The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs Read Free

De Fretais, even if he found the man strangely compelling. His copy of
The Bedroom Secrets ofthe Master Chefs
was a guilty lunchtime purchase, and it lay concealed in his briefcase. He recalled the opening paragraphs of the foreword, which he’d read with such distaste:
    The wisest in our midst have long known that the simplest of questions are often the most loaded. With every student of the culinary arts who comes into my orbit, I endeavour to begin our relationship by asking the question: who is the Master Chef? The responses are never less than instructive and intriguing to me, for in order to assist in my quest for culinary excellence, it’s this very question I perennially seem to address.
    For sure, our Master Chef must be an artisan: a craftsman who takes a stubborn pride in the painstaking and often mundane details of his
métier
. Certainly the Master Chef is also a scientist. But he is more than just a chemist: he is an alchemist, a sorcerer, an artist, as his concoctions are not designed to remedy maladies of body or mind, but attend to the far more wondrous task of uplifting the soul.
    Our vehicle for the achievement of this objective is food, pure and simple, but this journey must take us along the road of our own human senses. So, I contend to my oft-bemused students, and now to you, dear reader, that if the Master Chef is anything, then he is, and must always be, a complete and utter sensualist.
    He’s just a fucking cook, and so many of those cunts are too big for their boots.
    And this fucking guide to sexy food! That fat cunt! The whole thing’s ridiculous, it’s been a good few years since that phantom’s seen his fucking prick without the help of a mirror! And those fucking anodyne, sexless yuppies would respond to that, they would actually buy it in their thousands and make a fat, rich, spoiled cunt fatter, richer and more spoiled still. And here I am with a fucking copy in my bag!
    Watching Skinner’s complexion redden, Foy felt a slight unease and removed his arm. — Danny, we can’t be rocking boats at this time of the year, so no pub stories from the horse’s mouth about how bad our friend De Fretais’s kitchen is, okay?
    — Goes without saying, Skinner replied, trying to conceal a mounting excitement that in the boozer tonight he’d blab to everyone who would listen.
    — That’s the spirit, Danny. You’re a good inspector and we certainly need them. We’re down to five in the inspectorate,Foy shook his head in disgust, and then quickly brightened up. — Mind you, our new laddie starts tomorrow, the one from Fife.
    — Oh aye? Skinner raised his brows enquiringly in an unwitting impersonation of his boss.
    — Aye . . . Brian Kibby. Seems a nice young chap.
    — Fine . . . Skinner said distractedly, his thoughts drifting to the weekend. He’d have a few bevvies tonight; these four pints at dinner time had given him a fair old thirst. Then, barring the football on Saturday, he’d spend the rest of the weekend with Kay.
    Everybody had his or her own idea of where Edinburgh ended and the port of Leith commenced. Officially, they said it was the old Boundary Bar at Pilrig, or where the EH6 postcode started. For Skinner though, coming down the Walk, he never truly felt back in Leith until he could feel the hill levelling out under his feet, which was a great sensation, like his body was a spacecraft, landing home after a long voyage to inhospitable lands. He generally marked this from the Balfour Bar onwards.
    On his way back home, Skinner decided to stop off at his mother’s, who lived across the road from her hairdressing business, in a small cobblestoned alley off Junction Street. That was where he’d grown up, before moving out the previous summer. He’d always wanted his own place, but now that he had it, he missed home more than he could ever have imagined.
    The Old Girl’s finished her shift and she fair stinks of thon perming lotion. I’d forgotten how much the whole