The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Chefs and Poets

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What do you get when you cross a poet with a chef?

I dread to think.

A poety chef? A cheffy poet?

How different are poets and chefs anyway?

Earlier today I listened to Pierre Koffman: A Life Through Food (The Food Programme). This is the umpteenth episode of this BBC Radio series I’ve listened to and by now I’m starting to see quite clearly that perhaps poets and chefs are a very similar type of character. If I were to summarise the one big similarity between both though, in one phrase it would be: sense and sensibility. Cooking is ultimately a practical pursuit, which requires things to be done as efficiently as possible, understanding all the while there is a certain sleight of hand and artistry in making the ingredients of a meal more than the sum of its parts. In the same way, poets take the ingredients of the English language and lay them down clearly, within the bounds of syntax and grammar and rhythm and rhyme, to produce something which transcends normal speech, while remaining rooted in normal speech.

There seems to be a sense of obsession

Koffman is clearly obsessed with food, and he talks about how he never minded working 60+ hour weeks because he just loved what he did, the process, the ingredients, and training the new chefs. He talks about ingredients and dishes with a kind of mouthwatering reverence, and that they’re not just meals or elements but something more important than that. For him food, cooking is about identity, it’s a way of life in itself, just like the writer’s life. How many writers have died ill, penniless and alone through their all-consuming desire to write great work?

Childhood and nature seem to be an endless resource

Wordsworth wrote that ‘the child is the father of the man’ and this seems to be true for both poets and chefs. Poets draw on their child epiphanies, disappointments, revelations, while chefs like Koffman use it as inspiration for famous meals, such as his signature dish of pigs trotters. At one point he describes going to the market with his mother in such granular detail that you feel like you’re in the market with him, bartering for some produce. Marcus Wareing, whose father was a greengrocer, also talks about how important the market was to his understanding of seasonality and produce. Both poets and chefs, I think, share a connection with the natural world in this way, as we see from Wordsworth’s The Prelude or Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ – both disciplines encourage an intense sensitivity towards the changing faces of the year.

Apprenticeship, mentoring and passing it on

This idea of apprenticeship and serving your time as the vegetable chopper before moving up through the ranks to saucier seems to be really important to Koffman, and you get the sense that he’s sad to see that sense of progression and discipline lost from modern kitchens who can’t afford to pay such a huge number of chefs. He believes, it seems, in a sense of hierarchy in the kitchen and earning your stripes, as it were. Beckett’s mantra to ‘fail better’ is now engrained in the writing process of many writers, and Yeats also wrote much about ‘the trade’ of poetry: ‘Irish poets learn your trade’. I somehow struggle to imagine Yeats deboning a pigs trotter, though, and think he may have been better desk-bound, and suited to the ‘sedantry trade’ of writing as he, himself, called it. Seamus Heaney was seen as one of the great mentors of the next generation, and there have been others since who have taken on mentoring roles to great effect, some who are known better as mentors and shaping new groups and styles than for their own writing, perhaps, such as Roddy Lumsden. In either world, though, there seems to be a sense of reverence for the mentor and learning from the more experienced master craftsman.

Simplicity is everything

‘Simplicity does not necessarily rule out beauty’ writes Escoffier in Le Guide Culinaire. Cecil Day Lewis wrote of the poetry of Robert Frost: ‘it is the simplicity not of nature but of a serious and profoundly critical spirit.’ When I listen to Pierre Koffman as with many other chefs, they are always going on about simplicity and cooking food that is true to your origins, and not getting carried away with complexity and too many confused, clashing flavours. They talk endlessly about the quality of the ingredient and bringing one’s skills to bear in optimising the inherent beauty of the raw ingredient. I can’t help but think this is the same with poets who use the raw material of the everyday English language in order to create something which transcends it and is memorable.

And finally...

If only as many people would buy books of poetry as hot dinners.