I am staring out of my office window, dreaming about a dish: a single cipollini onion, slow confited in olive oil until you could cut it with a spoon, then sliced in half, the cut edges seared quickly on a hot pan so that it caramelises. The cut sides are sprinkled with sea salt and then, while they are still warm, a slice of 24-month-old comté cheese is draped across them, so that it starts to melt but doesn't quite. Alongside this is a thick slice of a sizeable cep, sautéed in a little butter and garlic. Bringing the two items together is a fat comma of an acidulated flat leaf parsley and caper purée.
Sounds great, doesn't it? There's sweetness and softness from the onion, and power from the hit of properly aged cheese, and earthiness from the cep and then there's the purée to cut through it all. Wouldn't you love to eat it? Of course you would. Anybody with a modicum of good taste would want to eat that, including me. And yet I never have. Not surprising. It doesn't exist, or at least not so far as I'm aware. I made it up. It's a fantasy dish.
Oh, the filthy things that go on inside my head. No, not those filthy things. These are the other filthy things, the food fantasies that occupy so many of my waking hours. The fact is that however involved with my own appetites I am, I can't eat all the time. There are yawning gaps between mealtimes, when physical appetites are sated. They must be filled with something.
And so I slip into the kitchen of my mind, where the real ingredient-on-ingredient action is: the butter-poached lobster tails that end up with the slices of crisp-skinned pork belly, the pairing lubricated by a silken cauliflower purée; the whole black truffles that get drenched in demi-glace and served on toast smeared with grouse liver; the mammoth pots of cassoulet, a full 48 hours in the making, the crust worked and reworked back into the stew; the peanut butter parfaits and chocolate delices, the messes of whipped sugared cream, chestnut purée, chewy walnut meringue and soft stewed rhubarb.
These are my my orgies, full of ecstasy, pain and delicious shame. I can't believe I'm unique. Anybody with a properly developed interest in food really doesn't need to slaver over pages of glistening gastro-porn. Their own twisted minds should be able to do a far better job for them.
Of course, most of these fantasies are achievable. I could confit the onion. I could butter-poach the lobster. But I don't and with good reason. For a start there is, as with every fantasy, the suspicion that if you acted upon it the reality would be nowhere near as satisfying as you thought it might be. That lobster could be a little tough; the combination of comté, cep and parsley-caper purée might be dull. Not only would you have eaten badly but the pleasure of the fantasy itself would have been destroyed.
Plus there's the effort. I've always wondered whether S&M freaks find the hassle of erecting the wall bars detracts from the pleasure. Likewise, I don't really want the bother of heating a vat of olive oil just to confit an onion. Far better, I think, that it all stays where it is, tucked away in the recesses of my mind. For in there, everything is perfect.
