Under a Mackerel Sky

by Rick Stein

  Penny was originally from London and had a strong cockney accent. She loved the gossip in the town and had very strong views about many of the locals who used to come into the club. She had been married into one of the main Padstow families, the ubiquitous Bates, and knew them all only too well. She didn’t have much time for her ex-husband Joey, but admitted that they had got married far too young. Later, after she had stopped working for us, Joey himself did the washing-up. I was initially a little wary of him because of her stories, but he worked hard and filled us with laughter about the goings-on in Padstow. Penny was always tidy and quick. She brought in a friend to wash the dishes. She was called Dianne Lobb and didn’t have a lot of time for her husband either. I look back with fondness on those early days when the kitchen was run by working mums. Later, when I employed chefs, working relationships became more complicated and often frustrating. These girls just got on with it, never complained, just gossiped all the time while they did an absolutely competent job. Padstow was a bit like Coronation Street. Were I a sociologist I’d say that it was a port in transition from a male-dominated society, where fishing was the only livelihood, to a place far more diverse. In the early days of the restaurant, the men were still the men and if they didn’t treat their women too well, so be it. Boys were brought up to think of themselves as the breadwinners, and the power in the family. I’ve had quite enough Padstow wives working for me over the years to realise this situation. But young men – fighting, binge-drinking, womanising – have changed. Those old macho fishing days have gone. Many of the characters I now meet on the quayside are keen gardeners, not averse to going to the theatre or even travelling to see married sons or daughters in Australia. The days when two young fishermen stood outside The Shipwrights and attacked each other with anchor chains are no more. Male aggressiveness is tamed, but maybe that’s why May Day is still so powerful a celebration of fertility where the vigorous reality of male and female sexuality is acknowledged.

  Penny was the cornerstone of the kitchen and Marie provided the same stability in the restaurant. Jill and Marie worked well together. Jill was on the surface smiling, slightly innocent-seeming, but underneath much tougher than she appeared. Marie was on the surface Liverpudlian, blunt and to the point, but underneath much softer than she appeared. They needed each other for support, dealing with sometimes very difficult customers and in the height of the season large numbers with not quite enough tables to go round. They evolved a form of service which was efficient but refreshingly informal. This is the best type of service for a restaurant in rural Britain. They made me behave better, too. Like most young chefs, I wasn’t averse to throwing my weight around. They were far more concerned to get the food to their customers.

  With those two in charge out in the restaurant, I grew to love my little domain, the kitchen. It’s a busy Saturday night, with Penny moaning about too many orders, and me pushing a couple of lemon soles under the grill. Sliding the door down on the leaky microwave into which I’d just put a sea trout with cream, chives and fish stock sauce, while reducing some more fish stock – white wine and velouté – to go with some chopped tomato and broadleaf parsley for a piece of brill with Dugléré sauce. I always worked in the centre of a pile of debris – parsley stalks, onion skins, splashed velouté. Penny used to say it was like Casey’s bleeding court wherever I was.

  I evolved a strategy for dealing with panic. Some nights were so busy that the orders stuck on nails driven through an old narrow floorboard would be lapping themselves, i.e. all nails would have one paper order and would be starting to pick up a second. I just used to say to myself, ‘Don’t scream, because if you can stand the next ten minutes it will get better.’ And it did. Once, though, I felt like giving it all up. It was August Bank Holiday Saturday; we were full to bursting. Jill’s family were in for dinner: Jack and Mary, her parents, and Veronica (Roni), her sister, and Roni’s husband Chris. Roni was working in a smart restaurant in Manchester called the Beaujolais and Chris owned a trendy hair salon in the city centre called Christopher James. I wanted to impress them – they were used to really good restaurants. Jill’s younger sister Mary was down as well, with her boyfriend Nick. She worked in Waddington’s art gallery in Cork Street in London.

  Much later we learnt to space out the tables better, but that night the orders kept coming in for two terrible hours from about 8.45. So bad was it that, I confess, I moved the family order back three nails hoping they wouldn’t mind. The time between the orders coming in and the main courses going out increased so much that I refused to notice it, one hour, one and a half hours, and worsening. Finally, I sent their mains out: grilled sea bass mostly.

  Within minutes Roni came into the kitchen and said, ‘Rick, love. The bass is raw in the middle.’

  She said it with such sympathy and kindness that it cut straight to my heart. I wanted the nightmare to end and to wake up as a journalist. I must remember to remind her about it. She’s now the sommelier in The Seafood Restaurant.

  Sometimes on a really busy night I’d go into the cold room and stand there cooling down and eating raw green beans. It was quiet in there, just the whir of the fans. Outside, it was crazy. I used to hum the Peter Gabriel song, ‘A Normal Life’. It didn’t quite fit the words but the sentiment did.

  That Peter Gabriel song actually came out in 1980. Soon after that Paul Sellars started working with me. He had been coming to the restaurant at lunchtimes. I always got to know the regulars, and appreciated people who liked my food. Sometimes they asked me to have a drink with them, other times they passed a message into the kitchen and I went out after the service to talk to them. Paul came round the back door one morning and said he’d like a job.

  ‘Where have you worked before?’

  ‘Well, I was in the House of Commons for five years, but now I’m working at the Lantern in Surrey.’

  ‘OK. Do you fancy a pint at the Customs?’

  At the Customs House pub, just down the quay from The Seafood Restaurant, he told me that he was tired of cooking French food and wanted to move down to Cornwall to surf and cook seafood. His wife Sue was with him – very Geordie, a coalminer’s daughter, very direct. I liked them both and thought, I’m about to take on a real chef.

  Paul was deft and neat and tidy. I was in awe of him but felt threatened by him, too, because I knew very little and guessed he knew everything. He caught me boiling new potatoes at much too rapid a boil and suggested I turned them down to a simmer. I got cross and said what difference did it make, boiling was boiling. But it did. His knife skills were a joy to watch, the way the filleting knife neatly parted the two top fillets of a lemon sole and flew across the backbone, leaving it clean and the fillet whole with no nicks in it, or the way he could take a side of salmon off the bone with no tearing of the flesh and remove the pin bones just using his thumb and a potato peeler. His peeled, deseeded and chopped tomatoes were a perfect dice and his brunoise of shallots were like Demerara sugar. I didn’t always warm to some of his ways of presenting food. He liked to do a Sole Mousseline where he freed the top two fillets of skinned Dover sole and piped fish mousse under them, then braised the whole fish with a little white wine, chopped shallots and fish stock, where he then reduced the cream and finished with some egg yolk and gratinated under a salamander. I pointed out that the finished dish, with two curves of fillet on the top and an extrusion of soft mousseline looked slightly pornographic. I didn’t like the way he cut lemon wedges, either, with a little tail of peel which he’d curl up decoratively. These, however, were the sum total of my reservations.

  With Paul in the kitchen the menu grew significantly in size and scope. It was now about 1982 and nouvelle cuisine, which arrived in the UK in the mid-Seventies, had finally got to Padstow. Nouvelle cuisine was a reaction, by a number of young and highly regarded chefs in France, to classic French cookery and the almost-hallowed recipes of Escoffier. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, the Troisgros brothers, Michel Guérard and Roger Vergé had pionee
red ideas about flavouring sauces with fresh herbs and fragrant stocks which were thickened not with flour but with cream and a little butter whisked in at the last minute. The emphasis was on the freshest possible produce, and the presentation of exquisite, tiny portions on the plate was very important. I bought all their books, some in French, the others translated. It was an exciting time to be cooking but much as I longed to be able to create dishes like those French stars, the reality of a small kitchen, limited equipment and, most importantly, limited chef’s skills put an unnecessary strain on the kitchen. Delicate colour presentation is very demanding and requires time and effort at the last minute.

  I certainly came up with some difficult ideas. I wanted to get the best possible value out of our glorious Cornish lobsters. This would have been fine with a kitchen full of trained chefs, but in those days we had one commis chef on the larder, who portioned all the fish for cooking; me and Paul on hot starters and main courses; one chef on the veg and another on the sweets. Just five of us on nights when we might be doing 80 or 90 covers.

  I went and put on this two-course lobster dish. First course, a fresh bisque made from the shells. Main course, a nouvelle cuisine version of homard à l’américaine. I would take a live lobster, briefly boil it in salted water so that the colour changed from blue to red, cut it in half, remove as carefully as possible all the meat from the body and the claws. Then I’d make a stock from all the shells except a small triangle of red shell to which the long red feelers were attached. I’d then make a fresh bisque out of the stock with chopped onions, shallots, carrots, tomato, white wine and tarragon. I’d put all this in a food processor, pass it through a fine chinoise, add a little cream and send half of the bisque out with tarragon leaves, diced tomato and a few very thin slices of lobster meat. While the customers were eating their lobster soup, I’d be reassembling the lobster meat to look like a lobster, without the shell, garnishing the plate with two red feelers and making a sauce out of the rest of the bisque which I’d reduce down with a stamen or two of saffron. I’d add cream, whisk in a couple of pieces of chilled butter, and finally pour the sauce decoratively around the plate, which by then was a 12-inch Wedgwood insignia white plate with, as the brochure said, a thin band around the edge and ‘a little nosegay of flowers’.

  Usually we’d get an order of three of these on a table at the same time as we were dealing with the main courses for tables of ten, six and four. In the ensuing chaos, I couldn’t help noticing that a lobster laid out on an oval plate without its shell looked a bit like my Jack Russell terrier, Chalky, when he jumped in the sea and came out shrunk.

  This idiocy was not the end of my ambitions. I devised three fillets of three different fish – say John Dory, monkfish and brill – cooked in three different ways: the John Dory sautéed in butter, the monkfish grilled over charcoal, the brill steamed. They were served with three different sauces: the John Dory with sautéed cucumber, the monkfish with a roasted red pepper dressing and the brill with a cream and sorrel sauce. All on the same plate.

  When people ask me for a tip about seafood cookery and I say, ‘Keep it simple,’ it’s in the light of bitter experience.

  Gradually Jill and I found time to visit other restaurants to get ideas from them. Just across the Tamar in Devon at Gulworthy, near Tavistock, was The Horn of Plenty. It was our favourite. The owners were Patrick and Sonia Stevenson. Sonia, an ex-violinist, was the chef and Patrick, an opera singer, ran the restaurant wearing tails every night. The menu seemed to us to be a wonder of sophistication, and we loved the ambience of the large manor house overlooking the Tamar. I don’t quite know why but the smell of the deep, dark-green gloss paint in the toilet, and the way the Stevensons provided real fabric hand towels that you dropped into a bin when you’d used them, are a lasting memory of comfort. In the restaurant was a log fire that ran right through the wall in the main dining room into the conservatory outside in which Patrick often had a barrel of Bass which he’d drink out of a pewter mug. Sonia put on regional French dinners with wines from parts of France we’d never even heard of. For the ‘Poitou’ evening they devised a large folded card with a scene from the Poitou countryside around Poitiers, near the Loire, and a menu handwritten by Patrick made up of special dishes from around that area. It was enough to set me off with a determination to do the same sort of thing in Padstow. Within a year, I’d found a supplier of the two wines on that menu, Sauvignon du Haut Poitou and a red Gamay. The Sauvignon was our house wine for 30 years. I was influenced by Patrick’s sense of place to the extent of copying a drawing from Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food, for use on our own menu. It was a harbour scene with a girl, holding a basket of grapes, talking to a young matelot. In the foreground is a cloth spread on the ground with scallops, whelks, a red mullet and what looks like a turbot. It was by John Minton, who illustrated her first two books, and it worked for me because the fish were the right ones and the sailor looked like one of the local Padstow fishermen, Bernard Murt, in May Day whites. It was our little logo for about ten years and it set the tone. It wasn’t the Mediterranean, it was Cornwall. It felt different from the rest of England and the delightful Minton drawing seemed to sum up the romance of Cornwall.

  V

  Before 1978, there was no chance of a baby, our future was too uncertain. Then it took a long time to happen. I began to blame the ancient kitchen microwave for making me sterile. I thought it might be the electrons, and I started to stand well back and to press the button with a stick. This did the trick! Jill got pregnant.

  She went into labour on a cold morning in January. There was a deep frost and driving her to hospital in Truro I saw a hare standing motionless in a silver field. I will remember this forever and ever, because it seemed the perfect way to introduce my first son to the world. It was prophetic. Edward has always had a unique love of nature. The minute I saw him born, I felt he’d been here before. Edward is one of those Old Souls.

  Two years later I was at the birth of Jack. When the baby arrived and proved to be another boy, I blurted, ‘Oh no! My tools!’ My father used to tell me that I could borrow his tools but I always had to put them back. When I took Edward in to see his new baby brother, a look of shock passed over his face, followed by consternation. He, too, knew that in future he’d be sharing his tools.

  I missed the birth of Charles in 1984, and have regretted it ever since. Looking back, it seems symbolic. Already – only four years after Jack’s arrival – the restaurant had become all consuming, to the point where business was more important than family life.

  One of my brightest chefs, Peter Richardson, once said to me, ‘Catering’s not a vocation, it’s a disease.’

  It’s a sine qua non that anyone seriously involved in the catering industry doesn’t have a family life. The sheer exhaustion of working 16 hours day after day, the frustration of having to deal with complaining customers, the indignity of having to clean out blocked urinals at midnight. The mistakes you make when you’re tired, how your judgement is increasingly impaired. How you once dropped four treacle tarts when your builder, Roger Bennett, yelled ‘Afternoon’ as he came into the kitchen and you looked up just as you were lining up the tray to put it in the oven. Then you had an hour to make four more tarts before service. Or the time when, exhausted and angry with someone who sent back your lovely grilled Dover sole because it was tough, you snapped and went out to the large round table just by the reception desk filled with a party of regulars from Rock and shouted, ‘The trouble with you upper-middle-classes is you’re so supercilious.’ Afterwards you realised they were right: the sole was like rubber.

  Actually, Jill and I were lucky for the first 15 years of running The Seafood Restaurant: we took the winters off. In 1990, however, we decided to stay open all the year round because it was almost impossible to find enough good staff on a seasonal basis, i.e. pay them off in October and re-employ them in March. But for a long while, when our boys were little, we had plenty of time for the
m in the winter. We had a pleasant home life which I’m pleased to say they still remember, partly because of the stories I used to tell them most nights before they went to bed.

  The stories sort of progressed out of Treasure Island. In the 1960s, a small tanker, the Helmsley, had run aground in thick fog at Fox Cove, near Treyarnon Bay. She was close enough to the coast for her crew to get off on to the rocks and up the cliff. People scrambled down the cliff to remove bells and other small pieces of booty from the ship, which was wedged firmly on the rocks and was later cut up and winched to the cliff top and taken away in trucks. I told my sons about the Helmsley and suddenly started imagining what it would be like if three boys of their age had come across the boat shortly after it had been wrecked and decided to patch it up and set out in it. Near Stepper Point at the mouth of the estuary had been a jetty for ships to load the stone from a quarry there, and I had heard that there was a diesel tank dug into the ground, so I had the boys refloat the Helmsley and sail it round to Stepper to refuel. The jetty became the base from which they sailed away on adventures all over the world, finding smugglers’ islands, wreckers’ islands, vampires’ islands, getting becalmed in the Sargasso Sea and surrounded by giant turtles in the Galapagos. Some nights I found it so hard to think up new stories that I repeated the old ones, to howls of ‘Dad we’ve been here before’. None of them has forgotten the voyages of the Helmsley.