by Rick Stein
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
PART TWO: Rites of Passage
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
PART THREE: Early Days
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
PART FOUR: Giddy Times
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
PART FIVE: Back to Australia
Chapter One
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
‘All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.’
Rick Stein’s childhood in 1950s rural Oxfordshire and North Cornwall was idyllic. His parents were charming and gregarious; their five children much-loved and given freedom typical of the time. As he grew older the holidays were filled with loud and lively parties in his parents’ Cornish barn. But ever-present was the unpredictable mood of his bipolar father, with Rick frequently the focus of his anger and sadness.
When Rick was 18 his father killed himself. Emotionally adrift, Rick left for Australia, carrying a suitcase stamped with his father’s initials. Manual labour in the outback followed by adventures in America and Mexico toughened up the naïve public schoolboy, but at heart he was still lost and unsure what to do with his life.
Eventually, Cornwall called him home. From the entrepreneurial days of his mobile disco, the Purple Tiger; to his first, unlikely nightclub where much of the time was spent breaking up drink-fuelled fights, Rick charts his personal journey in a way that is wry and perceptive; engaging and witty.
About the Author
RICK STEIN’S passion for using good-quality local produce and his talent for creating delicious flavour combinations in his books and restaurants have won him a host of awards, accolades and fans. As well as presenting a number of television series, he has published many bestselling cookery books, including Coast to Coast, Rick Stein’s Far Eastern Odyssey, Rick Stein’s Spain and Rick Stein’s India.
Rick is a firm supporter of sustainable fishing and farming techniques, which he strives to maintain in Padstow, Cornwall, where he runs an acclaimed restaurant and a seafood cookery school, as well as a delicatessen, patisserie and hotel. In 2003 Rick was awarded an OBE for services to West Country tourism. He divides his time between Padstow and Australia, where he opened a restaurant, Rick Stein at Bannisters, in 2009.
For Sas, Ed, Jack, Charles, Zach,
Olivia, Jeremy, John and Henrietta
And in memory of Janey
All men should strive to learn before they die,
what they are running from, and to, and why
James Thurber
PART ONE
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
I
I loved fishing off the rocks with my dad. There weren’t a lot of things I loved doing with him; I was a bit scared of him because he shouted a lot. But fishing was a time when the tying of knots in nylon line and the threading of ragworms on hooks involved us with practicalities and I forgot my reserve. He kept his wooden reels in a green canvas bag flecked with fish scales and he always took with him a little wire folding stool with an orange cloth seat which he also used when painting watercolours of the medieval bridge at Wadebridge or the view of the Camel estuary towards Stepper and Pentire Point. We had a house in Cornwall on Trevose Head and my dad knew a lot of local fishermen, mostly from going to pubs: the Cornish Arms and Farmers Arms in St Merryn and several of the half a dozen or so pubs in Padstow, particularly the London Inn, the Golden Lion and the Caledonian.
A strong memory of childhood is sitting in the back of our Jaguar with my sister Henrietta drinking St Austell ginger beer and eating crisps with a little blue paper twist of salt, waiting while my mum and dad had a drink on a dull day. We were never allowed inside the pub but the smell of beer and tobacco smoke and the sound of good-humoured conversation billowing out as people came and went was tantalising, particularly in the warm summer drizzle, when the dampness of the air seemed to hold in those aromas, infused with the scent of wild fennel from hedges nearby.
Henrietta remembers interminable hours in one boat or another with Bill Cullum fishing for mackerel, garfish and pollack, or with Johnnie Murt hauling lobster pots. Most of the time she would sit and read. Occasionally, we’d both be sick. Once, alone with my father in a small boat, we narrowly missed being turned over in the surf at Polzeath. In our excitement at catching so many bass we had let our lines become tangled, snagging the propeller and stopping the engine. I remember the panic then, as we drifted towards the breaking waves. Years later two local boys, Bronco Bate and Arnold Murt, out salmon netting on the Doom Bar drowned because the same thing happened; the atmosphere in Padstow the next morning was as dark as I can recall.
The downstairs bedroom next to the kitchen in our house, Polventon, would often be used for storing live lobsters, crab or crayfish which crawled over the floor, bubbling and making cracking noises. I loved the crab meat and quite liked the crayfish, but the lobster was too intense. Its firm, white, sweet-salty flesh was too strong for a child and the bright yellow mayonnaise too pungent with the olive oil that my mother always used. How special now are those flavours that I couldn’t take then; the beer tasted horribly bitter, particularly the Whitbread Pale Ale which some of the workers on our farm drank. I can still recall the black, heavy screw stoppers with red rubber seals, and the men sitting with their glasses on the just-filled barley sacks at lunch break during harvest time.
Fishing off the rocks we never caught much more than wrasse and pollack. The wrasse were gorgeously coloured; deep red, orange, yellow and sometimes green or golden-hued, but tasted of nothing. The pollack were always the same colour, a silver belly and brown back and large dark blue eyes. My dad and I would take the fish back to the house where the wrasse were treated with little enthusiasm by my mother. She left them till they were starting to smell, I think to make me feel better about it, then threw them out into the springy cliff grass for the gulls. The pollack she made into fish cakes, often with mackerel, which were ever-present due to the almost daily boat-fishing trips. All the cooking I’ve ever done since is in some way an attempt to recapture some of the flavours of the cooking at home when I was a boy. Those pollack fish cakes with mashed potatoes, parsley, salt, pepper and dazzlingly fresh mackerel, just put under the grill with a sprig of fennel, are still the best I’ve ever eaten.
One summer we went to stay on the south coast of Cornwall, at Church Cove on the Lizard peninsula with some friends of my parents, the composer Richard Arnell and his wife Colette. They had a daughter, Claudine, whom my brother John admired even more urgently than I did, he being some years older, but I was fascinated by her: she was far and away the most beautiful girl I had ever met, and with the longest legs. She was like a real-life version of Brigitte Bardot, whom we then thought the ultimate in sexiness. Church Cove s
eemed very dishevelled, the thatch on the cottages patchy and full of holes, and a large pile of smelly cattle bedding straw right next to one of the houses. I may be recalling wrongly, but I think that some of the local boys of my age had no shoes. The holiday house had been the old fish cellars. Below it, at the top of the pebble beach, there was a capstan house for hauling up the pilchard boats, and Henrietta and I would spin round on it while Claudine played cool.
One evening, after an afternoon’s fishing, I returned in triumph with about 11 wrasse and a couple of pollack and Colette cooked a bouillabaisse. My mother had a well stocked cupboard but it baffles me now where Colette could have got the ingredients for that fabulous fish stew. Not in Cornwall, for sure. The olive oil perhaps from the chemist. There would have been plenty of well-flavoured tomatoes. Maybe the saffron was bought locally too, that would have been available for Cornish saffron cake. Garlic – green and moist – grew in the hedgerows, but I suspect that Colette had a whole box of things like bulbs of garlic and tomato purée from London because, being French, these were essential for her.
Colette’s bouillabaisse – with its dark orange colour and the saltiness of it and the way it made those wrasse really taste of something – really stays with me. I must have been 11 or 12 but I still remember the glorious crunch of cornflakes with full-cream milk, brown sugar and clotted cream for breakfast. And the perfection of my mum’s spaghetti in the kitchen of Polventon, with the view from the window of the Merrope rocks jutting out into the sea below with Cataclews Point across Mother Ivey’s Bay in the near distance and, beyond, Trevone and Stepper and Pentire Point.
II
I was born in Chipping Norton on 4 January 1947. My parents, Eric and Dorothy Stein, owned a farm in Oxfordshire, and I was the fourth of five children. The youngest, Henrietta, was my childhood playmate on the farm and on the beach; we are still incredibly close. John is six years older than me; he was idolised by my mother for his good looks and his brilliance at exams. Janie, nine years older than me, was idolised by both Henrietta and myself for her trendy clothes and cheerful don’t-care attitude; she had countless boyfriends, most of whom were disapproved of by our parents. Jeremy is my half-brother, my mother’s son from a previous marriage. He is 12 years older than me, and soon after I was born he went to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth. After that Jeremy was away at sea so I didn’t see much of him. He had built a model railway at the bottom of the garden and had large model yachts and other grown-up toys which I vandalised with clumsy wonder as most much younger brothers do.
My father had a manager – Harry Watson – at the farm, helped by a young woman called Joyce Unwin who had come to work on the farm as a land girl in the Second World War. My father spent most of the week in London, where he and my mother had a flat in Bloomsbury. My dad ran the family firm – Stein Brothers, whose main business was distilling – with his brother Rolf. By the time I was born it had been taken over by the Distillers Company and, in time, my father became managing director. The Steins, including my father’s sisters Zoe and Muriel, had connections in North Cornwall, where my father and Rolf built Polventon, an Art Deco house on Trevose Head where we all spent our summer holidays. Many people thought it was eccentric and experimental in the 1960s and 70s – but today the architecture is much admired and, indeed, the house is now listed.
On Sunday nights at the farm in Oxfordshire, my dad made tomato and onion soup. It was probably little more than onions – or more likely shallots, because he adored them – sliced and softened in butter to which he’d then add some chopped tomatoes from the garden and simply simmer it all together with stock made from the leftovers of the Sunday roast chicken, with lots of salt and pepper. His soup was so clear you could see the pieces of shallot and tomato in it. No wonder I am drawn to simple dishes.
My father used to say with some pride at Sunday lunch that everything we were eating had come from the farm. Vegetables from the vegetable garden, which was surrounded by sheep netting near the Dutch barn where he also grew sweet peas (I can’t think of those delicate shades of creamy-white, pink, blue and mauve and the sweet fragrance of them without a sense of comfort). The beef, if not immediately from our own Herefordshire bullocks, would certainly have come from a neighbour’s. The pudding, too, would have been ours: in summer, strawberries from the fruit garden near the house and cream from the dairy in Chipping Norton, or a blackcurrant or gooseberry fool. In autumn, an apple charlotte from our apples or a damson tart from the tree by our house. When I was little I found my mum’s pastry too rich but now I always use her recipe. It wasn’t really delicate, not like the sort of pastries I’ve relished since in French patisseries. It was a mixture of lard and butter, 5oz of each to a pound of flour, but it had a rich crumbliness. She never altered it by putting in sugar for puddings, and I have always found that a nice contrast. I used to scrape out the mixing bowl, but raw pastry doesn’t taste as good as it smells, unlike raw sponge mix which is so more-ish that it’s frustrating.
My earliest memories of the farm are to do with food. A few years ago I made a television series called Rick Stein’s Food Heroes in which I went round the British Isles and Ireland. ‘There’s a whole band of people out there producing small quantities of food with passionate commitment,’ I wrote, ‘who look after their land properly, treat their flocks or herds with affection and respect and take their time to grow or rear crops or animals.’ Only after some time did I stop to think that I was actually writing about our family farm.
The farm was 150 acres, down a long yellow bumpy lane just outside Churchill, on the road to Chipping Norton. It was called a mixed farm, which I later came to realise was a farm where there were lots of animals being reared and lots of crops being grown but you didn’t actually make money out of any of it. I don’t think it lost a lot of money, but my father was always blaming Harry, who ran the farm. Basically, it was never going to be profitable. It was not big enough, and not efficiently managed. I’m saying this only with the benefit of hindsight and having run – or tried to run – restaurants.
It was called Conduit Farm because it had a spring that fed the village of Churchill. One English summer, my father decided to build a swimming pool, which was rare in those days, especially in rural Oxfordshire. That year, there was a drought and the spring dried up and the locals had very little water. The Daily Telegraph reported that Distillers Company director, Eric Stein, had filled his pool while the villagers were queuing at the standpipes. In fact my father had fallen into the empty pool shortly before it was due to be filled and had broken his leg. He lost interest in it after that. It remained about a quarter filled with increasingly muddy rainwater. When it was finally full of clean water and we children got to swim in it, we were stung by the nettles which grew out of the mud near the edge because the paving slabs were never laid. The water always went green because the filter was never plumbed in. This was an early indicator to me how newspapers don’t tell the truth. I was too young and naive to read the signs, but it was also an early indicator of my dad’s state of mind. After the manic phase of building the pool came the depressive stage of the man who had used up all the water. It really upset him.
Much of what my dad did bewildered me. He came back from Japan with tons of gadgets – early transistor radios, cameras, tape recorders. I had never seen anything like it. Nowadays, I know that crazy shopping is a common manifestation of the manic phase of bipolar behaviour. As a child, I was embarrassed by my dad’s effusive episodes; I honestly don’t think I had much awareness of his depressed episodes. He was just terribly low, and I suppose I got used to living with someone who was intermittently sad.
Each year in November we killed a pig. I wasn’t allowed to see the actual killing or the bleeding. The blood was collected for black pudding. Mr Nurdin, the local slaughterman, came over from Chippy (Chipping Norton) to do the killing and, as soon as the pig was dead and bled, I could watch the burning off of the hair with straw. The belly was slit open, and all th
e guts spilled out and were loaded into buckets. Then came the sorting out of various organs and the cleaning-out of the guts by attaching them to a tap or hosepipe and watching as all the shit and a few white worms ran out. When they were clean, Harry used to tie them up into bundles and make chitlins which we ate fried. He’d make brawn by boiling the pig’s head and pressing the meat. He’d make sausages and hang bacon and gammons in our larder. I don’t say it was carried out with the finesse of an Andalucian matanza but it familiarised me with the realities of slaughter and created my enjoyment of offal. A few years ago at Brasserie Bofinger in Paris, my lifelong friend Johnny Walter and I both ordered andouillettes, the speciality of the house. Realising we were English, the waiter laughed. ‘I think maybe you don’t like these,’ he said. ‘It’s French speciality. No for English. Maybe you like Choucroute Alsacienne instead.’
‘We absolutely want the andouilletes,’ I said.
He shrugged, as they do, and blew a little from the corner of his mouth and shortly returned with two plates of the stumpy sausages which I can only describe as honking, in the sense of a strong blaring smell. They were very powerful – the same order of unsettling aroma as ripe Camembert but also sharp tasting in their intestinal taint. To the uninitiated they smelt of pig shit, but not to me. These were the intestines of my youth, albeit with a little extra maturity.
I can’t honestly say I totally enjoyed them, but I was definitely not going to leave them unfinished.
As a child, I took pig evisceration as normal so there was no surprise when my mother pulled the guts out of a chicken on the kitchen table and occasionally let me have a go. I would marvel at the whole eggs in there, flecked with blood but without the shell, getting ready to be laid. I remember, too, a type of cottage cheese known as cherry curds, so-called because it was made from the first milk after a cow had newly calved and contained traces of blood. The facts of life were all around us: boars and sows, collie dogs, pet rabbits. On one occasion Mr Hutchinson, the owner of Sarsden Farm across the valley from ours, walked over a number of cows to be crossed with our bull. My friend Les and I sat on the wall of the yard watching. Mr Hutchinson, something of a gentleman farmer like my dad, told us to get off because it was not appropriate. I remember feeling embarrassed but also a bit bewildered because neither Les nor I could see why it was so wrong because we didn’t really understand that there was a connection between what we were seeing and what humans did.
