Under a Mackerel Sky

by Rick Stein

  I have to do my bit and make sensible comments about the places we’re in, but that’s not difficult because, almost without exception, I like where we are. I get irritated with David because he often wants me to bang on about things that I find tedious, but that’s because he needs what I’m saying to be part of a narrative. He sees filming in terms of the finished programme. Often we argue; sometimes we film the arguments because they say quite a lot. Once in Sydney we went to the restaurant of the famous chef Tetsuya, and filmed his elaborate Japanese take on Western food. Afterwards in the crew van, we filmed David talking to me about the lunch we’d just had. I thought it all wonderful.

  He said: ‘Well, if you like a tiny chunk of salmon with some tea oil and minute pieces of carrot and pink peppercorns on top, that’s your business. Give me lamb chops and green beans any time.’

  ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ I said. ‘You really like Bisto gravy with your roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.’

  We were in Australia making Fruits of the Sea. This series, which started in Padstow, established, on TV, the essence of what I was doing in Cornwall, trying to broaden the scope of my menu and to increase my knowledge by adding to my understanding of exotic and different ways of cooking. I’ve always had an uneasy feeling that many people don’t really like fish. If, like me, you desperately want to specialise in fish, you need to fight hard to attract punters.

  When I was playing rugby for the Wadebridge Camels, I once asked Jethro why he didn’t come to The Seafood Restaurant.

  ‘I don’t eat fish,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but we do steak too.’

  ‘In Padstow even the steak’ll taste of fish.’

  Humorous, but revealing too. I had already realised that if I wanted to make the restaurant even busier, which I did, and if I wanted to convert the no-fish-for-me brigade, I would have to bring in tempting and original fish dishes from all over the world. The family holidays in Australia, South East Asia and India had filled me with excitement for travelling and now I visited and revisited many far-away locations in Fruits of the Sea and Seafood Odyssey. I wrote:

  Travel changes you. The way I cook now, the recipes I write, the way I look at food can never be the same again, as a result of my travels and my quest for seafood dishes. I suppose a certain purity, innocence and simplicity in the way I used to cook have been lost because of what I have learnt on the way. But I can’t go back. I keep thinking that it would be nice to retire into some sort of Cornish cuisine but it’s just not enough anymore. I need to keep travelling to find those perfect simple dishes from all over the world.

  I revisited places I had been to before. In India the team and I went to Goa and filmed at the hotel where Jill and I and my boys, Edward, Jack and Charles, and our friends Johnny and Terri, had enjoyed so many holidays. In Thailand, we went to the Station Hotel in Hua Hin where I had stayed with them all 12 years before. In Australia, the autobiographical element was to do with my journey to Queensland when I was 20. This came from a conversation in the London Inn in Padstow during which I had rather over-optimistically told David, when planning the Seafood Odyssey, that Noosa was just north of Brisbane. I hadn’t actually looked at my diary since the 1960s but so keen was I to go back to Australia that a little thing like checking the facts or looking at the map never came into it. Indeed only when reading the diary recently did I realise that what I thought of as Noosa was in fact Tweed Heads. It was about 200 miles away from where I thought it was.

  By the time we got to Noosa and the pub didn’t look anything like I remembered, I said to David: ‘I’m not sure I have been here after all.’

  ‘Well, you have been here before. If you catch my drift.’

  I did a piece to camera in which I stood in Hastings Street saying that in the sixties it had been a mere strip by the sea but that the whole town had changed out of all recognition since then. Not that much of a white lie, really. I’m sure it had changed radically, certainly from a gastronomic point of view. We ate in a different restaurant every night, and they were all good.

  Seafood Odyssey included trips to Italy, the USA and Galicia in Northern Spain as well as Goa, Thailand and Australia, but what I still think is one of the most magical sequences we ever did was actually filmed at the mouth of the Thames. I was trying to liken my travels all over the world to the way the empire builders voyaged all over the world appropriating stuff to bring back to Britain.

  We managed to get a near-perfect sunset over the Thames and I quoted a passage from the beginning of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

  The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the utmost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, ‘followed the sea’ with reverence and affection than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The current runs to and fro in its unceasing service crowded with memories of ships and men it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea.

  This was weighty for a cookery show, and I wasn’t unaware that this passage is setting a scene which is on the dark side of exploration and exploitation.

  I didn’t want our programmes to funk the dark side or to trivialise cooking. On the surface it’s only food, but there’s an underlying seriousness about what I wanted to get across. I was trying to put world food into its context in life.

  In Seafood Odyssey, we filmed in Porto do Son in Galicia. We were there for fishing boats returning with their catch in the early evening. If it’s sunny, the hour before dusk is the best time to film because the light has a rich quality which bathes everything its lustrous warmth. It’s called the golden hour. Earlier that day, we had found a little bar on the harbour with about 15 friendly locals sitting at it drinking Estrella Galicia beer and small glasses of wine. The bar also had a few tables and a short menu, all of local seafood. Things like necoras (velvet swimming crabs), gambas (Mediterranean prawns), several hake dishes and centolla (spider crab). I wandered off and walked along the harbour and found a grassy area where schoolchildren were playing. One of them, a boy aged about ten, was particularly animated, scampering about with a sense of joy on his sweet face on that sunny morning.

  I returned to the crew and we sat down to lunch and started with some grilled sardines as sweet and fresh as young hazelnuts. We shared a couple of the spider crabs. We drank Alborino, the local white wine, which is grown on stone trestles to keep the grapes off the damp ground, and then a local fragrant red called Mencia. After the fish we had rare steaks: very fresh meat cooked on charcoal, a little tough but juicy and full of sweetness. The whole meal, the bar, the locals, the spontaneity of it … I was overwhelmed with joy, starting with the boy on the green. David filmed me coming out of the bar and saying that I’d just had a lunch of such delight that it felt to me like being in love.

  And indeed, I was in love. I’d fallen for Sas – Sarah Burns – and, for better or worse, being in love makes you much more aware of the world around you, in all its variety and colour.

  David and I went back to Porto do Son last year when we were filming my Spanish series. We had lunch in one bar, walked into another, but could not find our original. I’m sort of glad we didn’t, the memory is so precious to me.

  IV

  Around the time I was filming Seafood Odyssey, a radical change was happening on the quay of Padstow. The old fish market and fish sheds dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century, which had been gently falling apart for years, now began to cause alarm because it appeared they were also falling into the harbour. They stood quite close to the new quay built to land the considerable tonnage of cod and haddock that was coming in on the new steam trawlers. The fish market had closed in the fifties to be re
placed by a series of small fishermen’s stores and a fish shop with lobster tanks. But by 1998 our end of the harbour was collapsing and the town council decided to demolish the sheds, and relocate them further away from the quayside, and repair the quay. The result was a very attractive wood-clad industrial building, designed by an architect from Plymouth called Ian Potts who won a prize for its innovation. It soon became clear that the new building, much larger than the old, could take some new tenants and I decided to move our deli next to our cafe to a quayside location.

  Everyone renting space in the new building had to abide by the terms which were that your business had to be marine-related; so I decided to call our deli a seafood deli and sell only fresh and preserved fish with a few things which could loosely be termed as accompaniments to fish dishes such as sun-dried tomatoes, olives, olive oil, lemons, garlic, onions, parsley and fresh basil. I thought a few of our own home-made jams and chutneys could be loosely interpreted as going with fish and, while I was about it, I applied for a wine and beer licence to sell the sort of drinks that might go with fish for dinner too. Then I thought: why just sell fish? Why not cook it too, and sell fish dishes to take away?

  I put in a little kitchen and wrote a menu.

  Fish Tacos

  Po’ Boys

  Fried Squid

  Goujons of Lemon Sole

  Fish Soup with Rouille and Parmesan

  We were swamped from the day it opened. But in spite of that we couldn’t make it pay. We were charging £3 to £5 for each dish but to cook that sort of food well we need two good chefs in there; quite often, I was one of them. We weren’t taking enough money to cover the costs. All the time our customers were asking for fish and chips but we didn’t have the equipment to cook what they wanted. Gradually I realised that I had to buy a large fryer. We could then charge double the money and halve the cooks. So Stein’s Seafood Deli lasted just one year. But by the start of the next season, we’d opened a fish and chip shop next door.

  At the same time, we took over the space on the first floor for our offices. I consulted the architect, Ian Potts, because I realised that the unit next door upstairs had enormous windows over the estuary and could be something more than just an office. It was Jill who came up with the idea of making it a cookery school open to the public. To start with, I thought it should be the sort of place where we taught the rigorous secrets of fish cookery, maybe offering some sort of diploma in fish filleting, but having visited Raymond Blanc’s school at the Manoir aux Quatre Saisons in Oxfordshire I realised that we would be much better off teaching simple skills to people who just wanted to do a day or two to hone-up their cooking at home. Right from the start, we decided to make it seemingly unstructured so that a day’s teaching was about preparing things for lunch, but the menu for lunch would contain as many techniques, cooking methods and types of seafood as we could cram in. We realised that after lunch and a relaxing glass of wine or two, it would be better to get the students to watch demonstrations rather than prepare and cook things themselves. Our scheme has worked well. I’m sure the main reason has been because all the fish we use is of the best quality. I love simple reasons for success – and ours is very fresh-looking, very fresh-tasting and very fresh-smelling fish. Most people simply don’t get a chance to handle stuff as good as this. When they realise what fresh fish is like, their previous difficulties vanish. It is as simple as that. We opened the school with Paul Sellars as head teacher. Teaching cookery is something which chefs do rather well if they have any communication ability.

  I love demonstrating. I began doing demos in earnest about 25 years ago when the man who started the BBC Good Food Show at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, Tim Etchells, pioneered the idea. He invited chefs such as my chum Brian Turner, Robert Carrier, Ken Hom, Gary Rhodes, Raymond Blanc, Keith Floyd and Antony Worrall Thompson to cook on stage. No one had had any training in teaching cookery. Previously, some chefs had conducted their demos pissed, and some people had demanded their money back. After an inauspicious beginning, Tim asked us all to go and receive tuition in cooking demos from a TV producer called Peter Bazalgette, now chairman of the Arts Council, the same man who went on to create Ready Steady Cook, Changing Rooms and Big Brother. We each spent an hour or so running through things in his house in Holland Park. Most demos last for only 30 minutes and it’s a compromise between trying to show some techniques and trying to avoid the audience getting bored and walking out which is very demoralising. Over the year some of us have tried some wacky things. Jamie Oliver rode on to the stage on a scooter and finished his last dish to a drum solo. Ainsley Harriott rushed on to the music of ‘Bohemian Like You’ by the Dandy Warhols. But all big openers end up with the chef frying sausages or fillets of fish shortly afterwards.

  A couple of years ago, I did a tour of theatres first in New Zealand then in Australia, culminating in a show at the Opera House in Sydney. At one of them, we did a cunning false start: I failed to appear on stage. Instead, I was welcomed by the presenter, local TV journalist Mark Sainsbury, with a camera outside a strip club called the Mermaid which I swore I remembered in the sixties as being a fish and chip shop. I arrived on stage to laughter and applause – only to be cooking fish pie very soon afterwards.

  The cookery school has been a source of great pride to me and out of it came an idea for a book not tied into a TV series but a comprehensive guide to preparing and cooking seafood, simply called Seafood. I must confess that I borrowed the idea of photographing the most important preparation and cooking techniques from a cookery series produced in the early seventies by Life Magazine and edited by Richard Olney, the only difference being that the Life books used black and white photos like a textbook whereas we made each colour shot atmospheric to give excitement to each phase of filleting a fish, shallow frying a Dover sole or making fish stock. Seafood won a James Beard Award in the United States, prompting me to go on a short book tour there. Philadelphia, Chicago and New York – I hadn’t been back there much since my Midnight Cowboy days in the sixties, and not being well-known in America, my book signings and cookery demos were sparsely attended. But I had the prize and there were just enough booksellers and chefs to tell me how much they liked my work to keep my ego ticking along nicely. I loved simply being there. Edgar Allan Poe’s house and Rick’s Philly steak sandwiches in Reading Terminal market in Philadelphia. Charlie Trotter doing a lunch of my dishes at his restaurant in Chicago. A tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s generous suburban houses, and getting ticked off at the Whole Foods Market in Columbus Circle in New York for taking a picture of their vegetable displays, there being nothing like it in the UK at the time. America was a great place after all.

  V

  Following the success of Seafood Odyssey, David and I began to plan a second odyssey, this time taking in some much more remote areas where there was an extreme fishing element. Jill had an Icelandic friend called Ingrid and I rang her in Reykjavik. She’d seen some of my programmes and agreed that filming in Iceland would be rewarding. Brought up with my mother’s enthusiasm for the Icelandic sagas, I sensed a rich seafood story among the rugged landscape of volcanoes and geezers, the ice and the mountains and the tough lives of those independent fishermen who had seen off our great British Navy in the cod wars of the early seventies. David and I had plans, too, of salmon fishing in Alaska, chasing the anchovy shoals in Chile and visiting the Sukiji fish market in Tokyo. Maybe go out on a tuna fishing boat or do a matanza in Sicily where tuna are herded into a small pen made out of nets off the coast in May and June and slaughtered with long knives on poles. All this came to nothing: the BBC wanted us to stay in the UK. But early frustration soon gave way to enthusiasm for filming about my own waters.

  The Seafood Lovers’ Guide to Great Britain and Ireland came out of a reaction to what I had seen in Seafood Odyssey, all those lovely fish dishes that I had found all over the world, yet in the UK we didn’t seem to share the same enthusiasm. My role in the programme was to travel roun
d the coast of Britain and point out what was the best local fish and shellfish and also to identify where you could buy it and eat it whether in fish and chip shops, posh fish restaurants, raffish fish cafes, jolly beach kiosks or simple seafood shacks. I couldn’t be too negative but the truth is that I was saddened by how few outlets of any kind there were in Britain. Nevertheless the fact that there was a dearth meant that when I did find somewhere good it was a time of celebration. The highlights were often the simplest. There was a tea room called the Shorehouse, for example, in Sutherland near Cape Wrath right up on the West of Scotland at a tiny harbour called Tarbet, where you can catch a small ferry to the nature reserve island of Handa Island. We ordered cups of tea and bread and butter and a great heap of boiled orange langoustines which they simply called prawns. The little ferry came and we sat outside happy with our good fortune at our almost secret find. These unbelievably delicious prawns were almost unknown. The majority of the catch in Scotland and Ireland goes to France and Spain.

  Another delightful find was in West Mersea in Essex, a seafood shop simply called the Company Shed. We had lobster and oyster and a delicious piece of ray – washed down with a bottle of Chablis from the off-licence down the road. The fame of the West Mersea oysters dates back to Roman times; but the truth is that such a place as the Company Shed would not exist today were it not for someone like Heather Haward who opened it 25 years ago as a place to sell her husband Richard’s oysters.

  Running through The Seafood Lovers’ Guide was an anxiety about overfishing. The dawning knowledge that our fish stocks are in danger is like trying to remember when you first realised that cigarettes caused lung cancer. When I first opened The Seafood Restaurant, crayfish – crawfish, or spiny lobsters as they are more correctly known – were plentiful and large. Within 15 years they were rare, and now if we get more than a couple a year I’d be surprised. The same applies to sea trout (which we call salmon peel). They used to arrive in the kitchen in the summer in hessian sacks. I‘d empty the sacks on to a work bench; the fish would slither out covered in filmy green weed from the Camel estuary, some still alive. They came in so often that sometimes I wouldn’t really want them but never said anything to Jim McOwen as he was too nice to refuse. He always wore a navy blue fisherman’s sweater and had a nose of deep red and purple complexity. Sharp blue eyes. A little difficult to understand at times, but it’s hard now to think of anyone more evocative of Old Padstow when all was good. These days, getting salmon peel is a special event.