When planning menus, a few simple rules help ensure gastronomic success

When planning menus, a few simple rules help ensure gastronomic success

When planning menus, a few simple rules help ensure gastronomic success

At the secondary school I attended it was compulsory to study Home Economics in Years 2 and 3. We had one of those adorable battle-axe teachers with butterfly glasses, who did her bossy best to turn us from budgies to swans in the kitchen.

It was tough love, and she didn’t think twice about throwing us in detention or clipping us behind the ear if we stepped out of line. That said, I think even at that young age, it gave us an excellent grounding in the architecture of food and how to engineer a menu.

I enjoyed Home Ec so much that I elected to do it all through high school. I have a vivid memory of a lunch I prepared for my practical examination in my last year. We had to plan our own menu and I decided to start with a cream of frogs’ legs soup (it was the ’70s), followed by a frilled crown roast of lamb served with pommes chateau and honeyed carrots with fresh violets (don’t ask!). The finale was a chocolate hazelnut swiss roll with fresh strawberries – a recipe by food doyenne Jean Bowring (a contemporary of Margaret Fulton).

My menu was deemed too haughty and I lost points for being overly fancy, and a good deal more for blowing my budget (which I had lied about anyway). My teacher’s parting shot was to tell me that, in her eyes, a carrot should taste of a carrot and superfluous garnishes were the hallmark of a fraud.

Some mentors stay with you forever and with every one of the dozens of menus I write, I ask myself: why am I putting this ingredient with that? Is what I’m adding to the dish going to enhance the flavour of my protagonist, or is it diverting the dish away from what I want it to say?

I’m a real advocate for simple food and more interested in serving nourishing meals than winning hats and stars. That’s not to say that a menu should not have a “wow factor” but, like any theatre, it needs to have big, wide-angle moments as well as more intimate ones.

If I’m hosting a dinner party or proposing a menu for a client, I generally prefer to go easy on (or not include) canapes. Meals are often spoilt by showing too many cards too early, or by filling people up too soon so their capacity for enjoying the meal is diminished.

Humans are like cats when it comes to food. When appetites are on edge, people tend to be more social, which works to your convivial advantage during arrivals, when guests are taking time to feel out the room. Entertaining is about crafting a moment. Its starting point is determined by the dynamic of a meal and the effect to be created. Is it a romantic occasion or is it a rowdy gathering of friends? A menu is a conversation and it should communicate with the room.

The first course needs to be intensely savoury to wake up the palate. Most importantly, it should be fresh, light and comprised of ingredients that are in season. Seasonality plays such an important role in the food equation. If ingredients are in season they taste better and need less work. Less work looks less handled, which implies ease and keeps the mood relaxed.

A main course can often be an opportunity to throw down an “ace”, but at the same time it should not be allowed to upstage the rest of the meal. If the entree is light, then this moment can be a little richer.

I like the European concept of a cheese course but I prefer to serve it with salad rather than fruit. Any dessert should be designed to put the palate to rest, but there is nothing worse than the feeling that you have eaten too much.

If guests are filled up too early their sense of fun wanes. Too much food, like too much wine, intoxicates to the point where people lose interest in each other and become boring. The purpose of a meal is to restore, hence the word restaurant, and it works in your favour that guests leave feeling sated rather than stuffed.