WRITING'S NOT ALL HE DOES WRONGLY
CORFIELD COOKS LIKE HE WRITES: WITHOUT TASTE
completely bankrupt—which is one of the reasons I’m keen to do this interview; I’m hoping to make a bagel later, and then eat it.” We ask why he offers the sandwiches to the media if he’s so hungry, and he says it’s because he doesn’t like triangles. “Tony has a tendency to cut them diagonally, which I find makes them harder to eat. I might be starving to death, but I’m not going to risk slashing my face on the sharpened edge of a ham and cheese sandwich.” This went some way to explaining why he offers them to the media in particular. “Admittedly, I throw them at the media in the hope of injuring some journalists," he says. "But don’t write that bit down. Write the bit about the bagel instead.”
The idea of sandwiches becomes increasingly attractive when Thomas proceeds with his next dish, which he sniffs, before asking, “Does this look off to you?” It looks like something that required extensive medication in its final hours and tastes no better. It’s stringy and has the texture of crispy sick in sauce. We know this because it’s the description Thomas gives after trying some. “Can you write that down?” he asks, wiping his chin after being sick in the sink. “Can you write down that I tried eating something that I clearly shouldn’t have? It might make me appear brave. I’d like to appear brave, rather than pathetic. I’m not really pathetic, you know. It’s just the way I’m portrayed.” He says this while scraping some of the larger chunks off the benchtop, which he collects in a cup, before looking around and asking if there are any skewers. When ask what beverages he enjoys, he offers us the cup.
Thomas finds the refrigerator fascinating, and is astonished by the things in it. “None of them move,” he says. “Look. I’m prodding this and it’s not protesting at all.” He then goes on a tour of inspection of other kitchen appliances, advising that he’s never seen them before. “My kitchen is very basic,” he says. “It only recently had a ceiling put in. Well, I say put in. What I really mean is that I used some newspaper and sticky tape to patch a hole in the roof that I created after a tin of baked beans exploded.” He points out a microwave, saying that apparently all the expensive models speak French. He knows this, he says, because he ruined a friend’s dinner party in an apartment with no walls.
During the fifth course, which consists of a full compost bucket, Thomas asks whether we’re going to skew this article to make him look dreadful, which is how he’s been portrayed in other interviews. We assured him that we would not, and wished to give him the opportunity to reveal himself as the decent, hard-working individual he claims himself to be. We wished to portray an honest and accurate account of his culinary expertise, which, in an irony only possible with someone who dishes up sick on a plate, proves that he’s ghastly. He’s clearly unable to grasp the most basic principles of cooking; using heat, for example, and has an uncanny talent at making food look better after it has been eaten than before.
Meeting Thomas was tolerable, but staying with him in a kitchen has been dreadful. He cooks as he writes; with no taste at all. He has no redeeming features except for the fact that one day he’ll be dead. And considering his attempts at cooking, I suspect that day will come sooner than later. It’s just unfortunate that it’s not right now.
We should be relieved that he doesn’t write cookery books.
MELAS OF FOOD/January, 32