Reinventing the Hexagon

Jonathan Meades on Alex Jackson’s Frontières and the French food resurgence. Illustration by Alex Christian.

Frontières by Alex Jackson. Pavilion. 286pp.

Every so often the wheel is reinvented by people too young to recall its last reinvention. To them it’s invention, tout court, no prefix. Its discovery is a source of pride and self-congratulation: we are the generation that came up with this device that previous generations were incapable of summoning because they were too dull or torpid or were still marvelling at their ability to destroy the huts of the bastards in the lush valley by rubbing together flints that the bastards don’t have because there is no chalk down there for the flints to hide in. 

For wheel, substitute any one of the almost 100 dishes from France’s borderlands that chef Alex Jackson – formerly of Noble Rot in Soho, and now at Leila’s Shop in Shoreditch – presents in Frontières, a book that offers no resolution to the many questions it raises. The first of these concerns that wheel and its eternal return. Jackson is not yet 40 years old, but his taste, his precursors, his enthusiasms, his repertoire – what he elects to write about and, as importantly, what he ignores – are those of chefs (and this writer) at least 30 years his senior. 

“Against that, he is searching for repertoires that have fallen into desuetude, have disappeared though neglect and changing fashions: the unrelenting clamour for fusion, pulses, and vegetables, the dispiriting enthusiasm for Burger King, Shergar Shack, and so on”