Although I
doubt that Sancho Panza would have cared much for the presentation of his food
there is an undeniable truth in the saying: you eat with your eyes as well as
your stomach. Cooks have always understood this and many of the same dishes
have gone the merry-go-round of fashion. Think of the suckling-pig once
presented in all its glory with a red apple in the mouth compared with today´s
tiny cubed terrains with dainty accompaniments.
When I
first started working in the kitchen I couldn´t care less for presentation. I
saw plates leaving the kitchen with as much attention paid to appearances as to
taste. My love of Sancho rebelled against such verbose extravagance.
As time has
gone on I have come to appreciate the fun of designing a dish and the
impression a good looking plate can leave on a guest and their palate.
One of the
easiest ways to brighten up a meal is by adding herbs, seeds, nuts, salts or
vegetable crisps.
Every
restaurant I have worked in uses parsley or chives to brighten up their dishes
and each one has had a different take on how to do it. The most impressive I
have seen is to turn the chives into streamers by cutting horizontally up the
chives until you have six separate cords fanning out rather like a cartoon
shoot gun after it has been fired (see photo). By pulling down quickly along
the length of the chive you can create very pretty streamers which look great
with small intricate dishes.
Alternatively
there is the Joel Robuchon method of cutting parsley into razor thin slices or
the classic thinly chopped chives. Though this may seem to be for decoration
alone they help to bring out the flavour of the main ingredients much in the
same way as salt.
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The crux to
all this is forethought and imagination. Those half-used bags of dried fruits
or nuts in the larder or that scraggly herb that has shoot up amongst the weeds
in the garden – with a little creativity they can add a professional flourish.
