supper is a favourite of the Roman bachelor, who might make it in his apartment for a lady friend on returning from an evening at La Scala.”
The reality, of course, was more hum-drum. “Would you like to come back to my place for spaghetti with garlic and chilli?” I would suavely ask my date as we left the movies. “You what?” she would reply, deeply sceptical. “You call that dinner?”
“Well, I’ve got some Parmesan.”
But the spirit of this dish is right. Bachelor cooking should — in the Playboy world where Cary Grant or Sean Connery wields skillet withoutbreaking sweat — be elegant, simple and apparently effortless. Ian Fleming, Bond’s creator, only published one recipe: it was for scrambled eggs with fines herbes, served with pink champagne. I had a mate whose reputation was built on just one kitchen trick, but that was a perfect cheese soufflé: it would appear without fuss, immaculately risen and a golden tropical tan on top. A sure-fire pulling dish — a tightrope recipe executed with insouciance.
Classic bachelor cuisine is spicy and eye-opening: the man-about-town’s store cupboard needs anchovies, capers, truffle oil, smoked roe and Tabasco in it. Perfectly formed savouries — devils on horseback, kidneys, anchovy toast, a spicy welsh rarebit, an immaculate mushroom sauce — are proper chaps’ dishes. But they’re not necessarily useful for seduction. Girls are more moved by artifice: my wife’s fondest memory of food for love is a perfect mango, beautifully cut (not by me).
I’ve asked lots of women what was the first dish a boyfriend cooked for them. Many complain that the kitchen revealed the caveman: slabs of meat or fish to prove the potential mate’s skill as a hunter-gatherer. I used to do surprising risottos: squid, ceps and chianti was a favourite. This had its failings but it came out a wonderful purple. I would serve it with a radicchio and chicory on white plates amid mauve candles. That was the 1990s of course. I looked up GQ magazine to see what today’s young buck is cooking — or what style gurus think he should cook. What I found was a recipe for “beer-braised beef”, a dish for lads, not suave bachelors.
Gentlemen, of course, cook mainly offal. The writer William Coles, who has just published a life of that kitchen bad boy, Lord Lucan (Legend Books), claims to have uncovered the dish that Lucan would cook late at night to bolster his spirits after a ruinous evening at the Clermont Club. It was devilled kidneys. Some people can’t stand kidneys: the smell and leathery texture closes a door on many women. But devilling, with its Raj-era spicing is a gorgeous way to serve any pungent meat.
Here I’ve slightly adapted Fergus Henderson’s recipe for kidneys, which comes from his great “nose to tail” cookbook The Whole Beast, which every red-blooded bachelor should own. Henderson suggests eating them for breakfast with Black Velvet (champagne and Guinness, mixed 50/50); but I like serving them at the end of a dinner party, as a savoury.
Devilled kidneys
Ingredients
8 lambs’ kidneys (two per person is quite a lot)
3 dessertspoon flour
1 tsp hot cayenne
1 tsp Colman’s mustard powder
Knob of butter
Worcestershire sauce
30ml chicken stock
Wholemeal toast
Clean the kidneys until their skin fat and gristle is gone (the butcher may do this for you). Cut them in half lengthways with a sharp knife (or smaller if you don’t like kidneys pink in the middle) . Mix all the spices with the flour and roll the kidneys in them until well coated. Melt a good chunk of butter in a hot pan, and cook for two minutes each side, with a hearty splash of Worcestershire sauce. Then add a further splash of chicken stock. Remove the kidneys and put them on the toast, turn up the heat so the sauce reduces and emulsifies, and pour it over.
I am not sure that --even if Cary Grant had served me-- devilled kidneys would have done the trick...
