Alex Rushmer raids his bookshelves to create a special menu in spired by the world of literature
For the last three years it’s been a real pleasure taking part in the Eat Cambridge food festival, and once again I marked the occasion by creating a themed tasting menu to cook at my restaurant, The Hole in the Wall. In 2014 the focus was on locality and we sourced all the ingredients for the feast from within about 20 miles of Little Wilbraham. Last year’s menu centred around historical figures from the city’s past and consisted of such dishes as Lord Byron’s Pool and Cromwell’s Favourite, as well as a deliciously sweet Duchess of Cambridge Tart, flavoured with bergamot and vanilla.
The challenge for this year’s menu was to find another connection on which to base the ten courses that create the meal. I’d had the germ of an idea wondering around my head for at least 12 months, but the advancing deadline ensured I would have to work a little more quickly. So I delved into the bookshelves for inspiration and found plenty.
Thankfully Cambridge has a rich and varied literary history and there are any number of authors, books, poems or plays that could have been used as influences for dishes that would appear on the menu. I devoured the works of the Romantic poets, scoured Milton and powered through Forster to find even the most fleeting references to food or a hook on which to hang a dish.
“Culinary inflections from all over the world (and even beyond if you include Douglas Adams)”
Gradually the shape of the menu came together and after plenty of time searching through book after book I found enough source material to create a fun thematic menu with a definite connection to this great city.
Along the way it takes in fiction, memoir, poetry, science and travel with culinary inflections from all over the world (and even beyond if you include Douglas Adams’s magnificently named cocktail, the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster) including Chilean ceviche flavoured with Tahitian vanilla, a vibrant green chutney taken straight from the pages of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and a truly wicked dessert based on the brilliantly evocative Turkish delight of C S Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.
One thing I realised when putting this menu together was that inspiration can, and often does, appear from the strangest of places. On late nights when it felt as if the creative juices had long since been depleted, a single word or line could fire a spark of inspiration that would be sufficient to come up with a whole new element or complete dish as happened when reading the gentle meanderings of A A Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner and the wonderful opening words of Tom Sharpe’s biting satire Porterhouse Blue.
But I suppose, more than anything else, it made me realise just how much fun the process of creating and cooking and dining actually can be – that small injection of comedy or a referential nod to something can bring a whole new dimension to an eating experience.
