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Marco Pierre White grew up in Leeds, lost his mother when he was six and left school at sixteen without any qualifications. He arrived in London with just over seven pounds in his pocket and apprenticed under Albert Roux at Le Gavroche, followed by Pierre Koffmann and Raymond Blanc.
In 1987 he opened Harveys in Wandsworth, aged 25. Eight years later he had three Michelin stars, making him both the youngest chef ever to achieve them and the first Briton to do so.
The photographs are by Bob Carlos Clarke, who was not a food photographer but worked in fashion and erotica. That explains entirely why the book looks like an album cover rather than a cookbook.
The recipes are genuinely difficult. Tagliatelle with oysters and caviar, pig's trotter, everything at restaurant level and without simplification. The anniversary edition contains new material and commentary from, among others, Gordon Ramsay, Tom Kerridge and Anthony Bourdain.
In 1999, White handed back his three stars and stopped cooking professionally. He was 38.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 192
Language: English
First published: 1990, this edition 2015
The Kitchen Lab Selection
It turned cooking into a job people choose rather than one they end up in. Before 1990 a chef was kitchen staff and nothing more. Invisible, glimpsed through a hatch, entering from the yard. Bob Carlos Clarke's photographs of a then 28-year-old Marco Pierre White, sweating, smoking and visibly in the middle of something very hard, showed instead someone you wanted to become, and the chef became a rock star. An entire generation of British chefs entered the trade for that reason, Gordon Ramsay among them, and he worked for White as well.
White Heat is not chosen primarily for its recipes, but for its cult status.
