Under a Mackerel Sky

by Rick Stein

  This happened to be soon after Bill died. He’d suffered a heart attack in 2008 while en route to a wine tasting with me at The Seafood Restaurant. I missed his funeral at Wells Cathedral because I was filming in Cambodia. I still regret not having been there. Missing him terribly, I imagined my ideal dinner party: Bill and his wife Kate, Bill’s friend Johnny Apple and his wife Betsey. Len Evans and his wife Trish. Peter Herbert and his wife Sue. Peter had been very helpful to Jill and me when we were building up the restaurant. There was only one problem about this imaginary dinner and, I would guess, most fantasy dinners containing successful people: none of the men apart from Bill and me really got on with each other; they were all a bit alpha male. By then, though, there would be one other at my dinner who would have made everyone get on, who would have read all the undercurrents and simply steered the party into clear air, a lively Australian, a book publicist used to dealing with talented but often difficult authors, Sarah Burns, or Sas to her friends. She had met them all and liked them, particularly Johnny.

  I first met Johnny Apple, who wrote as chief political correspondent for the New York Times as R. W. Apple, in the early nineties when he and Betsey came to The Seafood with Bill. I knew from Bill that Johnny, as a political correspondent, had been everywhere, even spent time under fire in the Vietnam war. He had run the paper’s bureau in London, lived in Washington, had a farm in Connecticut and a cottage in Lechlade in the Cotswolds. Betsey (née Pinckney) was from Charleston, South Carolina and came from a very distinguished southern family. They loved my restaurant and loved my food. He was very keen on the soft-shell crabs from the Camel Estuary, and wrote a piece for the NYT in which he described Padstow as ‘plug ugly’. I was a bit pissed off. Years later I reminded him what he’d written. ‘Well it’s not plug ugly now,’ he said. Padstow had come up in the world. While travelling everywhere for the New York Times Johnny wrote about food, and was far more informative than any food guide. He knew the inside of every Michelin three-star restaurant, of course, but he also loved prosaic food if it was good. He would enthuse equally about the lobster rolls in Maine and the secret spices with the fried fish at Cha Ca La Vong in Hanoi. There was nothing he didn’t know about Southern barbecue – the subtle differences between North and South Carolina, Kansas, Memphis and Texas. Like Bill, he seemed to come from another age, maybe pre-revolutionary France; he might have been a guest at one of Brillat-Savarin’s lunches. Johnny’s ancestors were German immigrants to Akron, Ohio. He used to say that with their can-do attitude, Americans were like Germans – just by a quirk of history they ended up speaking English.

  The last time I saw him was at a dinner in Washington at a very good fish restaurant called Pesce. I had been over for a long weekend with my brother, John, selling the idea of omega-3 fish oils to the great and the good at a couple of dinners at the Willard Hotel. Johnny was absolutely in his element – politicians and journalists dropping by to say hello, included Seymour Hersh who broke the story of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war. Johnny had caught up with my TV programmes and recognised that they were indeed about more than just cookery. He understood that it gave us our reason – our platform – for filming somewhere like Cambodia, but that cookery was just the starting point from which we could go on to say whatever we needed to about poverty and the Khmer Rouge, the atmosphere, the architecture, even the civil war.

  I had lunch with Johnny and Betsey in Sydney, once at Tetsuya’s and once at Est, both great restaurants, and each time he knew the chef and knew the dishes. Both times I went with Sarah Burns. At Est, a favourite of mine where Peter Doyle is head chef, Sarah’s little son Zach was building a shopping centre out of a white shoe box at the end of the table and Johnny stopped talking about food and spent 20 minutes discussing the construction with Zach. He took delight in many different things. He died in 2008, the same year as Bill.

  Len Evans was like a second father to me. I had first met him in the 1980s when I was once more staying in Australia with the Ifoulds. Ed Ifould’s mother, Mary, suggested that my friend Johnny Walter and I should go and see Len. I protested he would be far too busy but she insisted I give him a ring, that he wouldn’t mind. Later, he liked to tell people he had arranged to see some Cornish boys at 11 a.m. and expected to be through by 11.30. ‘I was,’ he said. ‘Through by 11.30 that evening.’

  Even then, Len was famous as a wine maker and it proved to be quite a day. When we arrived, he was firing a batch of tiles he’d made in a small kiln he had installed in one of the corrugated iron and hardwood outhouses on his farm which he called, with typical humour, Loggerheads. The largely figurative designs had an almost medieval simplicity about them and when fired the tiles were vividly coloured, bright yellows and blues. He’d already started plastering them into the walls of the arched entrance to the rambling single-storey house. He had only just come out of hospital from heart surgery but that wasn’t going to stop him opening bottles of Evans family wine, a choice malolactic Chardonnay from his company, Rothbury Estate, and later that night a 30-year-old Château Margaux. There were bottles from wine-making friends like Murray Tyrrell, Brian Croser and James Halliday, and a couple from further afield, including a Bâtard-Montrachet.

  After lunch Johnny and I retired to our motel for a snooze but after what seemed no more than a couple of minutes, Len was on the phone demanding we meet him in the pub in Pokolbin. We had a quick look round the winery at Rothbury, then he took us on a drive through his property in his four-wheel drive Mitsubishi Pajero with kangaroos hopping away to left and right as we drove through the gum trees past a dam he’d recently put in and a sculpture he’d created out of antique wooden gears. We went back to Loggerheads where he and Trish cooked us a three-course supper starting with scallops in the shell with a wine and cream sauce, then simple lamb chops, then Trish’s trifle, made without fruit which is the way I always make it now. I can’t remember the very old vintages of Bordeaux which we had with all this – after the first bottle of Margaux one became a bit blasé.

  I saw Len and Trish many times in the following 20 years, both in the Hunter Valley and in Padstow. Though very Australian, he was born in Suffolk of Welsh parents and always had an affection for his country of birth. He loved fish and chips. He suggested that a simple white-tiled restaurant with slate floors and wooden tables and a rigorously pure menu celebrating traditional fish and chips would work in Padstow. He was right: we opened Stein’s Fish and Chips and it has proved very successful.

  Len had persuaded Jill and me to invest in his new wine-making company. He called it Tower Estate, and we’ve had its wines on the list at Padstow for 15 years. Len’s infectious optimism seemed to be the answer to everything. It was his sense of humour which I most remember.

  The last words on Len go to Jancis Robinson, one of his close friends:

  ‘We were served more than two dozen great Australian wines blind, plus a magnum of Le Montrachet as “quaffing white” and almost a dozen other treasures including an 1890 Chambers Rutherglen Muscat. Afterwards, we reeled out into the night counting the blessings of this 30-year friendship as we blinked up at the Southern Cross. The next day, we learnt via a newsflash in Sydney airport that he had been found dead in his car that morning while picking up his wife Trish from hospital. The heart that had struggled for 75 years against all the odds to keep up with the appetites and passions of this pugnacious hedonist finally gave up.’

  Johnny Apple, Bill Baker, Len Evans – probably all of them would have lived longer if they hadn’t enjoyed the pleasures of the table so much. It was almost as if their enthusiasm for eating and drinking was an act of defiance. They had a sense of the heroic about them which I admire. I don’t think any of their wives admired it too much, though. All left families who miss them very much.

  I like rather loud men. In spite of the fact I was a little afraid of my father, I look back with fondness on my childhood with a loud man who was larger-than-life and pushy and naturally always the centre of attention. I
think that, however uncomfortable it was at times, it was reassuring that my dad was the lion. Johnny was just such a man, often irascible, often cross with Betsey, but he was always in charge – as was Bill, as was Len. Lions, all of them.

  PART FOUR

  Giddy Times

  I

  In 1984 The Sunday Times ran a national restaurant competition in conjunction with the RAC: they invited members of the public to nominate their favourite restaurant. Tony Hackett who spent every night of the week of the Royal Cornwall Show in The Seafood Restaurant, put us forward – and we were voted best restaurant in England.

  At the time I had started writing monthly fish recipes for Woman’s Realm magazine. I got the job simply because I knew the editor, Richard Barber. I found writing these articles really hard. I had no idea what the average reader of Woman’s Realm wanted and I didn’t get a lot of feedback, but Richard seemed happy with my recipes and the cookery editor, Christine France, was so keen on them that she arranged a photo feature. We worked on that one picture for about five hours. I still have it. I’m holding a copper pot of fish stew and I look horribly nervous.

  Getting a regular cookery column in a magazine gave me an insight into how publicity worked, so when we won the Best Restaurant Award I typed a single sheet of paper with information about the prize and, on Richard’s advice, sent it to all the local TV and radio stations and local newspapers. It had an immediate effect. Television South West sent a journalist who took one look at the menu which, of course, featured lobster grilled and lobster cold, and proceeded to conduct an interview with me of the I-can’t-believe-you’re-still-in-business-charging-these-prices sort of thing. I was too naive to stand up for myself and point out that, yes lobster was £10, but everything else was under £5. I didn’t have the nous to argue that here was a restaurant staffed by young people who were trying to do something excellent in the West Country. The journalist from BBC South West, Sue King, couldn’t have been more different. She liked what we were doing and sampled a meal in the restaurant. Not only did she do a very nice piece on the local news about us but, more importantly – much more importantly – she mentioned my restaurant to a friend of hers who was working for the BBC in Bristol. He was called David Pritchard.

  David was a habitué of Keith Floyd’s restaurant in Clifton, Bristol, and had featured Keith on a Friday night TV programme called RPM, distinguished, as he hilariously pointed out in his book Shooting The Cook, by an enormous number of appearances by The Stranglers because he liked them so much. David also employed Keith to do some cookery slots and together, in Keith’s restaurant, they hatched a plan to produce a series for the West Country called Floyd on Fish. They were looking for places in the south west where the fish cooking was of note. They chose The Horn of Plenty and – thanks to the good word that Sue King had put in for us – The Seafood Restaurant.

  I decided to do a new bass dish for the occasion. I took a julienne of carrot, leek and celery and simmered it gently in butter, then added some white wine and stuffed the cavity of the bass with the mixture. I roasted the fish in the oven and served it with a sorrel sauce which was a food-processor version of a hollandaise with lots of sorrel thrown in at the last minute so that the greenness of the leaf came out in the sauce. (You don’t want the sauce to turn brown as soon as the sorrel is cooked.) I’m still proud of this dish.

  I’d already met Keith a couple of times because he visited Padstow with his second wife, Julie, and their daughter Poppy. Keith knew North Cornwall well because his first wife, Jesmond, had come from Port Isaac. He had been complimentary about the restaurant and had given me some good advice about the Provençal fish dishes I was cooking at the time, notably the bourride which I had worked out from my memories of eating the dish in St Tropez and what I’d gathered from recipes in Alan Davidson’s Mediterranean Seafood, as well as recipes by Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. Keith gave me an idea for serving it with a slice of baguette fried in olive oil and rubbed with garlic, then spread with harissa, the North African paste of pounded chillies, red peppers, cumin and coriander. He had a confidence about him. He had cooked classic all-French dishes such as bourride and bouillabaisse for French people in their own foodie heartland of Provence – and had passed the test. He used to claim that local French restaurants were so regional that a perfect boeuf Bourguignon was available only in Burgundy, while only in Alsace could you eat a perfect coq au Riesling. I was in awe of him. He spoke with public-school swagger, drank whisky with American dry ginger ale and smoked many Marlboro reds which gave his voice an attractive gravelly edge.

  I was excited when the crew arrived. David Pritchard – with a mischievous sparkle in his eye – gave the impression of only being interested in what was for lunch. His PA, Frances Wallis, was attractive, Scottish and constantly exasperated by David’s ever-changing plans. The tall, slightly patrician cameraman was called Clive North. Keith treated Clive as if he was rather stupid and never in the right place at the right time with his camera – a clever ploy because it made the viewers feel they were sharing directly in Keith’s culinary secrets and that the filming, though necessary, was an intrusion. Then there was Timmy West, the sound recordist, who was all over the place with dynamic youthful enthusiasm. The net effect on me was of a world much more attractive and much more dynamic than my own.

  Keith and I cooked together. He said, ‘Now, Nick, what exactly are we cooking this morning?’

  ‘Roasted sea bass. Actually, old boy, it’s Rick, not Nick.’

  ‘Nick, Rick, you new young chefs are two a penny.’

  I wasn’t fazed by this one bit, and I loved cooking with Keith. After we’d cooked the bass, they all ate my lunch. I had spent some time worrying about this. Even then, I sensed that showing off would not go down well. I cooked small sirloin steaks, thin crisp chips and a salad of tomato, red onion and fresh thyme with the dressing I’ve always used – four parts olive oil and one part red wine vinegar with a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar. I served a bottle or two of Beaujolais with the steaks and instead of pudding I produced some cheese so we could finish off the wine. No big deal. But it was exactly right; the sort of food both Keith and David absolutely loved.

  After lunch we got down to filming. It was a lovely sunny afternoon. David decided to photograph the bass not in the restaurant but on the quayside. A table was prepared on the edge right next to a trawler which was almost level with the quay as it was high tide by then. It was to be just Keith and me with a bottle of Trimbach Riesling.

  David suddenly said, ‘Let’s put the whole thing on the boat.’

  So it was that Keith and I found ourselves sitting at a table with a white cloth, eating sea bass and toasting each other with Alsace Riesling as we sailed down the Camel Estuary in the golden light of late afternoon – and I felt I was sailing off to a new and exciting life with all these fabulous new people.

  Floyd on Fish was a great success. It was originally intended to be a local programme but even I could see it was going to become a lot more than that. Keith was a real bloke, slightly arrogant, drinking while he cooked. He also had a mission: to make the British enjoy the great seafood in our waters all around the British Isles, and to show an enthusiasm equal to that of the French and Spanish. The fact that Keith didn’t cook in a studio was radically new. Keith reminded me of Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet who I’d worked with in Sydney so many years before – but Keith was much more dangerous. Cocky on-screen, he lived life at full speed. He really was like a rock and roll star, rather like what The Byrds wrote in their song ‘So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star’. When he and I filmed again in Padstow, I cooked porbeagle shark. Keith’s son Patrick later came to work with us for a few years, a lovely boy. Then each time I saw Keith he seemed a little less fun, a little more into being a star. He took to wearing very expensive suits and Burberry coats. He was always sartorial but the new Keith was in a different league. He bought a white Bentley and had the first mobile phone I’d ever see
n; he used to phone our house to say he was outside in his car.

  In 1991 I was invited to appear on Keith’s This is Your Life. When the time came for me to be revealed he was very un-pleased to see me. This was unsettling, to say the least. I put it down to Keith’s resentment of my growing friendship with David Pritchard. Meanwhile, Keith’s drinking was creating problems for David and the crew on their next project Floyd on Oz.

  He had become a little insane, I would go so far as to surmise, but fortunately he employed a Kiwi girl called Maggie McClaren to act as the tour manager who also drove them, and who was not afraid to stand up to him and he in turn liked her for it. I have a great affection for Australians and Kiwis, and from my formative years there often think of myself as half Australian. I admire their straightforwardness and fearless approach to people. Maggie was a shining example. She would have told Keith exactly what she thought about his less-than-perfect behaviour while filming. But it was Maggie’s mistake, perhaps, to fall in love with David Pritchard, which Keith wasn’t happy about. After the series Maggie came to England to be with David, and when David and Keith finally parted company after Far Flung Floyd in 1994 it was Maggie who helped steer David in my direction for TV.

  David had been instrumental in getting me a slot in a local TV programme called Village Green, on which I was the judge of the best cooking. I wore a purple striped blazer and mostly the food was appalling – I mean utterly appalling. It’s hard to recall how terrible cooking in Britain could be in those far-off days before everyone watched food programmes and reality TV. Of course there were exceptions and standards – and the wondrous Women’s Institute – but Village Green had me filming in a pub where the landlady was cooking in her dark kitchen at the back. It was tiny and there was no extraction. The filming lights and the landlady’s stew made the smell of two aged Labradors in unspeakable dog baskets almost unbearable. I did it, though, because my brief appearances with Keith had given me the TV bug. I started appearing on local TV whenever I was asked, doing little slots on barbecues or what to do with summer mackerel.