The Charm of British Pudding

With the ink freshly dried on both my marriage certificate and my diploma from Le Cordon Bleu Cooking School, I landed my first job working as a director’s chef in a large advertising agency in London. It was a great job. No nights. No weekends. No budget. When I say no budget, I mean no budget constraints; there were endless funds to rustle up all the fancy food my newly minted cooking skills could conjure. I was ecstatic. I made lots of plans, lists, and menus. My only limitation was Pixie. Pixie hired me. Pixie had seniority. Pixie was a skinflint. Pixie was a thin-lipped, thin-hipped, redheaded Scottish woman, and a careful and simple cook. She hated garlic, she hated fancy desserts, and after a while I was not so sure she was very fond of me. Pixie loved smoked salmon, which we served incessantly, and she had a notorious predilection for pilfering the leftovers. Fresh with the snobbery of youth and a cooking school diploma, I wanted to wrap giant prawns in prosciutto for grilling, and make endlessly fiddly little lemon soufflés with citrus suprêmes; she wanted grilled trout and boiled potatoes. We had a standoff. When I wanted to fill squeeze bottles with raspberry coulis and decorate the dessert plates with little hearts and spiderwebs (the squeeze bottle was my favorite ’80s kitchen tool—I never went anywhere without at least one), she just rolled her eyes. Good, solid British food had been good enough before I arrived and it would still be good enough after I left.