Fergus accompanies me to work each morning, and soothes my commute with talk of lambs brains and skinned eels. He’s the first chef I’ve read with whom I can imagine having a stovetop conversation (Diana likes talking to Ms. Hazan), and makes all the others seem… not dull, as such, but normal. The sort of people who might be disinclined to give someone a raw ox heart as a token of affection.

You might accuse Fergus of monotony – duck fat, green sauce, sea salt, pepper, cook till “giving” – but every page, every single recipe, right down to the terrine of lamb’s brains, sounds like something I would love to cook and serve. The now customary lecture on the need for perfect ingredients is absent, and there is no glossary nor directory of purveyors nor list of tools – these are all unnecessary, because this food is so transparent. You need nothing in your pantry beyond salt and pepper, and the most basic of tools. Some recipes call for a food processor – or you could just chop faster.

Instead of lecturing on seasonality, he leaves you to ask yourself, “what sounds good?” A huge bowl of roast quail to pick apart with a salad on a July evening. Lambs tongues and cress on a bright spring day. Gratin of tripe and duck neck terrine in late November. Instructions are written in Hemingway prose, not numbered steps, and there is a general lack of both bravado and babying. On de-boning trotters (a fraught and bloody procedure for me) – “Some cooks have described this as being as easy as removing a kid glove. If you find this not to be the case, you need not despair.” He assumes that you either know what you’re doing, or that you’ll muddle through and be better for it.

Part of the reason it’s hard to talk about modern manhood is that masculinity as a category is being evacuated. Traits we used to call masculine we now recognize as adult, butch, metrosexual, geeky, liberal or conservative… We can no longer describe masculinity because even though sociology tells us we live in a gendered world, we no longer feel comfortable claiming traits for genders. If we start talking about an aspirational masculinity, though, things we believe masculinity should be about, then I’d like to sign up with Fergus – idiosyncratic, unpretentious, deeply serious, and completely without bravado.

Tags: The Carnival of Modern Man

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"A gentleman’s cookbook" was written on 30 Aug 2006 and filed in General