As a rule, I am suspicious of any French terms used in cooking in this country unless it is genuinely about food from a Francophone country. I suppose this comes from the late 1970s and 1980s fashion when many British restaurants would pretentiously use French expressions in what were otherwise ordinary menus as an excuse to charge lots of money for supposedly "posh nosh". I recall my Dad - who was then a manager with a wellknown British bank - explain that his posh dinner included mousse d'Arbroath smokey! Yuck! Arbroath smokeys are a traditional Scottish way of treating haddock and have nothing to do with France!! This is not to put down French food which, on the whole, I love....but let's keep the French for Francophone dishes!

About half a year ago I read an Independent article about Anton Mosimann and his influence on modern British cooking. He apparently has been an influence on Heston Blumenthal among others. A week ago I did a search on the Amazon website for books from Anton Mosimann and came up with Cuisine Naturelle among others. Although it can be bought new, it was on offer from £2.35 second hand so I could not resist that. As you can see below the copy is not in bad condition and even the coversheet is not too tatty. BTW to find the book use either  ISBN-10: 0333379713 or ISBN-13: 978-0333379714 .

 

Since getting my copy this week I have been reading it, though I have not yet followed any recipes consistently. It is very interesting reading as he (Anton) is keen to do healthy cooking based on fresh and seasonal ingredients...exactly what I love. However he is very serious. While I understand that he might not be happy in his Swiss working time reducing cream by a factor of 10:1 for his sauces, he rules out most oil, sugar, butter, cream and alcohol for cuisine naturelle. While I advocate being sparing on salt, oil and cream he is VERY challenging and thorough. However, I want to avoid giving the impression that he is some sort of nutty fundamentalist. He advocates cuisine naturelle as being a new approach to healthy cooking while acknowledging haute cuisine with its butter, cream, etc as a legitimate, but less healthy, way of cooking.

For savoury starters and maincourses he relies a lot on good home-made stocks. I must admit I have rarely made my own stocks and bought stock cubes tend to be salty. I am not sure if I make a stock from a cube that I will achieve the healthy results that he aims for. For example, rather than using a mixture of oil and vinegar in a salad dressing, he uses reduced stock and vinegar. If I had time to do my own stocks I can see that is very interesting as an alternative and would involve less calories. However this will require more discipline than I have today.

With regard to cooking he avoids conventional deep-fat or shallow-fat frying but focuses on steaming, grilling, poaching, blanching and dry frying with a non-stick frying pan. This is all much healthier than what I do....even though I try to start with fresh ingredients.

His philosophy is to bring as much of the taste of the ingredients out in the dishes. He avoids alcohol, butter or cream-based sauces. This makes sense to me and I appreciate his statement that herb mixes should reduce the requirement to use salt by 50%. I have high blood pressure and I have tried to cook with limited salt, however despite my generous use of garlic, herbs and spices to provide flavour without salt, Mrs Oregano and my kids tend to add a lot of salt anyway :-( .

For a book published in the UK in 1985 it is unusual in emphasising presentation of food in a modern way; probably a reflection of Mosimann's experience in the Far East. However my copy has the 1980s limitation in printing technology which means that the colour illustrations rarely are close to the black and white text describing them.

While I will try to adapt my normal cooking to a few ideas seen in the book I have not really tried Cuisine Naturelle out yet. However the book is an interesting read and I appreciate Mosimann's understanding of the science of food. It will certainly challenge me to follow his ideas rigorously but that is not to say that the ideas are not good.

I certainly recommend anybody getting (at least a second hand) copy of the book.