I have been reading Fergus Henderson’s Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking, and I am enjoying it to an uncommon, unforeseen degree. I am not typically a great appreciator of cookbooks. I picked up Nose to Tail because I recognized it as a classic that I had never investigated, and it seemed an essential volume for thinking through the contemporary resurgence of “craft” butchery. Indeed, it may be the very wellspring of that phenomenon where Anglo-Occidental culinary culture is concerned, Henderson and his London restaurant St. John being one of the first bastions of the trend of offal appreciation and “whole-beast” cookery.
What is truly impressive about the book—as much as, and perhaps in spite of, its tremendous impact—is the tone and spirit with which the whole thing is imbued by Henderson. Nose to Tail is disarmingly frank and warm, the prose elegant but utterly unpretentious. This is perhaps a too-worn trope in the description of good cookbook authorship, but it does more than anything feel as if one is being addressed by a friendly acquaintance of whom one has asked simple instructions for the preparation of an unfamiliar cut. The recipes are clear, not too clinical, and have about them a tremendously inviting quality, evincing a respect for both the reader/cook and their ingredients. The introduction by Anthony Bourdain aside, the book is free of the sort of orgiastic, high-sensualist, macho hyperbole that proliferates in much of the discourse on whole-beast eating. Henderson’s is not a gastronomy of unbridled carnivory or an exultation of the excesses of the flesh—the dishes, while certainly meat-centric, are not excessive, but are presented as a part of the everyday, if an everyday that has come to seem sadly distant and inaccessible for many. One wants to try the recipes, not because they present a challenge to be met and mastered or an ethical promise to be fulfilled (there is none of the pedantic moralizing of someone like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, although I do believe there is a place for that), but because reading them one is given to think, “Why wouldn’t I try this?” Dishes are described as “sustaining,” “steadying,” or “a very good dish if you are feeling a little dented.” Henderson tends toward understatement, in several instances describing recipes as inspired by previous meals to which he admits they likely bear no longer any authentic relation (but are delicious nonetheless), and in one case proclaiming a dish to be “based on a very dour recipe” (for Pea and Pig’s Ear Soup).
Henderson also expresses his admiration for curly parsley, for its strong flavour and structural abilities, which I find particularly gratifying given that my own preference for curly over the widely endorsed flat-leaf variety has long made me feel something of a pariah and/or bumpkin. Further points in his favour are awarded for his use of the terms “lights” for lungs and “pluck” for organs all still attached in an organized fashion, terms I had no idea were still in modern usage; and for his enthusiastic recommendation of Fernet-Branca as a cure for any overindulgence (albeit with the caution “Do not let the cure become the cause”).1
When years ago I dined at St. John, on my first visit to London, I was familiar with none of this, and I don’t think I quite got it. I knew nothing of the restaurant or of Henderson save their importance to the “scene,” with which I was by that time semi-acquainted, and I could appreciate that importance in a vague, historical way. But on the whole, I found the meal a little dull, especially in comparison to some of my other outings that same trip. I remember we had bone marrow, and perhaps a very large crab, and something involving a lot of braised kid. I don’t know if I would come to an altogether different conclusion now, but I am certain it would be a different experience. I would like to chance it. To see whether the simplicity and forthrightness of the cooking might have a different effect on me if I were thus prepared for it. It brings to mind re-watching a film that perhaps one knows relatively well but has not seen since one has come to know and care more about form and context, or about film qua Film and a given movie’s place therein. Not long ago I watched Citizen Kane for the first time in probably ten years, and was basically shitting my pants from the very opening: The camera rolling through a miniature Xanadu, conveying the same subtle horror by way of meticulous, abandoned opulence as the unchecked natural overgrowth of Manderley in the opening pages of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (although this effect is less pronounced in Hitchcock’s adaptation). The rather mundane point being that having a better sense of the animating philosophy of a thing, its history, and the conditions of its production can often lend another quality of enjoyment to one’s experience of (although conversely, “unmediated” experience has its merits, too, of course, of course).
Least anticipated, and perhaps provocative only because upon encountering it I am so surprised not to have encountered it so articulated before, is Henderson’s statement of philosophy of nose-to-tail cooking and the place of vegetables therein. Mindful of the carnivorous overtones of his approach, he takes pains to declare: “There is equal respect for the carrot; once radishes are eaten, their leaves are turned into a peppery salad...they all make up the whole beast” (emphasis mine). This somewhat counterintuitive assertion that vegetables et cetera are part of the whole beast is more than just an injunction to Eat Your Vegetables and not throw shit out that could be good for something; it pays a deft homage to the very contingency of life. And, if one chooses to so take it, it serves as a reminder that whole beasts are never wholly or solely the beasts they are taken to be, but are deeply implicated in and made up quite literally of other life-worlds; they are not only meat, but guts and blood, plants and bacteria, punch-outs of ecosystems. They are stuff, yes, but stuff and relationships. Matter that may not be so easily disentangled, or may only be disentangled at great cost, from the worlds of which it is a part. If one is alive to it, the threads of relationality, and even a casual assumption of material agency (although this is not so foreign to culinary discourse), can be discerned running all through his book: “Do not be afraid of cooking, as your ingredients will know.” Preparations must often be given just enough time so that ingredients get to know one another, time for the (savoury) pie filling to find itself. The “whole beast” thus materially and conceptually extends beyond the borders of the organism itself, comes to know itself in its relation to others, and of course vegetables form a part of that. But you know, all this coming from a guy who includes a recipe for Warm Pig’s Head under “Salads.”
1 I long thought the unlikely hangover remedy of Fernet-Branca and crème de menthe over ice, a favourite of most of the chefs I know, was a Fergus Henderson creation, or at least one of similar recentness. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon this passage in the 1954 edition of Elizabeth David’s Italian Food: “For mornings after I have Italian friends who swear by a grisly mixture of Fernet Branca and Crème de Menthe; the appearance of the drink is that of a stagnant pond, and its effect depends upon individual reactions to shock treatment.”