If you ask me, the best cooking videos on
YouTube are, surprisingly, these infomercials
for infamously high-sodium dehydrated broth
products featuring an over-the-hill British
celebrity chef who can barely be bothered
to try anymore.
Believe it or not, I think there's some great
things you can learn about cooking and about
life by watching Marco Pierre White half-heartedly
smear a steak with a smushed up bouillon cube
while generally making an art of being "over
it." Being "over it" is basically my favorite
trait in other people, and it's one of my
favorite feelings on the occasion that I'm
able to experience it.
Before I proceed, I want to acknowledge that
there's a lot of reason to believe that Marco
White is, or at least sometimes can be, a
terrible person. And we'll get to that.
If you're in the United States, there's a
good chance you don't even know who Marco
Pierre White is. This is basically the one
place in the English-speaking world where
Marco Pierre White has not been a major pop-culture
figure for going on 30 years. He just never
seemed to break through here the way his one-time
protege Gordon Ramsay did.
"Where's the lamb sauce?"
"Come on, man."
But a lot of people trace the birth of today's
global celebrity chef movement to Marco Pierre
White. He is, arguably, patient zero for a
phenomenon that I do believe is a plague upon
us, but that's a topic for another day. Prior
to Marco, cooking was rarely viewed as a high-status
profession. Working in the kitchen was basically
like working in the laundry. This is something
Anthony Bourdain talked and wrote about a
lot in his too-short life. Bourdain is on
record as saying that everything changed for
both him and for his trade when these iconic
photos by Bob Carlos Clarke hit the world
in 1990, in particular this one.
There he his. Jim Morrison in an apron. A
wire-thin jackrabbit of relentless, obstinate
culinary perfectionism. The dyslexic child
of an alcoholic working-class widower, he
was beaten down by the English schooling system
that most of us know only from Pink Floyd
songs. You have to wonder if it was that chip
on White's shoulder that drove him to demand
respect as a young chef — to say to the
aristocratic twits in his dining room, "I
am good enough to walk among you. You will
not treat me as an untouchable, to be neither
seen nor heard whilst I service your gluttony.
I am an artist and you are merely passing
through my gallery." As he clawed his way
up the English social ladder that was infamously
light on rungs, he seemed to drag his entire
lowly profession up with him — or at least
so goes the legend.
For what it's worth, I think that interpretation
of history may be a bit overblown. Certainly
there were high-status celebrity chefs before
Marco Pierre White, but none of them were
as media-savvy as he was.
The footage I've been showing you is from
two series about Marco that aired on Britain's
ITV circa 1989. To the British media, White
was basically their bad boyfriend — they
loved him because he was mean to them. Check
this legendary clip.
"Floyd's coming in for lunch. Does he eat
at Harvey's a lot?"
"Yes."
"You've become quite friendly with him, haven't
you?"
"Yes."
"There's nothing like monosyllabic answers,
is there?"
"No."
"There's no point in doing this, Marco."
"Well, fine, you can go then. The door's over
there."
"IF you're not going to cooperate with the
shows..."
"You know, all I've got to do is make the
sauce. That is what I'm being paid for. Not
being paid for anything else. To make the
@*#$ing sauce."
As long as I live, you'll never convince me
that was a sincere outburst. I think Marco
knew exactly what he was doing, cultivating
— or, to some extent, inventing — the
volatile genius persona that Gordon Ramsay
would imitate into self-parody.
"WHERE'S THE LAMB SAUCE?"
"Right here, chef, I have it."
What you can also see in these videos is the
kind of cuisine that Marco was cooking — the
plates that made him the then-youngest chef
ever to earn the maximum of three Michelin
stars. The dishes look pretty dated, and some
of them are positively baroque, none more
so than this dessert of caramelized pears
with honey ice cream.
There's the poached pears. He brûlées them
— nice. Then about 15,000 garnishes go on
the plate. OK, that's you did in those days.
A little edible dish goes down, ice cream
goes in there and then done, right? Oh sure,
well you gotta have cherry on top and then
we eat it right? Ok, and then WHAT THE ^$%& IS
THAT A SUGAR BIRD'S NEST? Has the phrase "gilding
the lily" ever been more apt?
OK, now fast forward a couple of decades,
and this is the Marco we see making cooking
videos for Knorr, the stock cube manufacturer
now owned by multinational food and consumer
products giant Unilever. This Marco has no
time for sugar bird's nests. He has time for
exactly two things: his sponsor — this video,
by the way, is brought to you by Skillshare,
more about them later — and he has time
for the food he actually likes.
Back in his salad days, Marco took more haute
cuisine to bed than most could ever dream
of. Now he just wants to settle down with
a nice rib of beef and knock out a few Yorkshire
puddings.
I love this Marco. I love his physique — not
so much fat as swollen with pleasure. He looks
like my feet feel when I've had too much wine.
I even love how lazy and occasionally just
wrong he is. Like, he's got this thing that
he says every single time he sautés some
onion — does it every single time.
"What I'm doing is is I'm cooking them without
color, just to soften them, to remove the
water content within them, to remove the acidity,
to bring out their natural sweetness."
"As always, cook your onions to remove the
water content, to remove the acidity, to allow
the natural sweetness."
He really can't be bothered to come up with
a new thing to say about onions; he just busts
out that old warhorse, every single time.
And onions, of course, are not particularly
acidic — they have a pH between 5 and 6,
like basically most vegetables. What he's
talking about is the pungency of onions, which
comes from their sulfur compounds — compounds
that you can, indeed, break down by cooking
them.
This is a boarder phenomenon you see among
experienced practitioners who are suddenly
called upon to be teachers. Practitioners
tend to know really well what works; they
tend to have not such a good handle on why
it works.
I mean, here's Marco explaining why you whisk
liquid into a roux bit-by-bit when making
a sauce.
"You whisk it in to incorporate air into it.
By incorporating the air, you break down the
starch. You work it."
Yeah, I'm pretty sure everything about that
explanation is wrong. But the technique works.
I just kinda love that he doesn't care whether
what he's saying is right, or credible, or
coherent, or consistent.
"Most people make their shepherd's pie too
dry. I like my shepherd's pie quite wet."
"A lot of people tend to make their mince
too wet."
Now, I understand that you might find the
false confidence of a high-status man to be
infuriating rather than charming. It's especially
infuriating in light of Marco's recent interview
with the Irish Independent in which he said
that men are better than women in the professional
kitchen, because "they are not as emotional
and they don’t take things personally."
Yes, that quote was given by this guy:
"Clearly agitated Marco asks the cameras to
stop rolling."
"Don't tape me on this one, please. It's been
frozen. It's ^@%#. I want to know why. It's
very simple, isn't it? I don't want to be
filmed, you understand? Do not film what I
say, do not film me. Have some &@^$ing respect.
Do not push me. I don't think you understand
what I am. I control myself very well."
So look, I'm not here to tell you you're wrong
if you think MPW is a POS. I am here to say
there's something we could all learn from
how few &#%@s he gives about what either of
us thinks of him — and also how such a supremely
accomplished chef on this earth could be so
unconcerned with impressing anybody with his
food anymore.
I think the single biggest breakthrough in
my own cooking came somewheres around the
age of 30, when I stopped trying to cook to
impress all the damn time, which if I'm honest
had maybe been my primary motivation up to
that point. I kinda realized that was, indeed,
the most selfish way to cook. "Here, I'm not
giving you this to give you pleasure, or to
make you feel nourished or nurtured. I am
here to make you sit there and be awed by
me." Sounds great, doesn't?
These Marco Knorr videos helped me liberate
myself and my loved ones from that particularly
oppressive prison. And once you're out, you
can go on a much more gratifying and still
challenging journey of discovering what you
and the people around you actually like to
eat. And I love how Marco acknowledges that
is not neessarily an easy thing to do.
"So it's about finding that balance of what
you like. It's all about eating."
"Why should there be a recipe? Why can't it
just be feel? A philosophy. It's what I like
to eat — taste. If you don't taste your
food, you don't know what it's gonna be like
at the end."
It's what you gotta do. Put in a little bit,
taste it, put in a little bit more, taste
it until you like it. And even then, you might
sit down to dinner and be like, "This isn't
really doing it for me." It takes practice
to learn yourself.
Really, it's rather like our intimate relationships,
right? When you're a kid, you don't really
know who you need to be with or what you need
from them in order to be fulfilled. What you
have is somebody else's idea of what is or
is not desirable. It's usually only through
a lot of sloppy experimentation that we figure
ourselves out enough to get who and what we
want — and becoming a person who knows themselves
is usually the first step toward becoming
the kind of person whom someone else will
want.
Now, as valuable as these lessons may be,
let's say that you want to learn something
that's a little more specific, and learn it
from someone who doesn't have the false confidence
of an impossibly high-status man. Might I
suggest the sponsor of this video? Skillshare.
Skillshare is an online learning community
with thousands and thousands of classes covering
all kinds of creative and entrepreneurial
skills.
You know, I posted a video last week that
I was really happy with because I felt that
it demonstrated some progress in my still
nascent skills as a cinematographer. I'd barely
touched a real camera until a few years ago.
But the people who watched this video said
they were kinda more impressed with the music,
which I had composed myself. This was funny
to me, because basically all of my formal
schooling is in music composition. It's not
in journalism, or cooking, or filmmaking,
or teaching. But at the risk of exuding precisely
the kind of false confidence that I was just
decrying a moment ago, I have a little bit
of game in all of those areas now, and that's
not because I'm just so damn awesome. It's
really just because I'm old. Life is long,
and if you just don't stop learning, it's
amazing how many distinct skills you can amass
as the years march on and on, and Skillshare
can help you do that.
Since we're talking about music, let me recommend
the excellent music mixing and mastering classes
taught by Young Guru.
"Recording use to be sort of a black art,
because it was passed down by word of mouth.
Yes, there's science in it, but the things
that make particular engineers special were
things that were passed down to them. So that's
the complete reason why we need to take this
information and make it available to the public,
so the art form doesn't die."
Sure, you could spend a couple hundred bucks
on some software and watch enough free YouTube
tutorials to cobble together an understanding
of how to use it, but that's not really how
most people learn well. That is not a class.
Most people learn well in a structured environment,
and that's what you get from Skillshare. You
get a logical progression — building upon
skill upon skill upon skill — what they
call scaffolding in education theory.
Premium Skillshare membership gives you unlimited
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than $10 a month, that is a steal, compared
to all the other ways that you could take
a class. And hey, because you watch me, you
can follow my link in the description and
two months of Skillshare Premium for free.
And while I really do kinda love Marco Pierre
White, I doubt any of you would want an instructor
who would say something as stupid as this:
"What I always search for, when I'm looking
for meat, is a coating of fat around the eye
of the meat, because that tells you what's
in the meat. If there's not fat coating, you
might as well eat cardboard."
Yeah, you know what's an even better indication
of what's in the meat? LOOKING AT WHAT'S IN
THE MEAT, BECAUSE A STEAK IS DEFINITIONALLY
A CROSS SECTION OF MUSCLE. SO IF THERE'S NO
MARBLING IN THERE, THEN THERE'S NO MARBLING
IN THERE. IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT THE BUTCHER
DID OR DID NOT TRIM OFF OF THE OUTSIDE. Marco,
go home. Take a stock cube. Go to bed.
