Angela Hartnett’s home kitchen isn’t a place you could recreate, however much Le Creuset you bought. A basement in east London, it has the relaxed timelessness of a villa in a Sally Rooney novel, but the embedded knowledge of a Michelin-starred chef who’s been cooking since she worked in her family’s chippy 40 and a bit years ago (she’s now 57) – every utensil exactly where your hand would be looking for it, everything mysteriously the right size.
Today she’s making a poached chicken with spring vegetables. It sounds simple, and it’s maybe the fundamental paradox of food that the simpler a dish – the fewer the ingredients, the less fussing about – the easier it is to screw up. Poached chicken can come out the colour of over-washed underpants, although, to be fair, still taste delicious. Cook it too fast, and the skin wrinkles away from the meat eerily, so now it’s like underpants wearing tights. Listing errors from my own back catalogue is so unappetising that I’m going to stop, even though I’m nothing like done. The question is, how does a chef make this dish look so elegant, so vivid, so sharply delineated but perfectly harmonious, so appealing, so cheffy?
