Durban - Ever since he watched his grandparents making pastry in front of the old telly, rubbing butter into flour by hand, celebrity British chef James Martin has wanted to cook.
Nowadays, he writes in his new cookbook, simply titled Sweet and published by Quadrille, the pastry bench is the place to be, with bake-offs all over the place.
But it was a very different scene back in the early1990s, when a young lad from Yorkshire entered the kitchens of some of the best-known and most respected chefs in the UK.
“To say I was bricking it would be an understatement. Aged just 17, I quickly realised that there was going to be no short cut to the top,” Martin writes in his book.
Pastry, he says, wasn’t really what he had in mind at the time, but fate intervened – the pastry chef went to the loo, never to be seen again. And so after only three days, Martin was on the pastry section, becoming head of it within four months.
“Back then no one wanted to work on the pastry section. To some, it wasn’t seen as manly enough,” he writes in Sweet.
“There was no heat, no sweat and no fire, but I reckon the real reason was the hours. As a pastry chef you work longer shifts than anyone in the kitchen: there are early starts for the breakfast stuff, and you can’t go home until the last table has ordered dessert.”
Hard work has now certainly paid off, as Martin is among television’s top celebrity chefs.
Sweet is his first desserts cookbook since 2007’s hugely popular Desserts, and his intention with it was to show how his cooking had evolved over the past decade, “and how much I have learnt, and am still learning, from the great chefs I am lucky enough to meet”.
Taste must always come first, says Martin, who adds that Sweet features the “best of the best” recipes he has found, made up and borrowed, together with some basic recipes at the front and some handy troubleshooting tips at the back.
Everything from gingerbread biscuits and melon and honeycomb cheesecake, to buttermilk panna cotta, spiced apple strudel, chocolate and cherry tart, and a candied fruit Christmas garland are to be found in the book, which features superb photography of each dish by Peter Cassidy.
Also among the more than 70 recipes are show-stoppers including raspberry and rose bavarois, along with multi-layered recipes such as mango mousse with coconut foam, mango sponge, toasted coconut and sweet brioche croutons.
The Mercury