Interview with William Boyd, Author
I'm not really the cook in the family; my wife, Susan, is. Susan is a really good cook - she's a very good baker, she makes amazing jam, she's a proper culinary expert. It would be redundant me trying to compete with her, so I don't bother.
I'm the commi chef - I'm a very good chopper. I can slice an onion thinner than anybody else. I'm called upon to peel potatoes and chop onions and finely chop garlic - I'm very good at that. I have a bit of a knife fetish as well, so I have all kinds of the ‘right kind of knife’.
I occasionally do cook and the one thing I do regularly for other people is tonno e fagioli - a classic tuna and bean salad - usually in France where we have a house. It's tuna from a tin, nice cannellini beans, chopped sweet onions, finely shaved fennel, parsley, my dressing - that's my other tour de force, my vinaigrette dressing - all mixed up and then a green salad on the side. Susan calls it "Oh, your tuna salad..." and I say, "No, it's tonno e fagioli, if you don't mind,".
I also cook a mean omelette, if required, as well. I'm the omelette cooker in the family.
If I'm by myself I'll probably just put something on a piece of nice bread. Ham, chicken, cheese.
The best ingredients simply cooked is kind of our cooking mantra. If you get a nice bit of a chicken and an avocado, there's all sorts of things you can do. On my own, I wouldn't do anything remotely fancy. I just snack rather than sit down and eat. Or I'll go out and buy some sushi or something.
I was taught how to cook by Susan because we've been married for ages and we were students when we met, started living together very early on and got married a few years after that. Even then she would make pizzas from scratch, so I ate very well as a student! As she's got more ambitious and we could begin to afford more things, our culinary life expanded. I've probably learned from her more than anybody else.
I was born in West Africa and lived there until my early twenties.
Everything was curried because the fish was not very good and the meat was a bit tough, so everything had a curry flavour. Fantastic fruits, of course. My eating experiences growing up, which is sort of what shapes you, was either colonial African stews, curries, kedgeree - I've been eating kedgeree all my life - or else it was boarding school slop. I still cannot resist kedgeree when I see it on a menu.
You couldn't really get potatoes in Africa, you could get yams, but we almost always had rice. I love rice and I realise that's part of my African heritage. I'd almost have rice rather than pasta or potatoes. I do cook rice very well; I've got a flawless method of making it dry and fluffy and non-sticky. You wash it first in boiling water, you then cook it for however long - I don't believe in waiting for it to absorb all the water - just stick it in a pan and cook it until it tastes ready and then wash it again in boiling water after it's cooked. It's piping hot and every grain is separate and it works for basmati rice, it works for wholegrain rice, and it can keep for 2 or 3 hours, just pour boiling water on once you’re ready to serve.
My last meal would probably be something with rice. Probably a Beef Stroganoff or a Blanquette de Veau. My tastes have completely changed. When we could afford to eat in restaurants, we went through that whole 3 Michelin star thing. You know, fussy waiters and a cloche. I've gone right off that and now I like cuisine bourgeois, classic coq au vin or steak frites and I run a mile from very fancy restaurants with their foams and their drizzles. We once went to a very famous restaurant in Paris called Guy Savoy which has 2 stars and the daughter of my American editor was working in the kitchen and kept sending out food to us. We ended up having about 4 extra courses and I've never felt so ill and bloated after a meal. I think that's the moment when I felt I just don't like that stuff anymore. Back to the bistrot du coin! Give me a hearty coq au vin any day! Everyone to their own taste but I have gone right off that 'fine dining' stuff. I don't think it's going out of fashion though. I think it's very aspirational; people feel they've made it when they can go to these kinds of restaurants and get that kind of food. And look at the success of programmes like Masterchef, they're sort of educating people that way.
In London, where you can eat fantastically well, the restaurant we probably go to most is called Barrafina.
It's a chain now, Spanish food. You sit at a bar in front of the kitchen and it's mainly fish and it's so fresh. Again, it's that philosophy of the best ingredients simply cooked and simply served. Utterly delicious. We go there when we want to treat ourselves.
We like sitting at bars and counters and because we travel so much with the books and so on, somehow it's nicer to go and sit at a bar. You get into conversations with people and the staff in a way you don't if you're just sitting at a table for two, so Barrafina is tailor-made for us. There's another one which has been started by a chef from Barrafina called Sabor. Spanish cooking - it's kind of taking over the world. We go to the same restaurants again and again. We go to the Corbin and King restaurants and the Chelsea Arts Club and we have a restaurant 50 yards away called Ziani. It's a great mythic, Chelsea restaurant; very good Italian food, loud, shouting waiters, braying Chelsea voices, but it's really nice. Because it's in a residential street, it's quite discreet - the people one's seen in there, from Eddie Redmayne to Camilla Parker Bowles, it's got quite a 'celeb' aspect to it as well. We've been going for 30 years - we're like members of the family in a way. People fall in love with it. It can be a bit of a zoo sometimes at night; it gets so loud but it is a Chelsea institution.
We've lived in London now for 35 years and we've seen it transform as an eating experience but then that's probably true of all provincial cities. When I went to do a PHD at Oxford, I think there was one pizza place and one burger place and now you're spoilt for choice and I think that's true of all cities in Britain - eating in Britain is a different experience now. There are some restaurants I really like in New York where we'd go a lot, because Susan used to work for Harper's Bazaar as the Editor-at-Large. We used to spent about 40 days a year there and so we have favourite restaurants in New York. There's one we really like called Lupa, which is part of the Mario Batali empire. When we go to Paris, we go to the same old places, big brasseries like the Deux Magots or Cafe de Flore or Closerie des Lilas. Paris is changing as well; the French have sort of woken up to this revolution of 'small plates'. We do our homework but often end up in the same places. There's a little bar called Le Rubis where you can eat but it's like something from the 1950's. We are 'foodies', I suppose. Whenever we go somewhere we try to find somewhere authentic and not grand. It's a great way of getting to know a city.
My favourite cuisine is probably Italian. We do eat a lot of pastas and, of course, it's been refined now - think of somewhere like The River Cafe, where it's like high-end Italian cooking. We know the owner and Susan has cooked masses of stuff from the cookbooks. It's very simple; you don't have to have a degree in food science in order to cook it. There's almost nothing not to like about Italian food. When we went to Rome and Venice, we went to very small restaurants, very local restaurants and ate fantastically well.
Today I've had a piece of toast with marmalade and a cup of tea.
I've started drinking tea without milk or sugar, oddly for some reason. I've got into that slight tea snobbery now and I like black tea and I like Assam rather than Darjeeling. I do drink quite a lot of Assam tea and it's quite a nice drink it's own. We kind of adulterate it with milk and sugar. We kind of forget to let it brew properly for 2 or 3 minutes rather than just seconds. Leave that teabag in there and you actually taste the tea! I went to Cafe Colbert for lunch today and had a Croque Madame, the one with the fried egg on top, and a green salad. Tonight, I might have one of my snacks because Susan's gone out. I'll be back on the sourdough and cheese.
I think I'm pretty eclectic but I'm not a food explorer as some people are; I've got a friend who looks at a Chinese menu for the most extreme thing he can eat. It's almost like I'm a Celebrity Get me Out of Here! I won't eat the more outlandish and challenging things. I can eat a certain amount of offal. I sometimes order liver and I don't recoil from kidneys, but I can't eat tripe. I once went to an Italian restaurant, misread the menu and ending up ordering mule which I suppose is like horse meat. I ate lungs in an Italian restaurant by mistake too. There are still horse butchers in our town in France, but I can't quite bring myself to eat it. I'll have a taste of anything; I don't like eating snails but I have eaten snails. I like raw fish, I like sushi and sashimi - I'm almost addicted to it - but I don't want to get too far down the raw road. I now know what I like, so I don't stray too far from the familiar.
I always say the same sort of people for my fantasy dinner party. William Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, possibly Percy Bysshe Shelley, because I spent years studying him at university. Then I'd mix it up with Elizabeth Bishop - an American poet who I really like - Louise Brooks or Ava Gardner, Dorothy Parker. Any number of people would be interesting, but I think we might have a bit of fun with that lot. Shouldn't have more than 8, I think for a dinner party. There are lots of people I'd be curious about, writers I admire like Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh though I don't think they'd be very fun dinner party companions. You're wanting either your curiosity satisfied or some sort of entertainment. They're all mainly writers or actors, funnily enough. A lot of our friends are actors, probably more actor friends than writer friends. One of the reasons I write films and television and now plays, is because you get to hang out with actors and they're very entertaining. I wouldn't necessarily want to be married to one but I do like their company. They're usually very smart and very articulate, so I really relish my actor friendships because they're stimulating. I'd rather go into a room full of actors than a room full of novelists, that's for sure!