Floyd on Fish

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Forget the wine swilling for a moment, Keith Floyd was actually a very a good chef. He was also a very good writer, and of course, a very good raconteur. In Floyd on Fish, Keith Floyd demonstrates all three of these skills brilliantly. The result is a very, very good cookbook.

Floyd on Fish – more than a seafood cookbook

‘As a small boy I played spaceship with the presses and machines in my grandfather’s workshop,’ reads the first line of Floyd’s introduction. It’s an unusual opener for a cookbook, but it’s Keith Floyd doing what he does best – charming you.

When watching any of Floyd’s TV series it’s clear he never neglects his audience, which is a skill in itself. He comes across with great sincerity and honesty. He’s happy to admit, on camera, when he’s out of his depth and doesn’t really know what he’s doing. Owing to the nature of this website, we can probably all relate to that at this stage of our culinary journey.

However, to attempt to pull off a similar approach for a cookbook is remarkable when you think about it. Floyd manages the feat with ease. The personable tone used throughout brings Floyd’s enormous personality to every page, making it feel as if he’s written the book solely for you. ‘Excuse me now. I must leave the typewriter and return to the kitchen to clean the mussels for lunch’.

Keith Floyd – good seafood, good advice

In the chapter, ‘A Working Attitude to Fish,’ Floyd offers solid, sensible advice in a manner of a friend, not a professional chef. This open approach means the book is ideal for people like us, the amateurs, the novices, and those taking their very first steps into the wonderful world of seafood cookery. ‘People plan visits to the theatre and trips to the country well in advance, they dress up for the occasion and spend time and money to ensure a good time. You must take the same attitude to your fish cookery,’ he writes.

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Floyd covers the essentials, choosing, storing, cleaning and filleting fish, as well a few pages on useful kitchen utensils. Here’s the interesting thing, Floyd on Fish makes no obvious mention of being a book for beginners.

Floyd assumes that you, and everybody like you (and like him sometimes), doesn’t really know what they’re doing.

However, he doesn’t shout about it, or make you feel embarrassed about it. He’s drawn the conclusion that you’re not a professional cook, for if you were, you probably wouldn’t be buying his book. All he wants is for you to love seafood, to enjoy the buying, handling, cooking, and of course, eating it.

Seafood recipes

The recipes are a mixture of great dishes like bouillabaisse, bourride and paella, to simpler offerings such as Sea bass in white wine and Marinated herring.

Floyd writes with humour and intelligence when describing each fish, crab, squid, etc.. ’Ah, the oyster. The crazy oyster. These androgynous aphrodisiacs, once the staple diet of poor apprentices, are now the currency of credibility for Gucci-shoed executive who also swallows big deals as he sips a glass of Chablis in the dim blue-suited bars of the capital’.

He goes on to say that Poole oysters are the very best he’s ever eaten, and being Poole-born, I completely agree.

For a book written in 1985, the majority of recipes remain relevant and easy and enjoyable to cook. Only in regard to freshwater fish does the book reveal its age, but then again perhaps I’m living in the wrong part of the country.

However, as much as I may try, I cannot recall ever seeing pike or perch on the fishmonger’s slab. The availability of freshwater fish aside, Floyd on Fish is my absolute favourite cookbook – and not just for the recipes.

Keith Floyd died in 2009 (you can read the Guardian’s obituary here), yet through the style, charm, enthusiasm and honesty with which he writes Floyd on Fish, he lives on – championing seafood and whole-heartedly cheering on us amateurs to glory and levels of cooking which we’d never have dreamed we were capable.

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