Marco On Marco

Reading White Heat with Marco Pierre White: how does the epoch-defining cookbook of the ’80s stand up 30 years later? We sat down with its chef-author to find out.

The first thing I see when I look at White Heat now is my son. When I look at the front cover, or the picture of me with the fag in the mouth, I see my son Luciano. He’s now working in the kitchen with the El Bulli boys in Barcelona after finishing a year in London with Pierre Koffmann, my old boss. The other thing I see in a lot of these pictures is myself saying “taste, taste, taste, taste”. Teach them your palate, not theirs.

White Heat did 15,000 copies. But a lot of bookshops wouldn’t stock it because they didn’t think it would work. They thought it was a coffee-table book for a small section of the market. What was interesting was that, within 10 days of it being launched, it sold out. Every single year since 1990, it’s been reprinted. It’s never been on the discount shelf.

We were shooting this in what would’ve been called the “yuppie” time: the bull market and Thatcher’s England. We were a little hole in the wall in the middle of nowhere – you had to go over bridges – and we had the most glamorous crowd in all of England. We had royals from all over Europe, from further afield, from Jordan, the Sultan of Brunei – all of them. It was an extraordinary time, and it all happened very quickly.

The pictures for the book were taken in 1987 when I was at Harveys in London. I worked seven days a week back then, and it’s a bit of a blur, but this book has fixed some of those moments in time. Looking at some of these pictures of us in service, I can still feel it, see it moving.