by Rick Stein
We did a blind taste test with a Women’s Institute meeting at a pub in the New Forest, where we roasted a fresh free-range chicken and a cheap frozen supermarket one. Those WI members were not deceived, and the response was unanimously in favour of the free-range.
There was a wonderful saffron cake at a bakery near Callington in Cornwall. And an almost surreal experience visiting the rhubarb forcing sheds of E. Oldroyd and Sons near Wakefield. I talked to Janet Oldroyd, the High Priestess of Rhubarb, marvelling at the reverence with which she described varieties with names like Champagne and Timperley Early, which are forced at a tremendous rate. With a bit of cheating time-lapse photography, we filmed the rhubarb actually growing. But we were disappointed with ourselves in that we failed to realise that you can also hear it growing.
Of course, making any TV series includes disappointments and disasters. David is a believer in just getting on with it. From time to time, I get quite stroppy with him that we are even bothering to film things that I think are substandard, but he always says filming is like food gathering and that the edit suite is where the real programme is made. If I knew at the time that I was putting on my brave face that it was going to be dropped, I’d be very disconsolate, but of course I never do. Occasionally we get ourselves into a situation where we all know a story is never going to be used and – to avoid embarrassment – David calls for the strawberry filter, which is a code he uses to mean that the camera isn’t running, though I carry on as if it is.
I must confess that as soon as we arrived at the house of a man rescuing battery hens from chicken factories, I thought the strawberry filter would be applied. I find mass-production in farming difficult to come to terms with. I was irritated when I filmed a fois gras farm in French Odyssey and had numerous letters of complaint about the shots of individuals force-feeding the fowls one by one. Restricting chickens in hundreds of thousands of tiny cages is cruel too, but no one seems to want to stand outside chicken batteries with placards like they do outside smart restaurants protesting against fois gras. When we got to the smallholding of the rescuer of battery hens there were chickens everywhere – not just in the garden but in the house, on the kitchen dressers, tops of cupboards, on the beds, everywhere. We filmed him in his back garden with a chicken on his head and another on his shoulder. I thought he was too eccentric to be a food hero in our series, but David, far from applying the strawberry filter, used just enough footage to highlight the good intentions and the humour and weirdness, without dwelling on the barminess of this house of chickens.
I also wondered whether a delightful young woman who had about ten outdoor sheds for chickens all laying blue eggs was a food hero. These days you can buy blue eggs in Waitrose but then to be able to buy free-range eggs with pale blue shells was exciting. The girl was passionate about her business. As we left filled with admiration for her dedication, we noticed a brand new BMW parked outside the house just as her husband was driving a Mercedes into the drive. We had assumed that her lifestyle was being maintained through blue-egg production, but having tried to work out how many blue eggs it takes to buy a shiny new BMW we weren’t sure it wasn’t more of a hobby than anything else.
There is no doubt, however, that Chalky was a hero, if not a food hero, in our series. This small family dog – a Jack Russell Terrier – had figured from time to time in the earlier programmes but in Food Heroes he stole the show. There I was, in my navy-blue Land Rover, driving across glorious skylines in Argyllshire or Suffolk, wearing a corduroy country sports jacket complete with leather patches on the elbows, and it was almost de rigueur that a dog would be sitting next to me in the passenger’s seat – and there was Chalky.
Like Eddie in Frasier, his was the appearance that viewers were waiting for. The mere sight of David made him excited and animated. In his dog’s brain he knew that David and the Land Rover meant that we were off on the road. Not just walks along Harlyn Beach but hopping over prickly stubble in September fields in Menheniott near Liskeard, out shooting pigeons and rabbit for pie, or squelching through salt marsh near Harlech, while we were talking to a lamb farmer. At Blenheim Palace he scampered across the park and peed near a sign saying ‘Keep dogs off the grass’.
David was clever at getting artful shots. We were making a film about Cornish early potatoes with a spirited local girl who said that they sold their potatoes only within a 15-mile radius of Tintagel because ‘You’ve got to have them as soon as they’re dug to appreciate the best of them.’ She said: ‘The trouble with a new potato is it can go stale. By the time it’s gone off the grading line and been pre-packed and delivered to the supermarket, it’s no longer the same quality and flavour as having been dug here and having it on your table tonight.’ While we were talking, David cut in a series of shots of Chalky trying to jump up from the ground on to the platform where I was standing with the potato baggers. There were too many people on the platform, so every time he tried to jump up, he couldn’t, and each time he fell back, he gave a little growl. Finally someone got off and he hopped up, again with a little growl but this time of satisfaction. Paul Roberts added the growls later when they were doing voice-overs in the studio, but it was Chalky who gave the whole sequence an endearing spontaneity.
Chalky chased a rabbit around an old greenhouse filled with watering cans, rakes, potting trestles and cold frames, like one from a story by Beatrix Potter. Chalky crouched on rocks and peered over hedges looking at things. He seemed to know what I wanted. I had never bothered to train him but if I said ‘sit’ he would. He was a little star and he didn’t know it. Even if he never learned how to bring sticks back when you threw one for him. Jack, my son, introduced me to his new springer spaniel puppy Bocca the other day. I threw an apple across the garden and Bocca brought it back. Chalky was too much his own man – or rather dog – to do that.
David, Bernard Hall and I used to take it in turns to have Chalky in our hotel room. Sometimes he got a bit restless and kept me awake. Every morning, he was up and ready for a walk before I was but on the whole he was no trouble. Of the three of us, Bernard probably looked after him best. David had a special relationship with Chalky but complained about him being noisy. David was the head of the pack when we were filming and it’s not too fanciful to think that Chalky knew this and respected him. But not at home. David came round to dinner at Trevone once and we all got quite pissed and at one stage David lifted Chalky up on the table and moved his face right up to his saying what a great little dog he was. He must have invaded this ‘great little dog’s’ personal space because he bit David on the nose, not at all badly, just a nip, but David was put out.
I think of Chalky in the series as some sort of exquisite paint in an artist’s palette which David used – just a dab of light here and there to make the story come alive. That’s David’s skill, not just with Chalky but with the music he chooses and also manipulating me, I guess. He uses me to add personal observation and feeling to what we are seeing, but other times he uses my lack of awareness to make it funny. I’m thinking here of the time we smuggled Chalky into my hotel room in Edinburgh. It was a Thistle hotel and they had a policy of no pets. I don’t doubt David had had a go at Arezoo about her oversight in not booking us into a hotel which welcomed dogs. She probably told him there was nowhere else. At some stage David might have said, ‘Well, we’ll just have to smuggle him in,’ and then would have seen the humorous possibilities of filming the smuggling. I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t see that it would be funny, which is doubtless why I’m not a film director. David had Chalky popped into Bernard’s blue overnight bag and he filmed him going up in the lift with his head poking out. Brilliantly on cue, Chalky chose to leap out of the bag in the corridor just after he passed a couple of security guys. What a dog he was!
In 2004, we began filming in France. I had fully intended to take Chalky. But the spontaneous nature of our style of filming means that we tend to leave organisation to the last minute. I hadn’t appreciated that I couldn’t mic
ro-chip Chalky one day and take him on the ferry the next. Back then, it was necessary to get everything in order six months in advance. David made a virtue of this, and filmed me taking Chalky to St Merryn to the vet, who said (he’d been primed by me, of course) that he thought Chalky was too old to go. Well, Chalky was getting on a bit by then anyway, so David dreamed up a plot to send Chalky videos from France for him to watch back in Trevone. This cunning ruse kept Chalky in the show.
French Odyssey was the last time that Chalky took part in a cookery series; he was getting old. I made a couple of other programmes in Cornwall with him. One about John Betjeman who had spent many a contented holiday over the estuary from Padstow at Trebetherick, where he had written some of his best poetry celebrating the British seaside holiday. Betjeman’s life in Cornwall was not all happy times, and Chalky was invaluable in that programme trotting along many a cliff path listening to my thoughts about some poem like ‘Tregardock’, where Betjeman compares the cliffs above the remote beach north of Port Isaac to the black vitriol of some journalist, who obviously didn’t like his work.
Gigantic slithering shelves of slate
In waiting awfulness appear
Like journalism full of hate…
Powerful stuff for me. Slippery cliffs in the autumn have a special resonance.
That was in 2005. The next year I made a programme about Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall. We filmed on Bodmin Moor and remembered an anecdote about how Daphne had got lost riding on the moor as a fog came down, and the setting for Jamaica Inn appeared to her out of the gloom that day. We also filmed around Fowey, where she had used local atmosphere and the beaches nearby for Rebecca. It was to be Chalky’s last appearance. We took him to Money Penny Beach but he only managed a weak walk along the water’s edge, stumbling a little as he went. I had said to David that I didn’t think he would be up to it. He was partly blind and deaf by then and I’d almost lost him in Padstow Churchyard a couple of evenings earlier. That morning I picked him up and said to camera with sadness, ‘he’s not got long I’m afraid’. He died some months afterwards and I wrote this little obituary for him:
Chalky RIP August 1989 to 13 January 2007
Let’s look on the bright side. Chalky, my family’s dog, lived to 17. He was healthy and fit right up to the last six months and he had a wonderful life. He travelled all over the British Isles and Ireland, he nearly went to France, he got up to some mighty capers, leaping to bite a microphone, snarling at our cameraman so fiercely that we thought twice about using the film, fearing his shocking fangs would frighten children. He dispatched rats and caused consternation by doing the same with a rabbit or two. He was loved by my children. He swam and jumped on boats, he attacked crabs, ran rings round Alsatians and Border Collies, being much fiercer and never backing down, ever. He scampered over a duke’s lawns and petrified me that he might bite the Prince of Wales (but he didn’t). Most of all though, we knew him at home as rather an unassuming, diffident dog who was never greedy, pestered you a bit for walks, but not too much, and kept reasonably quiet. But – my God! – he hated postmen. I don’t know why. If he couldn’t get at them, he’d rip the letters to shreds.
In truth, I’m very sad. He was loved by everyone. So many people, it’s a source of puzzlement to me that he never knew how famous he was.
I know what Kipling wrote is thought a bit sentimental but it’s actually true.
There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.
French Odyssey was a success because the Canal du Midi is a work of art and the country through which it runs is a dream of rural beauty. I spoke in the programme of the peacefulness of a slow boat down the canal with the traffic rushing by on a nearby motorway. At the time, probably five kilometres out of Carcassonne, I remember thinking that this part of France was just the best, anywhere. The climate is completely agreeable; the food, apart from slightly too many magrets de canard, is lovely; the lifestyle restful and the people not arrogant in any way. Perhaps the traditional antipathy between French and English is only a Paris and northern France thing.
I don’t know how long we could have gone on gliding through that green canopy with the yellow sunflower fields, vineyards, churches and terracotta-roofed houses sliding by. Watching the programme with Malcolm Ironton’s music is mesmerising. It looks like a painting. Our French odyssey was an impression of French country life so idealised that it worked in the same sort of way as works by Monet and Seurat. Like the art of the Impressionists, it represented yearning for the sort of ‘good life’ depicted as modest rural reality which we all at some point aspire to.
In fact, the life on the barge was not quite as idealistic as we portrayed it. With one break for a week in the middle, we lived on the water for eight weeks. It’s a long time to be cooped up with five others. The walls of our cabins were thin. I resorted to pushing one of the twin mattresses against the wall adjoining the cabin of the worst of the night-time snorers, David. The big problem, though, was we weren’t at all sensible with our alcohol intake. It was all too easy. Normally, when filming, there is a lot of activity when we get back after a shoot. For a start, we will often be checking into a new hotel, which takes time, but, even if not, there will be unloading of equipment and we don’t necessarily come back to the hotel before 5.29 or (as David calls it) beer o’clock. In contrast, on the barges, the Rosa from Bordeaux to Toulouse and the Anjodi thereafter, we didn’t need to do much filming work at night, so every evening at about 5.29 we’d assemble on what we called the poop deck which was actually the fo’c’sle, all have a few beers followed by a few red wines, then in very jolly mood climb down the companionway – being careful not to bang my head on the ceiling going down to the dining room (only once) where we’d drink a lot more wine with our four-course meal.
And what meals, particularly on the Rosa, where Bernard, the skipper, cooked for us. The French have a strict attitude to meals and that’s why most of them aren’t seriously overweight. Fast food is sadly getting a grip in France too, but there’s still a culture of restraint in eating. The French – and particularly French women – don’t get fat like me, because, unlike me, while writing these memoirs, they don’t go to the fridge every 15 minutes to see if there’s anything there which might be tasty. They eat only when they are sitting down for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Bernard, we soon learnt, ran a very tight ship. The meals he cooked and served were extraordinarily formal, thus revealing the difference between the British and French attitude to food. Julie, the waitress/chambermaid on the Rosa, described a visit to a penfriend in Grimsby as being very enjoyable, but peculiar in that the whole family seemed to be constantly watching TV and eating while they did so. Bernard’s lunches and dinners were always four courses, always exquisite, always at a dining table, always taken at a leisurely pace and always just enough and no more. There is a French saying to the effect that one should always leave the table wanting more.
I did a little chat to the DV camera towards the end of the voyage, an inspired idea of David’s: ten things we liked about France. Number one, of course, was the women – their style, their elegance in dress at whatever age – but number two was the simple fact that everything stops for lunch.
What Bernard cooked for us was not particularly unusual: artichokes with vinaigrette, sautéed eel with persillade, an onion tart, grilled magret de canard – the large duck breasts from birds reared for fois gras, with a faint flavour of that delectable luxury. It’s not really a criticism to say he was pretty parsimonious too. It goes, I think, with a proper sense of economy in cooking. The first course was always tiny: a small quantity of soup, a thin slice of tart. On one occasion he produced a salad of sliced Quercy melons, Marmande tomatoes and cucumber wit
h some crumbled brebis, a sheep’s milk cheese – summer in Gascony on a plate. The next course would be a simple piece of fish or meat, again modest in size, followed every day by a choice of at least three cheeses, which Bernard would slice with the skill of a Japanese sashimi chef, and which he would deliver individually and with a running commentary, often of donnish anecdotes about the cheeses, such as the mould in the caves of Roquefort, the carrot juice which gave the extraordinary orange colour to Mimolette, or the fact that the word crottins, for the little disc-shaped goat’s cheese, came from their resemblance to goat’s droppings. The sweet would be maybe a tarte aux pommes from a pâtisserie near the canal or a crème caramel, again from a local shop.
Often the actual cooking on board would be just one course made by Bernard, but this is another thing so different in France – the availability in any nearby small town of shops that specialise in really good-quality cooked food.
But I’m not sure that in the average French household a big boozy lunch would be followed by a big formal dinner on the same day, every day, especially with yet more red wine. The net result of our indulgent regime was we seemed to be suffering permanently from hangovers and probably too much food, and this could make us rather grumpy with each other. David and I began to joke about a voyage into the heart of darkness. David had asked his best friend Bernard Hall to accompany us and make a video diary of the trip. David ominously called it ‘Cabin Fever’. It was monumentally irritating, after having some row, normally with David, and having stomped off to my cabin, to have Bernard knock on the door and open it with camera pointing and say, ‘Well, what you think of David at this moment?’ My agent, Barbara Levy, heard about the planned extra programme and became extremely alarmed. Over lunch one day at Como Lario in Chelsea she explained that my viewers probably saw me as a nice person and would be shocked if they knew how bad-tempered I could be. I told David that I was un-keen on ‘Cabin Fever’, but he just said ‘Trust me’. He meant that I was to trust him not to include any awful bits; for example, calling him a string of four-letter words, which I certainly wouldn’t have liked repeated on film. In the event ‘Cabin Fever’ was a success. We always used to say that going on filming trips was like going on holiday and, even during memorable holidays, you fall out with your family. My father once filmed my older sister Janey and her best friend Penny having a row in the Scilly Isles, and all you can see is them kicking each other. It’s funny because we all know what it’s like to be very, very cross.