Frankie Unsworth - The new art of cooking : a modern guide to preparing and styling delicious food

'If the divine creator has taken the pains

to give us delicious and exquisite things

to eat, the least we can do is prepare them

well and serve them with ceremony.

Fernand Point, Ma Gastronomie (1969)

Being a Food Stylist

When I was on the set of a global ad campaign recently, watching a male hand models cuticles being touched up with foundation by a specialist hand make-up artist, I thought to myself thats a weird job. After this brief contemplative pause, I returned to the task at hand: inserting a chicken salad sandwich into the models now-pristine clutches, positioning cocktail sticks to secure the filling, grabbing my tweezers to tease out the prettiest leaves and then taking a tiny paintbrush to distribute mayonnaise across the underside of the bread. The rest of the crew looked on in bewilderment. Welcome to the world of food styling.

Styling food for photo shoots varies from the tweezer-toting precision of advertising jobs, where detail is paramount lest that sandwich be blown up on the side of a bus, to inspiring home cooks with atmospheric images for cookbooks, where natural lighting and realism make for the most delicious photographs. Food styling is both my profession and my obsession, but its the more natural side of it, focussing on flaunting the beauty of the ingredients themselves in a creative way, that truly inspires and informs my cooking at home.

A plate can act as a canvas and the layers and components of the food come together to form a whole picture through a play of colours, textures and forms. By paying more attention to how we buy, cook and eat our food, we can turn an everyday practicality into one of lifes affordable luxuries. Eating is a multisensory experience after all, enriched by the bright colours of the seasons pickings, the weight of a fork in your hand or the evocative smell of garlic slowly sweated in butter.

Spending most of my working day in a kitchen means that my style of cooking isnt fussy at home; it makes the most of a few well-prepared ingredients and usually requires little hands-on cooking time. It is led by a love of good produce, colour and clever flavour combinations. The recipes that follow are a collection of things I most want to eat, dishes that make the most of beautiful ingredients but dont take hours to prepare.

Working as a food stylist comes with a certain degree of stress. Every shoot day is different, every new kitchen has its challenges and every recipe has its intricacies. Ive been through it all, from cooking in a tent without any running water to crouching over a camping stove on a pebble beach. There will always be new, unpredictable and obscure issues, but having mastered a few basics (perfect poached eggs, the crispiest fish skin and the icing you can serve on even the most sweltering day) I now have the confidence to confront all the challenges that might be thrown my way. In a nutshell, Ive learned from many mistakes so that you dont have to.

This book is about lovingly crafting beautiful plates of food to be proud of, whether its showing yourself a little tenderness with a perfect omelette for one or sharing good food and too many bottles of wine with a gathering of friends. I want to show how easy it is to cook dishes that are just as pretty as in the pictures and how a little extra thought when it comes to prepping and presentation can make all the difference.

Setting the Scene

In the world of food photography, we bring cookery to life by creating a scene that will invite the viewer to sit down and tuck in. From the plates to the table surface, props create an atmosphere and enhance the real star of the show your dinner.

The same goes at home. You dont have to take a strict and formal approach to setting the table. Sometimes it can be as simple as taking the time to choose just the right plate or light a candle or two. Its about giving your cooking a backdrop and letting it shine.

Laying the Table

Setting the table initiates a ritual that tells you its time to set the day aside and focus on the meal you are about to dig into. Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, even offers a scientific reason to take care over the presentation of food. He has studied the impact of all the aspects surrounding mealtimes, from the weight of cutlery (the heavier the cutlery, the more people are willing to pay for the food in a restaurant) to the colour of a plate (strawberries taste sweeter on a white plate), and how they influence our perceptions of quality and taste. In other words, if you light candles, lay down a tablecloth and pull out your best glassware, youre already on your way to a good meal.

One of the easiest ways to create ambience is through considered lighting. Low lighting, ideally not from overhead, makes for a soft and sometimes even sumptuous setting. Candlelight and table lamps offer a subtle diffused light that is kind on the food and on your friends. If you have strong spotlights in your dining area, bring in lamps from other rooms and go heavy on the candlelight. I keep a stash of pillar candles handy, as well as tea lights, which I pop in small glasses, jars or pinch pots. When I am feeling romantic, I whip out the tapered dinner candles in candlesticks for some old-world elegance. Fairy lights wrapped around a tree or a bush in the garden can add a magical touch. I also have a few long lengths of festoon lights to illuminate the back of my house on those rare nights when the pesky English summer allows for outdoor entertaining.

Laying the table for a dinner party is best done in advance of the cooking that way even if you are feeling frazzled in the final stages of preparing the food, at least the table will be presentable and give an impression of organisation when guests arrive. Your table-setting need not be overly formal; try putting the cutlery in jars or old mustard pots and popping them in the centre of the table for people to help themselves. This is a good solution if you dont have room for everyone to sit down. And if youve limited space, you can put a folded napkin on each plate with cutlery on top instead of on either side. That way everyone can see how tightly they need to squeeze in.

At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, sometimes a small amount of formality can be fun and seating plans make excellent work of mixing up the chat and making tactical pairings. Try using postage tags as place names and flex your calligraphy skills. Tie the tags around napkins with butchers twine, ribbons or even fabric offcuts torn to encourage a frayed edge. Vintage clothes pegs or attractive heavy paper clips also do a good job. I have a vast collection of Japanese washi tape (see ), a fancy thin version of masking tape, which I use for sticking things down, whether its a pressed flower to a menu card or some garden foliage to a place name.

If I am serving bread, a breadboard with a scattering of salt and a swipe of whipped butter (see ) gets plonked on the table. With other condiments, such as mustard, gravy or pickles, either take the lids off the jars and centre them on a nice saucer with a spoon, or decant them into a jug or bowl.