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Fergus Henderson trained as an architect and had never worked in a restaurant kitchen when, in 1994, he opened St. John in a former smokehouse beside Smithfield meat market in London. The room is whitewashed, completely undecorated and without music, and looks much the same today.
His argument is not thrift and not provocation, but decency. If you are going to kill an animal, it is only decent to use the whole thing, which is why marrow, kidney, heart, ear and tail sit on the menu alongside the cuts everyone else serves. It sounds severe and the food is the opposite, simple and generous.
His best-known dish is roast bone marrow with parsley salad, three ingredients and hardly any technique to speak of. It now appears on menus all over the world and is probably the most influential British restaurant dish of the past 50 years. Anthony Bourdain said it was the meal he would want to eat last of all.
This volume brings together both of his books, Nose to Tail Eating from 1999 and the 2007 follow-up Beyond Nose to Tail, plus new material. The recipes are absurdly concise and the prose is dry and funny in a way very few cookbooks are.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 416
Language: English
First published: 2012
The Kitchen Lab Selection
The title became a term. Nose to tail is used today as the name for an entire way of working, by chefs who have never read the book and do not know the phrase comes from here.
That rarely happens. A cookbook can sell well, be quoted and stay in print for decades without ever giving a single word to the language.
