Lunch with Michel Roux

I don’t often see how other people cook. I don’t watch television; I do most of the cooking at home. I’ve even been known to take over my hosts’ kitchen when staying with my family. I like to read cookery books, but there aren’t many cooks I’d go out of my way to see. One of that small group was promoting a new book recently, so I grabbed the chance to watch Michel Roux demonstrating a couple of recipes from his new book, Pastry, a return to his roots for someone who started work in a bakery in Paris 50-odd years ago as a fourteen year old.

Michel Roux has had multiple Michelin stars for decades, and one of my very first cookery books was The Roux Brothers on Patisserie (written jointly with his brother, Albert), which has been my reference for pastry and various associated sauces for 20+ years.

For the demonstration, Roux cooked two recipes from the new book: a savoury “semi-confit tomato” tart using shortcrust pastry, and a sweet apple and passion fruit tartlet that uses puff pastry in the book, but for which he substituted rough puff in the demonstration, explaining that it gives you 80% of the effect of puff pastry for a lot less work, and that it’s perfectly adequate almost all the time for home cooks.

Roux is a natural entertainer. He borrowed a flowered apron from one of the bookshop staff serving lunch at the event, the pink flowers clashing loudly with his burgundy shirt. He explained that recipes weren’t to be followed slavishly, but taken as a starting point, and that tips and techniques were more useful than recipes. The tips that he passed on in this lunchtime talk ranged from damping the baking tray to fix the rough puff pastry circles in place to announcing that he was about to blow his nose because allowing your nose to drip into the pastry was not a good thing. The demonstration – and the book – were aimed more at home cooks than restauranteurs. Although some of the recipes are certainly impressive enough, the main message is that making pastry isn’t at all difficult. It tastes and smells wonderful, and is well worth making at home.

Some of what he said was obvious to most home cooks, but not always to restauranteurs: food must taste good. While waiting in a queue afterwards to get my book signed, I was able to taste the tarts he’d made. They did taste good. And they hadn’t taken a lot of time, effort or fancy equipment.

The recipes in Pastry look fine, and cover homely English pasties and pies along with fancy French pastries, but I already have lots of recipes and agree with Roux that they’re not really the important thing, so I don’t see that they’ll be especially useful for me. What was worth while was watching Roux’s ease with the pastry, and his blank bafflement when asked about pastry shrinking during cooking. Clearly his pastry wouldn’t dare to do such a thing – and certainly the ones he cooked that day kept their shape perfectly. If you’re not used to making pastry, and want a book that will get you started while having enough recipes and variety to last you for years, you could do a lot worse than this one.