KEITH FLOYD – THE KING IS DEAD – LONG LIVE THE KING
Sadly my hero Keith Floyd passed away this week and will be greatly missed by the millions of viewers like me who have been inspired and encouraged by, in my opinion, the greatest TV chef of all time.
I remember as a young child watching Fanny Craddock cooking her fancy European dishes using ingredients that were inaccessible to the average family living in the post war austerity of fifties and early sixties Britain but she didn’t make me feel like cooking. I remember as a teenager watching “The Galloping Gourmet” Graham Kerr and enjoyed seeing the expressions of extacy on his face as he tasted his own cooking. This made me want to eat good food but his slight campness (which would go unnoticed these days) didn’t exactly inspire me to take up the spatula.
Then in the seventies, when I was a young adult, Keith Floyd burst onto the scene and I was hooked and to this day, like so many others, a glass of wine is as essential a cooking aid as is a sharp knife (except for breakfast of course). Keith made cooking a fun and joyous occasion without the rigidness of traditional recipe books – “a dollop of cream, a splash of cider vinegar, a handful of chives and a good slosh of red wine”. This made cooking intuitive and helped me develop a sensitive and discriminating palate. This was jazz to Fanny’s chamber music!
If there can be a silver lining to this tragic loss then it is that we are likely to see more of Keith on the TV in the near future. For those of you who are new to cooking I urge you to get onto Youtube and check out Keith in full flight. You may recognise the influence he has had on that other great TV chef Jamie Oliver with his “bish-bosh” attitude towards measuring ingredients and the simplicity and accessibility of his recipes (but you need to slurp a bit more of the old vino my son!).
Here is a video of what is possibly the last interview with Keith and in typical style there are no holds barred, political correctness goes out the window and he takes no prisoners so if you are of an overly polite or sensitive disposition then cover your ears!!!!
Goodbye old friend – without you Crispy Chris would have been just plain old Chris.
CHEERS!!!!!
