Innard vision
Fergus Henderson believes that his cooking is misunderstood. Having gained a reputation as being the chef prepared to cook and serve almost any bit of any beast, he doesn't want to scare away anyone who is squeamish about such matters.
The menu at Henderson's Farringdon restaurant St John offers a host of dishes that will appeal to non-offal eaters. "I don't want to disappoint keen lovers of offal, but it really is not the only thing we serve," he says.
However, Henderson's recently published book, Nose to Tail Eating - A Kind of British Cooking (published by MacMillan, £20) reveals that innards and extremities undoubtedly play a significant role in his repertoire. As well as almost every part of the pig - head (including snout, ears, tongue and cheeks), spleen, liver, trotters and tail - he likes to cook tripe, ox tongue, calves' heart, duck's neck, veal bone marrow and lamb's brains. All have appeared on the menu at St John at some time or another.
As far as Henderson is concerned, it would be disingenuous to the animal not to make the most of the whole beast. "There is a set of delights, textural and flavoursome, which lies beyond the fillet," he explains in the foreword to his book.
Henderson's love of top-to-toe cookery stems back to his childhood. "My mum was a big cook and my dad was a big eater," he says. The likes of tripe and onions appeared regularly on the Henderson table and he was hooked.
Becoming a chef, however, was not his original plan. He trained as an architect, and it was while he was a student that he began to experiment in the kitchen.
Henderson's first opportunity to cook for a paying clientele came when the owners of Smith's restaurant (now occupied by Belgo) in Covent Garden allowed him and two friends - Piers Thompson and Orlando Campbell - to take over the kitchens on a Sunday. Friends and foodie folk were invited to sample simple, hearty dishes such as cassoulet and pot au feu.
A total of six lunches were held, which led to Henderson landing a one-month stint cooking in a club close to Covent Garden and then being invited back to Smith's to work alongside its regular chef.
"I was still an architecture student, but by then I was becoming somewhat distracted," he says. When Campbell opened a club in Notting Hill, providing Henderson with his first real opportunity to run his own kitchen, he knew his future was unlikely to be in an architect's office.
Within eight months the opportunity to become his own boss arose when the first floor above the French House, a pub in which Henderson drank in Dean Street, Soho, became vacant. As a result, he and his wife Margot, already an experienced chef, rented the space and opened the French House Dining Room in 1992. A third partner in the business, Jon Spiteri, ran the restaurant.
At last Henderson had a firm base, enabling his food to become focused for the first time. Hearty food, using indigenous ingredients, was central to his cooking then as it is now.
Within three years a second restaurant was opened when restaurateur Trevor Gulliver, who had previously run the Fire Station in Waterloo, came across a former bacon smokehouse.
"It was a crumbling wreck which in recent years had been used as a squat," says Henderson. "The walls were either covered in pork fat or crazy rave paintings and there was rubble everywhere. But both my architect and cheffing experiences told me that this could be the base for an irresistible restaurant." The fact that a pig was already the emblem for the French House Dining Room was a happy, but fortuitous, coincidence.
The building eventually evolved into the St John restaurant, with Henderson, Gulliver and Spiteri as partners. Margot remained in the kitchen at the French House Dining Room while Henderson moved to St John. Here the cavernous interior, with its minimalist stark, white walls, provides the perfect base for dishes that are robust, stripped back to their basic ingredients, and eschew any form of garnish whatsoever.
The menu, which may change between lunch and dinner and from day to day according to the availability of ingredients, is as straightforward in its presentation as Henderson's approach to cooking. Items are simply listed by their main ingredients, be it celeriac and boiled egg (£4.40), calves' liver and broad beans (£11.80) or duck breast and lentils (£16). "So often I read menus where an ingredient is mentioned which you only get a fleck of - it's so disappointing," he says. "All items listed on the menu here form a major component of the dish."
Roast leg of South Down lamb (£14), for instance, is simply served with roast carrots and aioli, while poached skate and anchovy (£12) comprises skate that has been poached in a vegetable broth, served with a chicory salad combined with a dressing made from anchovies, garlic, red wine vinegar and extra-virgin olive oil.
While a broad scope of influences from travels and reading, particularly from his cookery writer heroes Marcella Hazan and Paula Wolfert, have made their mark, Henderson unequivocally describes his food as British. "Not old British, not modern British, but permanent British," he says. "It is food that is appropriate for now."
The simple presentation of dishes requires the best-quality and best-tasting ingredients that Henderson can find. For instance, he has sourced the Trelough duck from the Hereford Duck Company (now operating as English Natural Foods), which, he believes, has the best flavour of any duck he has tasted. "Duck can so often be disappointing, but the Trelough ducks are raised in orchards and live a happy life, which is reflected in the taste of the meat."
Henderson serves a pan-roasted breast of duck on a bed of Puy lentils combined with some wilted cabbage. The rest of the duck is used in other dishes. The legs may be salted and poached, while the neck and gizzard will be confited. Nothing is wasted at St John.
Despite the restaurant's reputation for appealing to the most hardened carnivores, Henderson says he whole-heartedly embraces vegetarians and always offers at least one main dish and a couple of starters that don't contain meat. His approach is not to create a vegetarian version of a meat dish, but to celebrate vegetables in their own right.
A recent vegetarian main course was listed on the menu as melted cheese and potatoes (£9). The cheese is Lincolnshire Poacher, a hard cheese akin to Cheddar, which is melted down with some wine and eau de vie. Boiled Jersey royals, cornichons and spring onions are then dipped into the melted cheese.
A favourite dish of Henderson's is the one that has become a signature and is yet to be removed from the menu. He describes the roast bone marrow and parsley salad (£5.80) as "delicious and a joy". It combines his love of the unusual with a pleasure in cooking with bones. "I'm all for grappling about with bones," he says.
Henderson serves four rounds of roasted middle veal marrow bone with a salad made from flat-leaf parsley, shallots and capers, dressed with lemon juice and extra-virgin olive oil. The idea is for customers to scrape the marrow on to the accompanying toast and top with the parsley and coarse sea salt.
Ox tripe is also a favourite of Henderson's, which he loves for its soothing qualities. "I can't understand why it has become such a maligned off-cut," he says. He may serve white honeycomb tripe (which comes from the animal's second stomach) in a soup with some spicy sausage and chickpeas or poached in milk with onions, accompanied by mashed potatoes.
Spleen, like tripe, is unlikely to be found in many restaurants these days. This is a surprise to Henderson - "although I'm sure it makes its way into many restaurant terrines" - because as far as he is concerned it is very similar to liver. Henderson rolls up a pig's spleen with smoked streaky bacon and sage and bakes it slowly in chicken stock. It is then served cold with thin slices of raw red onion and cornichons.
Puddings at St John veer towards the traditional and comforting, although Henderson hopes to avoid offering choices that sound as though they come from a school dinner menu. The selection may include rice pudding, pears and chocolate sauce (£5) and lemon and rhubarb syllabub (£5), while the chocolate ice-cream (£3.20) is unlikely to be found on any school menu.
After extensive work, St John's pastry chef Leah White has created what Henderson describes as "the ultimate chocolate ice-cream". The crucial elements - 100% Valrhona chocolate, caramelised caster sugar and a few drops of double espresso coffee - which are combined together with a basic cräme anglaise mixture, help create a rich, dark, bitter ice-cream that Henderson believes is hard to beat. Just one scoop - any more and it would defeat the customer - is served with a hazelnut wafer.
As well as the 100-seat restaurant, Henderson's brigade, which includes six chefs, the pastry chef and two bakers, also serves a short bar menu and bakes a selection of rustic breads, including white, brown, soda, sour dough, ciabatta, olive, walnut and raisin, and eccles cakes, for the bakery.
