Heston Blumenthal to launch food range for Waitrose

by guardian.co.uk - 07/07/2010

"Fat Duck wonderchef conjures up British classics such as beef and ale pie."

Heston Blumenthal is to launch a range of foods for Waitrose this October as the nights draw in and our thoughts turn to gizzard marshmallow. Vanilla mayonnaise is a forthcoming treat, but also beef and ale pie. Pretty trad, no? What do you say to chicken, ham and leek pie, spinach and mushroom pie and steak and kidney pie? You might as well bake your own grandmother.

It's a bit more adventurous than that – there is kelp, for example, with the beef. But it's basically straight-down-the-line British cooking. This should come as no surprise from Blumenthal, who has demonstrated in his pub, the Hind's Head, and cookbook, Perfection, an endearingly obsessive interest in taking an obvious classic and getting it absolutely right (in his restaurant, the Fat Duck, conversely, he takes a dish of his own imagining, and nobody but him could tell whether it was right or not).

The problem is that our interest in individual chefs becomes fetishistic, larger than the sum of any of their dishes. It has to, since the prices in the world's most fabulous restaurants cannot, by any scheme of maths, be justified by ingredients and man-hours alone. There has to be an additional something – the mystique of Heston, the assurance that your hero has touched the food and bestowed something incredible upon it. When Gordon Ramsay gets the food for his gastropub from a warehouse, or Heston stamps his name upon a cow-and-sea pie, there is a feeling of fraudulence.

Other dishes Blumenthal might consider for Waitrose: the thrice-baked chips. How convenient they'd be frozen. The snail porridge: it's old but nobody else makes this stuff. The homemade sherbet dibdab: genius. Something featuring dry ice. Tuesday evenings would fly by.

More Details: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/jul/06/heston-blumenthal-food-for-waitrose