Chefs have a problem. Think of much of the best food you have ever eaten. Caviar, English native oysters, sashimi, foie gras, truffles, jamon iberico, grouse, golden plover, properly hung Scotch beef; Stilton, the great soft cheeses: all have one point in common. They require minimal intervention from the kitchen. With the assistance of one female sous-chef, even I could roast a grouse. The chef would come into his own over pudding, and indeed with Welsh rarebit, but one can understand why this does not provide enough outlet for creativity.
There are always the great French bourgeois dishes, which few of us eat often enough. Navarin of lamb, blanquette de veau, suprêmes de volaille, daube de boeuf: all splendid. But they are not a new challenge to a cook.
Artists have a similar difficulty. For centuries, there was an iconographic tradition and a canon: a continuity from Cimabue to Cézanne. Then, after Cézanne and the early Picasso — what was left to do? Hence the frequent subsequent descent into pseudery. ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’ and even worse, ‘Guernica’: absurd, feeble-minded pretentiouness wholly deserving of Alfred Munnings’s castigation.
Frivolity is not restricted to the arts. Among chefs, Tom Aikens is often guilty of it and Heston Blumenthal is not always innocent. Architects too have a difficulty. A chap wants a country house, and is unimpressed by most contemporary building. Forget architects: he only needs a style book plus a master mason, and there it is. Eight bays, a portico, all easy on the eye: the roof will not leak, and it will still be a pleasure to look at and live in two centuries hence. I suspect that even James Stirling or Richard Rogers could produce a decent house if they were not besotted by the need to appear original.
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