Floyd on death

'Drunk on the kind of applause that gets louder the lower you sink...' -Mark Eitzel

It's a few weeks since Keith Floyd departed now but he's been playing on my mind since he died. There's no point in me writing an obituary for the dual reasons that a) no one will read this anyway and b) there's been plenty written already by people far more erudite. So, here's some thoughts from up here on Sheepfold Hill about the man.

Being born in 1982, as I was, I missed Keith the first time around. It wasn't until, three of four years ago, watching Saturday Kitchen one morning, I saw footage of him attempting to cook clams in champagne in a galley kitchen of a boat during what I imagine was a storm. He explained jovially that the director and the cameraman were both being sick up on the deck so he was shooting and directing the sequence on his own. As the boat rocked from side to side, the sound of glasses smashing and crockery crashing to the floor punctuating his good-humoured banter, he swigged champagne from the bottle and tipped clams into a pan to cook. I have no idea how to replicate the recipe for clams that he was attempting to show the viewer, but sat in raptures of pleasure enjoying this chaotic television so different from the staid environment of the Saturday Kitchen studio.

Over the next few years I bought as many of his books as I could pick up for next to nothing on Amazon. Something I love about his books, apart from the anecdotes and literary allusions, was the simplicity of his recipes. It occurred to me that he was about a decade, if not more, ahead of his time. There are lots of asides in the recipe lists saying things like 'you can't get coriander from your local supermarket but all good Asian food shops will supply it'. I never shopped in supermarkets during the eighties but it shocked me to consider that ingredients as seemingly basic, and now ubiquitous, were not readily available then. Keith was right at the inception of the movement of television chefs who inspired people to experiment with food and not be afraid of new and unusual ingredients. I still hassle my fishmonger regularly to get me some cod tongues to try out a Floyd recipe!

For me, Keith pretty much laid down the framework for how a good and interesting cookbook should be, and the books since by Rick Stein, Gordon Ramsey, Jamie Oliver etc. are at their best when they deviate as little from this framework as possible. The newspaper columnists seem to have placed far too high a stock, if you'll excuse the pun, in his television work, and barely emphasised the quality of his published work at all. Perhaps this is a consequence of his rambunctious personality, and the fact that many of the commentators are part of the generation of television chefs that followed in his wake.

The influence of his recipes, haphazard and vague though they often are, perhaps partly goes unacknowledged because he never copy-wrighted any of them. As a consequence of this chefs can copy, or re-interpret, them without the need to nod to the man that first committed them to the page. A year or so ago I was surprised to see Keith's mackerel and gooseberry sauce recipe printed in the Guardian Weekend magazine by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Keith believed that recipes were public property, the accumulation of generations of experimentation and improvisation by cooks. No one creates a recipe without cultural context of course.

My final observation is that some of the commentators seemed to lament the fact that Keith was a drunk. This aspect of his personality was something he was lauded for whilst he was alive. It seems a bit harsh now he's dead to cast him as a man who serves as an example of the dangers of over-indulgence. Ironically, like Malcolm Lowry, an autopsy revealed his liver to be in perfect health. I wonder if that's because he only drank decent wine and spirits, as opposed to the poor drunk's tipples of choice, Special Brew and cheap cider?

I'll always have my Floyd books to refer back to so this will be the legacy that he has bequeathed me and I'm sure I'll think of him every time I cook one of his dishes.

Cheers Keith!