by Rick Stein
When I returned to Cornwall after Oxford, I moved into Redlands, the family home. My mother was still living there, but I cohabited happily with her, and eventually Jill moved in too. I lived in Redlands from the age of 18 until I was in my mid-forties. It was bliss. I adored Jill, our business was expanding, and our three children were born there. I had plenty of time to spend with my boys. Even when working flat out, I made a point of taking every Sunday off so that we could go out. These were days of simple country pleasures, the sort of things boys love – traction engine rallies, festivals, exhibitions, dog shows. I restored the ancient black Mercedes I’d acquired from a local farmer who had a shed full of cars. My sons shared my delight in the eccentricity of rural Cornwall. I seem to remember that once we found a ghost train at a farm show. When I dream of home, it is always Redlands.
In 1974 my mother moved out. She missed her Oxfordshire friends, and decided to live in Burford. Jill and I made Redlands our own. It had nearly an acre of land, and I had visions of growing most of the vegetables for the restaurant. I read a book about wine-making in England and planted about 50 vines which blew out of the ground in the winter gales. But the veg thrived in the quick-to-warm sandy soil. I was always happy pottering in my garden, albeit always under pressure to return to the restaurant to cook. An early enthusiast for recycling, I made a wall out of the wine bottles from the restaurant. It’s still there, a bit higgedly-piggedly because I used only sand as infill. Remembering my father’s meticulous constructions from the lovely Cotswold stone at the farm back in Oxfordshire, I wish I’d done a better job. But my empty-bottle wall is, nevertheless, now a local landmark.
In 1978, the year that Jill was pregnant with Edward, I rather ungallantly decided to bunk off on holiday with John Thompson. I bought a book called Visiting French Vineyards and off we went to explore Burgundy, the Jura and Provence. We drove to Paris where a neurophysiology graduate, Susan Greenfield, who my brother John had taught at Oxford, was doing research. Springy, as we know her, now Baroness Greenfield, was and still is one of those people who enjoy every moment of life, hence her name – she does everything with a spring in her step. Well that’s how I think she got her nickname. Because Susan Greenfield = spring greens. Her enthusiasm meant she was more Parisienne than the locals. She mastered the language in a couple of blinks and knew every cafe and bistro. She took us to what is still my favourite brasserie anywhere, La Coupole, where I ordered a plateau de fruits de mer. It was the best I’ve ever had, and the ideal for all the thousands of fruits de mer that I’ve produced in Padstow since. Was it the quality of the mayonnaise, made not with olive oil but rapeseed oil with lots of mustard in it? I couldn’t afford the lobster version but the langoustines, prawns and shrimps with their wispy feelers still intact were the star attraction. There were two crabs, half a brown crab and a whole etrille, a velvet swimming crab. Bigorneaux (winkles) were salty and sweet bulots (whelks) small and therefore not as intimidating as the ones that come to us from lobster pots. All the bivalves – oysters, mussels, praires and palourdes clams had been opened whilst still alive, so the mussels had that bitter but exquisite mineral taste alleviated only by a sprinkle of shallot vinegar. The platter came on a deep round aluminium tray. There was a chrome wire stand and seaweed on a pile of crushed ice. You chucked oyster and mussel shells into a bowl beneath.
And it wasn’t just the dishes: the service at that restaurant was of a sophistication which we in Padstow, with the local girls and the lack of waiters’ stations and the cramped hot kitchen, could only see as unattainable. For a start all the waiters had the most chic uniforms: white shirt, black trousers, white apron and black waistcoat built for the job with pockets for pens, pads and corkscrews. The amount of last-minute preparation that they did at their waiters’ stations was fascinating to watch. They filleted Dover soles and napped the fillets with the nutty butter from the serving pan; they sliced côtes de boeuf with speedy accuracy; they served up steak tartare and spooned out navarin of lamb from a copper pan. I’ve been back to La Coupole many times since then, and it’s still fabulous. The entrance in the Boulevard Montparnasse looks like a first night at the Odeon, Leicester Square. The interior is art deco, the pillars painted to look like green marble.
Visitors today are spoon-fed information. I prefer to experiment and find out for myself. That’s why I don’t like entries in Trip Advisor which moan about the brusqueness of the service at La Coupole. I find the service refreshing. It’s what you get from Chinese restaurants in Hong Kong. The waiters (usually middle-aged) are similar, and they do a perfectly efficient job of getting your food to you as quickly and professionally as possible. Not that I would allow brusqueness in my own restaurants, where customers expect to be treated as something close to royalty. But what’s wrong with bloody good service without any exchange of sweetness?
After Paris we drove to Beaune and visited a number of vineyards in Burgundy. At the Hospices de Beaune, possibly because of too much indulgence in wine, I felt chastened by the Rogier Van de Leyden painting ‘The Last Judgement’. Such a frightening scene with all the little beds with their red blankets in that very hospice where the poor of the area went to die. We tried a few Macons on the way to Provence, and just outside Orange I saw a promising vineyard near the town of D’Eath and, momentarily forgetting which side of the road I was on, I turned directly into the path of a Citroën. The young driver of the oncoming car, though shocked, was also humorous: subsequently I paid a large sum of money to compensate him for his very old, very mechanically imperfect car. I was shattered by my stupidity but no one was hurt and the police didn’t materialise. My bright yellow Golf was drivable, with smoke emanating from the front tyre where the bumper was pressing into it. I vibrated into a garage where a very tall, old garage mechanic with a bad back manoeuvred himself into a position to jack the bumper away from the tyre. What was so touching was he could, without language, feel my shock and guilt and told me in French to calm down.
We limped down to the coast and stayed in Le Lavandou where my spirits revived at a restaurant in St Tropez on the Quai Jean Jacques with a lunch of Aïoli Provençal and Bourride. These two dishes and the fruits de mer in Paris were instrumental in moving my culinary horizon a long way. The aïoli was the deep yellow garlic mayonnaise that they call the butter of Provence, served with a magnificent platter of vegetables – artichokes, green beans, carrots and warm potatoes with some quartered boiled eggs with bright orange yokes very slightly runny. The bourride – a sort of soup with a whole fish – was made with red mullet, rascasse, John Dory and monkfish. It came as the rich garlicky stock into which piles of the aïoli had been stirred. The fish, which had been cooked in the stock, were filleted at our table. Naturally we drank a lot of rosé and wandered around St Tropez afterwards feeling as full as it’s possible to be. I formed an opinion then, which I haven’t altered, that both dishes, but particularly the aïoli, are best eaten at lunch; they’re just too rich for the evening.
Jill was never totally at home in Redlands, which after all had been my parents’ place. In the summer, the nearby lanes were jammed with caravans. Eventually, she found a large family house in the village of Trevone and we moved in 1998.
My three sons went to a village school in St Eval. It wasn’t quite our local school, but I selected it because it was the choice of RAF families whose married accommodation was nearby and it had good facilities. I admired the headmaster, Paul Bordeaux, for his forward-looking teaching ideas. Edward didn’t do particularly well at school, and I was impressed when Paul said that gaining and retaining knowledge isn’t necessarily the most important thing in education. Too much emphasis is put on exams, and he looked to identify the latent talent in every child, and develop that, whatever it was. He saw that Edward was artistic and good with his hands. I think that it is due to him that Edward is a sculptor today.
I had been cooking for five years by now. I was aware that my palate was good and that my liking for simplicity and my abilit
y to produce dishes which tasted special were somehow instinctive, second nature. But my learned skills were crap. I didn’t know how to make puff pastry, or a soufflé, or croquette potatoes, or how to prepare a rack of lamb. I was still in shock from so nearly losing the club through incompetence, and I wanted to master the technical and business side of restaurant management, including portion control, budgeting and finding the best prices. I therefore enrolled at Camborne Tech in Poole as a catering student because I felt I wanted to learn the basics of French classic cooking. The other students on the course were all working in the industry, two from the RAF base at St Mawgan, a couple from the hotels in Newquay.
My tutor, Tom Chivers, was a chef who had worked in some legendary restaurants in the fifties and sixties – Quaglino’s, Le Coq d’Or, The Caprice, as well as the Dorchester Hotel. He filled me with lots of the detail I had so crassly missed during my all-too-brief experience at the Great Western Hotel in Paddington. This time I was thirsty for knowledge. We made fricassees and blanquettes, mousselines and farces. He taught me inventive vegetable dishes: a potato gratin from Le Coq d’Or, now Langan’s, which we still use in Padstow to this day, the correct way to produce Carrots Vichy which should be made with genuine salty Vichy Water and petits pois à la Française. We mastered champignons à la Grecque and presented salsify in a reduced blanc of flour, water, lemon juice and butter. We made proper fish stocks and beef stocks and discussed the origins of Lobster Thermidor and Lobster à l’Américaine (I bought lobsters down from Padstow and we made both).
Tom called me Colin. ‘Chef, I’d just like to say my name’s actually Rick,’ I said one Wednesday, college day.
‘Yes, yes, all right, Colin.’
He claimed I looked like a Colin.
He used to tell hair-raising anecdotes of his past life in the Dorchester kitchen and other busy basements with lesser pedigrees. One of these – a favourite – was about a Russian chef de parti called Victor and a commis chef on the roast section. Of course, when I was the audience for this shaggy dog story, the young wet-behind-the-ears commis was always called Colin. Thus Colin had been pushing his luck with Victor by maintaining that all Russians were baby-eaters, after the terrible siege of Leningrad. Victor had picked up a cooks’ knife and threatened Colin with it. Tom, the hero of the story, who was a sous chef at the time, had grabbed a copper sauteuse hanging from the extraction canopy, and had whacked the Russian over the head and dropped him. Tom told it well, with glinting eyes recalling the drama and his starched toque on the table beside him. Of course the subtext was an instructive little lecture about good manners in the kitchen.
If you’ve ever seen a play called The Kitchen by Arnold Wesker, you’ll know how these rows in kitchens evolve, especially where the heat is immense and where the numbers are, too. Wesker’s play is about a very large kitchen with about 30 chefs and kitchen porters. The action takes place over a busy lunch service, during the lull in the afternoon and then the dinner service. I first went to see it with my sister Janey in the sixties. It’s the sort of play which would make you never want to set foot in a commercial kitchen and yet there is a catharsis about the sometimes violent interaction between the characters, English, German, Irish and others, very like the kitchen I worked in London but much busier. Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential also gives a vivid picture, as does Rose Tremain’s novel, The Road Home.
The part of the course that I really didn’t care for was chaud-froid, the process invented by Carême where hot food was left to go cold then coated in a mixture of aspic and velouté, béchamel, mayonnaise, cream or reduced stock. Cooked whole chickens, chicken breasts, poached eggs or trout would be coated in a sauce. You’d chill it to let it set, then add decorations. We were taken to Hotel Olympia to look at examples of chaud-froid as well as chocolate moulding and sugar paste creations in pale pinks, greens, yellows and blues. Snow White and the seven dwarfs and nativity scenes were the most common. Most bizarre of all, though, was fat carving: the Venus de Milo, Michelangelo’s David or an eagle on a crag, in white fat. I found it all at odds with what I wanted to do in cooking, yet held a sardonic admiration for the effort put in. Back at Camborne Tech, chaud-froid decorations for a chicken were a black-and-white chequerboard or a harlequin pattern. The black, which in Marie-Antoine Carême’s day would have been thin slices of truffle, was a black cylinder of what was called truffle paste, which tasted as though it was made from charcoal, flour and gelatine. This would be sliced and cut into little squares, diamonds, lines and circles. I just didn’t get it and was hopeless at it, except that I did once do a couple of poached eggs with flowers on them using chives for the stalks, tarragon leaves for the leaves, and egg white and yoke for the flowers. The teacher, Gerry Boriosi, said it looked ‘very natural’. ‘Natural’ was what I saw in the fruits de mer, the bourride and the aïoli Provençal. That’s how I wanted my food to look.
It was Paul Sellars who helped me turn out fruits de mer and bourride. The problem at that time was the availability of seafood. Crabs we had in abundance, and lobsters, but that was about it. I was still going out and picking my own mussels. Oysters by then we could get from the Duchy Oyster Company at Port Navas near Falmouth, but no one would deliver them so we had to have them sent by train to Bodmin Road station and then persuade a Western National driver to pick them up for the Padstow bus. Some of them refused to do this because the cardboard boxes always leaked oyster water. We finally managed to get langoustines for the fruits de mer on the overnight train from Glasgow, which caused similar problems – in fact, leaked prawn water is a lot smellier. Initially the clams were from the Camel Estuary, a very soft-shell variety which the locals called Hens. We got cockles in the same way. I found someone who would pick mussels from the estuary, too, by the bagful; but I realised these mussels would have to be purified before I could sell them. So back at the house on Trevose Head, I set up an ultraviolet purification system in the coach house, scene of many a party in years gone by. Here, on my day off, I would collect water from the slipway at high tide in big plastic tanks in the back of my VW Caddy pick-up, and take it back to purify the mussels. These mussels were really good quality. The main mussel that grows in the Camel Estuary is from the Mediterranean and has an almost black shell which is rounder than the local beach mussel. It may be fantasy but I am transported to some beach-side restaurant on the Costa Brava whenever I taste them. We began to put on moules marinière and stuffed mussels. But getting all the ingredients for a fruits de mer had been a labour of love.
Not any more, though. I was in The Seafood kitchen last night and ruminated that now it’s just a matter of picking up the phone and shrimps, prawns, langoustines, razor clams, palourdes all arrive next day in perfect condition.
These days, I just go in and stand on the pass and watch what everyone is doing. It’s a scene of quiet concentration. Nobody raises their voices. I love it in there, always have, for all the hard work, sweating, stressing, yelling. Nowadays, it’s almost like a temple. It’s a friendly world where stocks and soups are simmering and fish and shellfish are grilling. The chefs are pleased to see me. I don’t say much, just notice that the horseradish and beetroot salad with smoked salmon is a little chunky. Mental note to ask them to cut the beetroot finer. I taste it. Needs more horseradish and a little more sugar. The sauce for the new season’s garlic with the monkfish is a little on the dry side. Will mention that. Grilled lobster looks perfect, as does the bass with the vanilla dressing which is hard to get right. Too much vanilla and it tastes weird; just a trace and it’s exciting, seems to make the chargrilled bitterness of the skin taste memorable.
In 1996 we bought the house behind the restaurant and dug out its garden, then knocked through to form a massively bigger space. We put the garden back on top of the roof. To me it’s like the Home Underground where Peter Pan and The Lost Boys lived in Neverland. It’s complete with its chimney, the extract duct now tiled with local Delabole slate to conceal it. The new kitchen is big
, divided into four sections. The main part has a central island Rorgue range. There are two solid-top stoves, a deep-fat fryer, a plancha (the stainless steel griddle beloved by the Spanish) and a chargrill on one side for the main courses and vegetables, and on the other side – for the hot starters and what we call bar snacks, little amuse-gueules – another plancha, a solid-top stove, a four-burner stove, a deep-fat fryer and a fierce wok burner. The wok cooker is also used for the large number of Singapore chilli crabs we do, where we split whole brown crabs and stir-fry them with ginger, garlic, chilli and soya sauce. There are also two salamanders at the end of the range nearest the pass for grillling whole fish like dover sole or bass, and browning fish pies. There are worktops on the back wall and side walls interspersed with two Rational cookers and another salamander.
The fourth side of the main kitchen is the pass where the food is passed from chefs to waiters. On the pass is a chef whose job is to check the food as it goes out and assist with adding last-minute sauces and garnishes. We made our new pass as long as possible, half heated and half cold, so that we could occasionally do a banquet service which needs lots of plates being assembled with, say, roast trançons (steaks) of turbot, a nap of fish stock flavoured with fish sauce, butter and fine herbs and, finally, a thick yellow slick of hollandaise sauce.
Next to the main kitchen is the pastry kitchen which has two ovens, a grill and an ice-cream maker called a Pacojet.
Next to that is the fish prep area or larder, as we call it, where all the fish and shellfish is portioned and delivered to the main kitchen, and the platters of seafood, prawns or oysters and the cold crabs and lobsters are put together. The initial fish prep – gutting, scaling and filleting – is done in a chilled kitchen upstairs. Next to the fish prep area is the pot wash, and just in front of that is the still area for slicing bread and preparing teas and coffee, and in front of that the wine room.