When you worked for the Roux brothers, just occasionally you were given a recipe – most of the time, though, you were not. Normally, you were just given a formula or a series of techniques and expected to get on with it. For example, to make the Troisgros classic Salmon Escalope with Sorrel, pretty much all you needed would be a salmon escalope cut on the bias, a noisette of butter, sauce vin blanc, chiffonade of sorrel and a fleuron.

The duck and beetroot consommé did, however, have a rather beautiful recipe. Its somewhat poetic style – the phrase la couleur d’un rubis foncé had a special resonance – suggested that it may, perhaps, have been lifted from another source. Since I learnt the recipe in or around 1979, it could not have been purloined from Simon Hopkinson who did not publish his recipe for the dish until 2001 (in Second Helpings of Roast Chicken). Although couched in less archly poetic terms, his recipe is more honest about the labour involved: “You may think this recipe is a bit of a palaver. You may well be right.”