by Rick Stein
Speaking directly to a camera, however, is much harder to do than passing judgement on a fish pie with no seasoning or filleting a mackerel. It’s a bit like bursting into song or dancing a foxtrot on your own, you just have to let yourself go – but if you’re shy as I am, it’s very hard. I tried some tests but my TV delivery was terrible – limp and stilted. David said, ‘Think of the camera as your little friend, someone who you’re confiding in. And don’t be you, play being you.’
I tried again, and David said, ‘Can’t you talk on camera like you talk in the restaurant? After we’ve had dinner? And three bottles of wine between us?’
I went to Plymouth to do what I knew would be the final camera test – last-chance saloon. I stood on the quay feeling hungover after an indulgent evening but with that sense of euphoria you get after talking late into the night. I just didn’t care. That did the trick. I got the job.
It’s always been the same ever since. The thought of doing a piece to camera is nerve-wracking, but doing it, getting over my natural reserve and getting on with it, gives me a wonderful sense of achievement.
Before filming started a few months later for our first cookery series, Taste of the Sea, I got glandular fever. This was really hard as I was cooking all the time in the restaurant. I had to give up for a couple of months and leave Paul Ripley, our excellent sous chef, to take over. When we began to film the series I felt really ill. I struggled to cook, sweating all the time and feeling weak. David was all for abandoning the project but Maggie, bless her, said, ‘We will persevere.’ Years later, I asked her about it.
You were shocking and David was convinced he had made a great error of judgement. I remember the scrunch, scrunch of his shoes pacing on the gravel of your drive,’ she wrote. ‘“What am I going to do? He is terrible. He just ain’t got it. How am I going to tell him? I’ve made a big mistake. I’m fucked.” He was very distressed, if he had any hair he would have been tearing at it. He’d put all his future hopes in you being fabulous.
But we were really partners in those days, Rick, and he used to listen to my opinions and of course he did this time.
‘You are wrong. He is really sick and it was his first time with that kind of pressure in front of the camera. It is totally unrealistic to expect anyone to be brilliant first time confronted with a camera and you don’t help him. He is a sensitive soul, not brash and full of bravado like Floyd. This is better. You have to give him another chance. And let me tell you the most important thing, he has that illusive quality, that men will relate to him and women will love him … he is like a teddy bear, you want to hug him.’
Looking at that first series now I can see how weak I was from the fever but it doesn’t really show to others, even the sequence which got the family dog Chalky a part. We had been filming in our kitchen at Trevone. I think it was salmon with sorrel sauce, and David was trying to get me to voice my thoughts about what it’s like working in a restaurant. We moved into the living room and I sat on the sofa and, almost as a prop, David lifted Chalky and sat him next to me. I started talking to camera and Chalky started growling. I asked David if he wanted me to carry on and he nodded. So again I started but by then Chalky was growling so loudly, that I said, ‘Chalky are you all right, old boy?’ and then Chalky gave a great snuffle and the next minute he had leapt up and bitten the fluffy cover on the microphone above my head. I keeled over laughing. It was particularly funny because I had been gallantly trying to keep the show going, as ever. David, of course, saw it as a perfect bloopers-type sequence, and so it turned out to be: Chalky’s performance on that day got him a part in every series till he died in 2007.
Richard Barber did me another favour. He mentioned to a friend at Penguin Books that they might want to publish a book by me. I was amazed. I did not realise at the time that publishers are always on the lookout for new young writers, that that’s how it works. I was contracted by a non-fiction editor, Eleo Gordon, but I was not hopeful when I went to meet her. I suppose I thought that it would be a bit like going to see a tutor at university. I was, at that stage, very much a chef and, though I still read all the time, I felt remote from the world of literature. She was a bit academic but also jolly, funny and relaxed. She had already seen some of my pieces and seemed to have no doubt that I could manage to write a whole full-length book. I was rather overawed by her position because Penguin published the cookery writers I loved: Jane Grigson, Richard Olnay, my mother’s best friend at Cambridge Elizabeth Ayrton, who had written a book on English food which I very much admired. Penguin had them all, including the star in my firmament, Elizabeth David. ‘Elizabeth David could be the most disagreable woman,’ Eleo said. ‘She once threw a cookery book at me.’
Eleo gave me a copy of Josceline Dimbleby’s Favourite Food. She told me to read it to get some ideas. I worried over it for days. It painted a picture of joyful family life, with Josceline stopping every now and then to jot down another favourite recipe, and it rather drove home the fact that I didn’t really have much family life. True, I cooked every Sunday evening for Jill and my two sons Edward and Jack (Charles had just been born) but my life was the restaurant day after day, night after night. Any books by me would have to be a book of recipes from the restaurant. I decided to call it English Seafood Cookery.
My mother lent me a book called Good Things in England by Florence White. Out of some 360 pages of recipes, only ten were for fish and the recipes seemed to show a heavy-handed approach to cooking such dishes as eel pie, breaded smelts dropped into a pan of boiling lard, stewed oyster and fish roll. The recipe for Cornish Stargazey pie had pilchards in a pie dish with lots of butter and double cream; the heads stuck through a rich shortcrust so that as they cooked the fish oil ran down into the cream. I wrote in my introduction, to ‘fill a book with recipes with an English flavour one has to look elsewhere than in traditional English cookery and this is where the recipes from my restaurant come in’. I continued by describing English seafood cookery as ‘the cookery by English chefs of fish from English coastal waters in an English port for English people. I may borrow from France, Italy and even China, India and Japan but everything is finely filtered by the place where I work and the people I cook for’. Would that I had substituted the word ‘British’ a few times to appease the Welsh, Scottish and Irish!
It took a long time to write that first book, mostly because I was cooking in the restaurant every night but also because I had to test all the recipes without any help. These days I work with a home economist. The recipes in English Seafood Cookery are a mixture of French and English dishes such as moules marinière, Provençal fish soup, bouillabaisse, skate with black butter and poached halibut steaks with hollandaise. Alongside this classic food are dishes that I made up. I’m proud of these, and many of them are still on the menu at The Seafood Restaurant, even, occasionally, poêlé of conger eel. Tom Chivers at Camborne Tech had taught me how to poêlé. Usually it’s done in a casserole with slightly tough pieces of beef like silverside or a shoulder of lamb, which need slow cooking, and you use lots of root vegetables including carrots, onions, garlic, leeks and celery, sweated in the casserole dish with the lid on. In this case, I larded a loin of conger eel with slivers of garlic and wrapped it in pig’s caul fat to enrich it before slow casseroling it. I served it sliced and suggested a chilled Beaujolais alongside. The red casserole dish used for cooking this is on the original cover of the book.
The book was illustrated by an artist called Katinka Kew who’s sadly died since the book was published in 1988. I love the illustrations. We can’t go back, people like photographs of food these days but this book was made by her drawings. She came down for two or three weeks and sketched me in the kitchen and in my vegetable garden at home. She went down to the quay and politely asked many a tourist to bugger off when they came up to question what she was doing while she drew a platter of fish. She drew a couple of the staff, Wendy Tarby and Linda Dakin, sitting on the sunny terrace above the restaurant, another of m
y friends David Evans offloading fish from his trawler and Jill, Johnny and Terri eating in The Seafood Restaurant. English Seafood Cookery is a lovely-looking book. I used to be rather embarrassed by one recipe – Anchovy Ice Cream – but these days, thanks to Heston Blumenthal, I’m not.
I finished the book in a flurry of activity in early December 1986 just days before my fortieth birthday and departure for Singapore and Australia for a six-week holiday with Jill and my three boys and Johnny and Terri. I was looking forward to going back to Australia. It felt like a reunion with a long-lost love. It lived up to expectation and we went there again in 1988. Good Australian restaurants had begun to appear everywhere. Neil Perry was cooking at Barrenjoey House at Palm Beach and then he opened the Blue Water Grill at North Bondi. There was simply nothing like it in the UK; it was always crammed and the cooking was right up my street, char-grilled seafood. Very simple decor but you didn’t need much with that view over the sea. I remember feeling very envious of the name too: the Blue Water Grill, very California but very Sydney too. I was also influenced by a restaurant in Clareville in an old clapperboard house with wooden floors called The Kiosk; I can still remember a pan-fried whiting with a brown butter sauce and capers. And a couple of very smart young Australians – tanned, languid and long. He had on some beige linen trousers, she in a blue cotton dress. He had a pair of memorable shoes, pointed thin-soled brogues but with wide slits in the leather so you could see his bare brown feet. These little details – the simple lovely fish, Pittwater outside, the trendy young Aussies, the homespun nature of The Kiosk – were a powerful pointer to where I wanted to go.
In Singapore we stayed at Raffles. Nasi Lemak and congee for breakfast and for lunch, fish head curry in the Apollo in Little India which was rugged: a spice grinder with whirring pulleys in the kitchen and everything eaten off banana leaves. We ate chicken satays in hawkers’ markets and Hainanese chicken rice in a restaurant with lizards running down the walls.
One evening Johnny and I hailed a taxi outside Raffles.
‘You want girls?’ asked the cabby.
‘No, we want chilli crab.’
He jammed on his brakes and, somewhat shamefaced, we got out on Purvis Street yards away from the hotel. I’ve made many a chilli crab since then. Indeed, we do a version in The Seafood Restaurant recently praised by a Singaporean for the quality of the brown crabs we use. Nothing, however, will ever live up to the delight of that first one. I remember my surprise at the amount of white meat in the local swimming crabs (Thalamita spinimana) and the ease with which I could extract the thick white meat from the thin flexible shells, so much easier than the thick, sometimes sharp, shells of ours. The fragrant chilli sauce had a deep redness and a sweet heat. It was also perhaps the first time I truly realised the pleasure of eating spicy food with copious amounts of boiled rice and also the recognition of the exquisiteness of combining all this with large bottles of ice-cold Tiger beer. Johnny and I smoked roll-up fags and talked a lot with delightful euphoria. Later I went out back for a pee and narrowly missed tripping over a rat in the kitchen.
That first trip was marked by parental neglect. The boys got sunburned by the pool in Raffles, and Ed and Jack – playing that irritating game of running up the down the escalators, commonly indulged in at airports after 24-hour flights – disappeared into countless upstairs storeys in a large department store. I feared they’d end up in the street somewhere in a strange oriental city, and knew with paranoid fatherly certainty that they’d be sold into slavery. These days I realise that it’s more likely to happen in London than Singapore. Jack and Charles have inherited my wanderlust – and perhaps they got a taste for it on trips when they were children.
At the Ronil Beach Resort in Goa I found the owner, Rui Madre Deus, happy to share his recipes. I would stand in the kitchen on hot evenings watching him turning out pomfret recheado and shark vindaloo made with hammerheads. I got to know his chefs and realised that there was no difference: the delights and the frustrations of cooking in Goa were the same as Padstow. After my wonder about the spice grinder in the Banana Leaf Apollo in Singapore, I became intrigued by the two grinders that Rui had in the basement. I realised that the secret of Indian cuisine was that the spices and masalas were all freshly ground. In a shop in Panjim I found a little grinder about the size of a Honda generator. I bought it and took it home on the Monarch flight. It had stone wheels and worked like a mortar and pestle, though driven by an electric motor. I made Goan masala paste with it for sale in the deli that I opened in 1982. I featured it in the first series Taste of the Sea where, almost on cue, the plastic retaining nuts on the stone wheels split and the whole thing came hilariously apart, never to be reassembled, though Rui did send some spare nuts over from Goa. During the filming of Taste of the Sea I managed quite a few mini-disasters. I suppose my cuts and abrasions have become a bit of a trademark of my TV persona. Perhaps it’s appealing to the viewers that I so graphically illustrate that I’m as capable of making a mess of things as the next man, and of giving the cheerful impression of not minding. I do mind, in fact. But I realise that upsets and a good laugh make excellent television.
Rui used to pack a kilo or so of vindaloo paste into a coffee jar, then wrapped that in foil. I secreted it in my suitcase and it always ran into my clothes. But I was grateful because it gave me a chance to try to copy the flavour, armed, too, with Rui’s recipe for the vindaloo. Even so, the vindaloo I make in Padstow doesn’t taste quite the same. I’m never quite sure why. Maybe the cloves are different, perhaps it’s not having any toddy vinegar – or maybe I’m not eating the hammerhead shark vinadaloo out in the warm wet evening air of west India, with the smell of burning rubbish, joss sticks and cheap perfume and the sound of dogs barking in the fields.
II
In 1982 The Seafood Restaurant was open seven nights, but not lunchtimes. I started to feel I wasn’t getting enough value out of the chefs, so hit on the idea of making food for a shop. There was a wool shop for sale for £32,000 in a street behind the cinema. Middle Street was not a great location but it was cheap. I discovered that the house behind was also for sale for £35,000. I was beginning to see the sense of having some staff accommodation, so we bought them both. In the premises of the wool shop, we opened a deli. I equipped it with a second-hand chiller cabinet and we started selling things that we made in the restaurant kitchen, including fish soup and fish cakes. We boiled gammons and roasted them with mustard, cloves and brown sugar, a recipe that my mother always made for Boxing Day. I did rare roast beef and the potato salads and coleslaws that I remembered from childhood. We poached salmon and made hummus and taramasalata from the products of a Greek company who sold us the Kalamata olives for the restaurant. In Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery I discovered an easy-to-make wholewheat bread called the Grant loaf to which I added walnuts. I invented a bubble and squeak cake, which I made with balls of the left-over spring cabbage and new potatoes we’d served the night before, passed them through beaten egg and breadcrumbs made from left-over bread then fried in beef dripping. School food, but delicious.
I made pâtés and terrines, I made gravlax with the abundant salmon from the Camel Estuary and gravid mackerel with the same cure. Sunny Saturday mornings with no lunch service were a hallowed time for me at my worktop, the back door open to the quay, Radio 4 on, Jim McOwen dropping in a salmon caught at dawn that morning. My worktop was only about five foot long and two wide but it was my special place. One of my chefs told me years later he’d had sex with one of our waitresses across my worktop, almost just because it was my prized worktop.
You can’t earn much money out of a deli because the time and cost of making small quantities of lots of different things is never justified by what you can charge for them. Eventually, I realised I’d have to turn the upstairs of the shop into some sort of cafe to make the deli pay. By then I’d turned the basement of the house behind into a bakery where we also made Cornish pasties. I don’t think we ma
de much money in the bakery either, but my figures weren’t good enough to confirm this. Or perhaps I didn’t want to know. I loved our pasties; still do. They’ve been criticised for not using the correct pastry, but I make them as I like them, using beef skirt, swede, potato and onion, lots of salt and pepper, and rough-puff pastry made with butter only. Our pasties were on the menu, of course, in the cafe, as well as quiches, sandwiches and espresso coffee.
In 1990, we expanded the cafe into the building next door. It has a more ambitious menu including salt and pepper prawns, Vietnamese pho, huevos rancheros and steak frites. It’s still there in Middle Street but I had the sense to change its name from the original Middle Street Cafe to Rick Stein’s Cafe, after I realised that being on TV had serious commercial advantages.
I had an additional reason for opening the deli and the cafe: I wanted to attract more people to The Seafood Restaurant and I realised I should also try to attract more people to Padstow. The Seafood Restaurant had flourished to the extent that Jill and I were able to buy Johnny’s holiday flats above for a sum which reflected our indebtedness to him. We converted them into eight bedrooms. We bought all the beds second-hand from a large warehouse in Cambridgeshire (they had been taken out of a Hilton) and the carpet came from a roll in the same place. We made sure that every bedroom had its own bathroom. We had to install a noisy macerator pump, a bit like a waste disposal unit, which whizzed everything into a mush and sent it down a 22mm pipe. Many was the time when I had to dismantle this pipe after someone had put a baby’s disposable nappy down the loo. My job entailed picking tiny bits of crappy plastic out of the impeller inside the unit.
