Table Of ContentM ISSION:
COOK!
My Life, My Recipes,
and Making the Impossible Easy
ROBERT IRVINE
WITH BRIAN O’REILLY
CONTENTS
Introduction..............................................vi
1 Amuse-Gueule,TimesTwo..................................1
Adventurous tales of two Roberts, from civil war in South Yemen
to the red carpets of Hollywood
2 SundayRoastsandtheWhiteRabbit.........................49
Charming stories of Sunday dinner and a meeting with a
surprising culinary character whilst out at sea
3 ACourseinPleasure......................................77
Delicious days with Mum and Dad and the Tale of the
Prince and the Wok
4 TheAltarofFlavor.......................................109
Making breakfast for Her Majesty, the Queen, and musings on
the essential meaning of good taste
5 PointandCounterpoint...................................161
Competing in the most dangerous sport in the world and frank talk
on how best to eat
6 TheFrenchGodfathers ...................................187
One man’s guide to surviving an education at the merciless hands
of French master chefs
7 I’mPassionateAboutPassion..............................219
Jamaican escapades, George and George, and the art of running
Donald Trump’s kitchens
8 Style and Substance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .247
The importance of doing it with style and my road to
the White House
Coda: Is This Dinner . . . Impossible?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .277
Afterword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .289
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .291
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .293
About the Authors
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
v CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I
HAVENOIDEAWHEREIAMGOING.
It’s not for an immediate lack of direction or information. I am driving to
my immediate destination in the middle of the night from an appearance at a
live cooking event in Morristown, New Jersey. I am driving a sleek new BMW
with a technologically advanced GPS system, into which I have fed the coordi-
nates for a hotel in Princeton. In the short term, I think I am probably quite
close to that locale. I am hoping to get some food and at least a few hours’ rest
before the big day tomorrow. Therein lies the mystery.
Tomorrow, I am due to arrive at an undisclosed destination, where I will be
cooking for an indeterminate number of people I have never met, in a kitchen
I have never seen, with stores of food and ingredients that may or may not be
of my choosing. I have no idea how long I will be given to accomplish this task,
nor will I have any prior ability to plan ahead in even the smallest detail. And
I have willingly...no, eagerly, placed myself in this predicament.
There is only one force that could be responsible for devising such an absurd
situation with such a markedly high potential for disaster: television.
Tomorrow is the day I am shooting the pilot for my first (hopefully success-
ful, hopefully the first of many, fingers crossed) Food Network show. Each epi-
sode of the show will feature your humble servant, me, ably assisted (most of the
time at least, God and my sadistic producers willing) by my incrediblesous-
chefs, George and George, in equally absurd and improbable cooking situa-
tions, with no advance warning or information ahead of the game as to where,
how, for whom, and with what we might be cooking at any given time.
Pretty cool, huh?
I am not inherently of an existential bent, but it’s hard to avoid a certain
level of reflection on one’s life when a benchmark for along-sought and cher-
ished goal such as this has been reached.
As you will see in the succeeding pages, I am a bit of an anomaly in the
cooking trade. Although I have a wide-ranging acquaintance with classical
technique and world cuisine, I have never been to a formal culinary institute or
cooking school. I am equally at home cooking for six people at a time as I am
for six thousand, and I discovered that ability within myself whilst I was still
in my teens. I have cooked an inordinate proportion of meals in my career on
the ocean. I have had the privilege of cooking for royalty, celebrities, politi-
cians, and ambassadors of high rank, diners of every stripe, but unlike, say,
Thomas Keller and his most admirable French Laundry, I have never—yet—
established a single restaurant kitchen as my home base.
In more than aquarter-century of cooking, I have never settled down, pro-
fessionally speaking anyway. Not unlike the freelancers of medieval European
chivalry or cowboys for hire on the open range in the American West, I have
preferred to follow my own path, my own internal compass. I have never liked
being constrained within a single system or style of cooking, and I have always
looked to the next horizon for opportunity and inspiration.
I am very good at drawing up strategies and attacking problems, but in
general, I don’t like “plans.” Blueprints, manuals, corporate directives, and
even recipes essentially leave me cold. I have collected cookbooks from about
the age of eleven, and have always enjoyed studying the pictures and figuring
my own methods for achieving a dish more than slavishly following every mea-
surement and cooking time listed by the author.
I believe that cooking can be a demonstration of what you have inside of
you, whether you are a chef expressing a passion for exquisite culinary detail, a
cook dishing up hearty and delicious fare in a diner to fuel your customers for
the day ahead, or a mother expressing love and caring for her family at the din-
ner table. I believe that these feelings are best expressed in the moment.
I have created a lot of dishes with which I am quite pleased, that reflect my
basic philosophies of how to put a dish together. I try to use fresh and interest-
ing ingredients, to incorporate the element of surprise, ofttimes by combining
hot and cold items on the same plate, by pairing unusual textures, by building
the dish on the plate in a new and interesting way, all without sacrificing the
integrity of thewhole. But however well practiced and well calculated a dish
might be, I know that I will never make it the exactly the same way twice. I
may find a novel ingredient whilst passing a market on the way to the event
and throw it into the mix; I may be in a bad mood and thus decide to approach
the same old dish in a new and playful way to cheer myself up; it may be rainy,
or sunny, orChristmasy—all of these will affect the way I cook on the day. If
vii INTRODUCTION
I know my audience personally, it changes the plan of attack I might use for an
anonymous crowd. If I make a dish tomorrow instead of today, well, that
changes everything.
The more open you are to the world and its infinite variety of people and
influences, the more they will spill into and around your life. This television
opportunity came from totally unexpected sources, and I find myself relishing
this next challenge, because, in fact, it suits me. I probably would not have
purposely chosen a format in which I will never have any idea what might be
coming at me next, but I can already see that it is going to test me and my par-
ticular theories about cooking and life in ways that could prove deeply satisfy-
ing (if I don’t screw up too much). Though I don’t believe in recklessness,
which carries its own punishments, I do believe that spontaneity is its own re-
ward. One of the biggest rewards is creative satisfaction. The biggest, in my
opinion? It makes things a lot more fun.
I also believe in sharing what I have learned; thus this book. There are sto-
ries contained herein about how I got to where I am, collaborations and con-
versations about how to approach and think about the subject of food, and
recipes that I think and hope you will enjoy. Make them if they appeal to you,
see how they work, and then, please take the liberty of making them your own
and using them as ajumping-off point for inspiration. Some of these recipes
apply directly to the stories in this book; some of them demonstrate certain
qualities that are valuable to the study and discussion of food; some go to-
gether thematically, some don’t; some are just in there because they’re good and
I thought you might like to give them a try.
A good chef knows how to set the tone for a meal by provoking interest with
a taste of things to come that illustrates, ideally, what his cuisine is all about in
a single bite or two. The amuse-gueule, which literally is an “amusement for the
mouth,” is a very small chef’s tasting, offered upon seating, of a preparation
that is exotic, surprising, or special, to prime the palate for what is to come.
Theamuse-gueule can tell you a lot about the chef and about what he is pre-
paring to set before you. Seems like a good way to start a book, too.
INTRODUCTION viii
