by Ed Balls
Society may have moved on, but sadly football hasn’t. Even today, no Premier League player has yet followed the brave and pioneering example of rugby’s Gareth Thomas and come out publicly while still at the top of their game. My football club, Norwich City, has worked tirelessly to combat homophobia and racism, but we see time and time again how rife those prejudices still are in modern football and the abuse players suffer online.
If there’s one area where I believe football has shown a truly positive lead for society, however, it has been in accepting and embracing different nationalities, celebrating what they can bring to our clubs, and by extension our communities and country. Sure, there’s nothing football fans love more than a local boy who’s worked his way up through the youth teams, and at Norwich, we still list with pride the players from our club – like Justin Fashanu – who’ve gone on to represent England. But at the same time, we chant the names of players who were born in Argentina, Cuba and Scandinavia, and take them to our hearts precisely because they’ve travelled halfway around the world to wear our shirt and do their best to make us happy.
When it came to recruiting a new manager in 2017, the process was led by our sporting director, Stuart Webber, who scoured the world for the right person and the best fit for our club, and narrowed it down to two candidates, one English and one German. The rest of the board and I enthusiastically backed his preferred choice, the German Daniel Farke. While foreign-born players had been in the majority in the Norwich squad for a few years by then, Daniel became our first non-British manager. As a board, we didn’t think that was an issue, but it certainly attracted comment in the local press and among fans – some negative, but much of it positive.
The first year was tough for Daniel, as the players adapted to his new playing style. But a stunning second campaign ended in Norwich winning the championship and promotion to the Premier League. Daniel became a huge fans’ favourite, earning his own song – a version of Blur’s hit, ‘Parklife’ – and his own special culinary recognition at the many food stalls around Carrow Road. Now, alongside the usual football pies, fish and chips and hot dogs, you can buy Currywurst, Berlin-style – a spicy, curry-flavoured sausage which has proved such a success it is now also regularly appearing on Delia’s menu in the directors’ dining room – a culinary homage to our German manager. At Norwich, that’s when you know you’ve really made it.
CURRYWURST
Serves 27,359
The people of Norfolk buying Currywurst hot dogs to show their support for Norwich City’s German manager is an acute reflection of modern global Britain. I’m no expert in German cooking, but I’ve had a few Currywursts in my time, in Berlin and more recently at Carrow Road (ground capacity 27,359). You ought to use a Bratwurst or other German sausage for this recipe, but I reckon any good sausage will do. It’s simple but good and should be served in a white roll.
INGREDIENTS
2 tbsp vegetable or groundnut oil
1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
1 tbsp curry powder
1 tbsp hot paprika – or use a mix of ordinary paprika and chilli powder
400g tin of chopped tomatoes
100g caster sugar
80ml red wine vinegar
½ tsp salt
METHOD
Heat the oil in a pan, add the onion and cook slowly until soft, about 10 minutes. Add the curry powder and hot paprika and cook for a further minute, then add the tomatoes, sugar, red wine vinegar and salt and bring to the boil, mixing well. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 30 minutes to thicken and allow the flavours to intensify. Then smear over your cooked sausages of choice.
STRAWBERRY PAVLOVA
Serves 10
The food in the Norwich City director’s dining room is excellent every week and all the recipes are Delia’s own. I was there for pretty much every game when I was chairman and still pop in for lunch every now and then in my role as vice-president and club ambassador, an honour I share with fervent City fan, Sir Stephen Fry. They regularly serve beautiful fish, tasty casseroles and an excellent Thai curry before the game, and the half-time sausage rolls and cakes are legendary. They also do terrific desserts, including ginger puddings, lemon meringue pie and a particularly good pavlova. These days we are back sitting in the stand and only occasionally go in the directors’ box, but I will often make pavlova to eat when we get back to my parents’ house after the game. You have to plan ahead if you want to cook it yourself, as they’re much better if they have time to cool and dry in the oven, but I think there is no better consolation after an unlucky home defeat than a big pavlova, oozing with fresh, whipped double cream and fresh fruit – preferably strawberries or raspberries.
INGREDIENTS
8 egg whites
450g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
600ml double cream, whipped
1 tbsp icing sugar (optional)
Strawberries, raspberries or any other soft fruit, washed, chopped and sprinkled with caster sugar
METHOD
Turn the oven on to 170°C/325°F/gas mark 3 and cut a piece of greaseproof paper big enough to cover a large baking tray.
Separate eight eggs and put the whites into a bowl (the yolks can be used for a Hollandaise sauce if you fancy Eggs Benedict). Using an electric mixer, beat the whites until you have stiff peaks – the egg white should stand up straight when you fluff them up.
Now add the sugar slowly into the whites, beating thoroughly with the electric mixer throughout. The whole process of adding the sugar should take about 8 minutes, at the end of which you will have a very thick and silky mixture. Then add the vanilla essence and gently mix in.
With a tablespoon, dab three blobs of the mixture onto the baking tray and then lay over a piece of baking paper so it is held in place. Dump the meringue onto the paper in the centre of the tray and shape so you have a dip in the centre where the cream and fruit will sit. You can decide how high or low and wide to make the meringue.
Put the tray into the oven and immediately turn the temperature down to 130°C/250°F/gas mark 1. Leave the meringue in the oven for an hour and a half and then turn off the oven entirely. Leave the meringue to cool in the oven for another couple of hours.
When the meringue has cooled, carefully turn it upside down – I use another baking tray to support it as you turn – and gently peel off the paper; then turn it back onto a big plate or board. Whip up the cream – you can add a tablespoon of icing sugar if you like, but you don’t need it – and spoon it into the hollow of the meringue; then pile the fruit on top.
12 HEAVY BONES
‘Have you lost weight?’
I know my friends and family always mean well, but after careful observation over many years, I’ve worked out that the only time anyone ever asks me this question is when I know my weight has actually gone up. I can understand the thought process. If you see someone and think they look a bit bigger than the last time you saw them, you’re not going to say that, but because it’s on your mind, you end up lurching in the other direction. I know I should respond with a rueful smile before going straight on a diet, but, instead, I generally smile back cheerfully: ‘All going in the right direction.’
I have a great line in excuses to avoid going on a diet. And it all starts with my mum. I think she was rather proud to have a chunky, bouncy, healthy child, always a stone heavier than my friends. ‘He’s not fat,’ she would say, ‘just heavy-boned.’ She taught me to cook good, hearty meals, and I learned from both her and my dad to leave nothing on the plate. I also definitely inherited my love of a snack from my mum’s daily routine: Jacob’s cream crackers for elevenses; biscuits with tea in the afternoon; peanuts before dinner; a Bounty bar or cheese and biscuits in front of the TV in the evening; and then a mug of Ovaltine before bed.
No one seemed to worry much about healthy eating or children’s diets back in the 1970s. We were taught to brush our teeth twice a day, and to cross the road safely using the Gr
een Cross Code. The government had just ruled that wearing a seat belt in the car was a good idea and drinking alcohol while driving was not. TV advertising of cigarettes was outlawed just before I was born, and health warnings on packets followed in 1971. But our attitude to sugar back then was summed up by the famous Mars advert: ‘A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play’; or the Milky Way slogan: ‘The sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite’ – which traded on the basis that eating this particular chocolate snack wouldn’t stop you eating more later.
On the fitness side of the equation, I did play lots of football and rugby at school and university. Then, when I started working full-time in my twenties, I played football twice a week, for the Financial Times in a London AstroTurf midweek league and at the weekend for the Hampstead Heathens in the Southern Olympian league, driving round the M25 every Saturday to play matches in suburban parks. I had a cooked breakfast before I left, and then sausages and chips with the team after the match. That was my version of healthy living, and I loved it. Sadly, my weekly football-playing rapidly tailed off when I joined the Treasury and Yvette was elected to Parliament in 1997. Travelling to and fro between Yorkshire and London every weekend made playing for a Saturday football team impossible. I did sign up for a year’s membership at a Westminster gym, but I can’t have gone more than three times and let it lapse.
Around my fortieth birthday, I started to notice. There comes a point in any man’s life when you look at last year’s holiday photos and don’t recognise that slightly tubby guy standing near your wife. But, like my mum, I gave myself plenty of excuses. After all, I was heavy-boned, and I did exercise whenever I got the chance; I just didn’t get the chance very often. I continued to play the odd charity football match without difficulty and chased the kids around the park at the weekend. In my mind’s eye, I still had the fitness and physique of a late-era Robbie Fowler, or perhaps that football legend from my childhood, Malcolm Macdonald.
Once I made it to the Cabinet, the TV cameras and press photographers started taking more notice of me at our annual Sunday morning Labour Party Conference football match against the members of the political press. The resulting pictures of me in the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph did reveal a little tummy spread, but I rationalised that, while their picture desks would want to show Cristiano Ronaldo or Wayne Rooney at their most athletic, they were trying to do the opposite with me. Clearly, these carefully selected pictures didn’t show the real me, I figured, and I just needed to be more careful during the pre-match stretching exercises.
By the time we left government in 2010, however, the mismatch between my perception of myself – fit, sleek and sporty – and the photographic reality was becoming gapingly wide. I decided I needed the solution most men try in the early phase of their mid-life crisis: sudden bouts of intense physical activity. I first turned to running marathons – or, more accurately, was completely bounced into it.
I was the guest speaker at a dinner for Whizz-Kids, a disabled children’s charity, which was one of the London Marathon’s early charity partners, and after my speech their CEO produced a running vest with my name on and announced, without any prior consultation, that I had agreed to run the marathon for them. The assembled donors started pledging enthusiastically and, six months later, I emerged from a state of total denial and started training. I ended up doing the marathon three years in a row, with a best time just below the magic five hours, raising £160,000 for Whizz-Kids and Action for Stammering Children in the process. That was the good news. The bad news was that I didn’t lose a pound of weight in that time. If anything, I gained a little. Perhaps I was starving when I came back from a training run and overindulged. As ever, I had my mum’s excuses at the ready: I was just swapping fat for muscle, leaving me now with heavy bones and heavy muscles.
Yvette thought Strictly Come Dancing might succeed where the marathons had failed – and forty hours of energetic training in a dance studio each week for three full months did make a difference. Katya and I trained most days at a dance studio on Old Street in London. It was hard work and, by lunchtime, we were starving. We usually went to the same local Vietnamese place just round the corner – there was always a long queue and I got quite a few funny looks standing in my dance studio ‘leisurewear’. But the food was great and super-healthy – BBQ pork, spicy beef, soups and banh mi rolls with pate, chilli and coriander.
I lost over half a stone that autumn and I was so impressed with my own efforts, I made the classic mistake of having a new suit fitted just after the show ended. I then embarked on the Strictly Come Dancing arena tour, performing once or twice a day in front of packed, cheering audiences. The problem was we didn’t need to train – we already knew the routines – and the food on the tour was incredible. The Eat to the Beat catering team travelled with us from venue to venue, wheeling their own refrigeration units, utensils and ingredients into each arena and producing amazing three-course meals. It wasn’t long before I had to ring the tailors to ask whether they could let out the waistband in my new suit.
Then came Kilimanjaro, an intense and exhausting experience where I could feel the strain my body was under. Once again, the food was brilliant – this time not cooked by a huge catering team, but by two guys in the mouth of a tent which they then packed up and carried from camp to camp as we climbed high into the African skies. The expedition leaders said we had to eat and drink a lot to replenish the calories we were burning, and once again, I lost over half a stone, this time in just ten days. But when we returned to London, I was shattered and spent the next three weeks exhausted, lazing around, eating the same amount as I’d done on the mountain, and was soon back where I started.
Yvette had, by this point, reached a firm conclusion. Perhaps it wasn’t my fitness I needed to worry about, so much as my diet? I was sceptical, I told her. Look at my dad and my uncles – we’re built to work in the fields, it’s in our genes. For years, I’ve had on-off goes at many different low-carb diets, but never succeeded in eating less. The 5:2 diet doesn’t work for me – the two low-calorie days are hellish and I more than make up for it over the course of the other five. I’ve tried various versions of the Dukan diet, just consuming steak, red wine and cheese, but then I persuade myself it’s time to go back to something less rich and more balanced and that’s the end of that. I do know that if I substitute more green vegetables for carbs, then my weight comes down, but, fundamentally, I enjoy food – and I just like bread, potatoes and pasta too much. I try and try for days at a time and then, when I’m tired and tempted, I’ll just think, What the heck, and reach for the crisps or peanuts.
I also know that when I’m working hard and don’t have time to eat proper meals, my weight goes down – but whenever I finish an intense period of work and relax, my eating ticks back up again and with it the weight. Excuses, excuses. As for alcohol, I rarely drink beer and try to have three or four days off a week. But I do like a glass of red wine, and I rationalise that if I cut out alcohol entirely, what I’d lose in calories I’d gain in stress. But I keep trying, and making excuses, and trying again. As I write this, I’m embarking on another bout of low-carb starvation. Maybe this will be the time that makes all the difference. Or else I’ll need to find another extreme charity challenge.
I wonder if it’s all my mum’s fault that I can’t manage to make dieting work for me. And not just because of the recipes she taught me to cook and her penchant for snacks that I inherited. I’m wondering whether that first roast beef and Yorkshire pudding dinner she fed me when I was just three weeks old set me on the wrong path. Yes, it was on the advice of the health visitor. And no, science hasn’t found any link between eating solids when very young and finding it hard to diet in later life. But perhaps from that moment on I never had a chance. Anyway, it’s the best excuse I’ve come up with so far.
PRAWN PHO WITH VIETNAMESE SALMON
Serves 4
I fell in love with Vietnamese cooking when I was on Strictl
y. But while I’ve tried to cook Vietnamese dishes at home, it’s not easy to get the same light, spicy, salty tastes. My banh mi rolls aren’t bad and the fresh spring rolls we’ve made at home were fine. I guess there are some cuisines that are just best cooked by the experts. I have found a couple of Vietnamese recipes that do work really well, however: a healthy, fiery soup with a wonderful aroma and deep flavours (unlike the disastrous ‘rustle up’ pea pho which nearly got me thrown off Best Home Cook, there is no shortage of flavour in this recipe); and a beautiful salmon recipe which is a big favourite of Yvette and my daughters. I leave out the honey if I’m on one of my low-carb diets.
PRAWN PHO
Serves 4
INGREDIENTS
1 litre chicken stock
3 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
3 stalks lemongrass, outer layer removed, bashed with a saucepan to soften and cut in half
3 red bird’s eye chillies (2 whole, 1 finely chopped)
3cm piece of ginger, also bashed
100g beansprouts
100g vermicelli noodles (or 2 packs of thin or medium wok-ready noodles)
400g peeled tiger prawns