Pas Comme Ça

We miss Keith Floyd. He may not have been the greatest chef but he had an enthusiasm and mission to explain that is often a little wanting these days. His programmes had spontaneity, and he was not afraid of getting it wrong. When he decided to cook fish in salt, lacking one big fish to pack in the salt, he opted to pack a lot of small fish together and proceeded to pile salt around them. The moment of truth came when he hacked open the hard salt crust and found nothing but bones and dry shards of overcooked fish. ‘There you are, you see,’ he said to camera, ‘it’s a complete disaster’. The lesson was that experimentation must include the risk of failure.