by Rick Stein
David and I took a trip on a giant herring trawler from Peterhead, north of Aberdeen. We had been told to expect most of the crew to arrive in BMWs and Mercedes, so profitable was the fishing for large pelagic trawlers out of Peterhead and Fraserburgh. We had been invited by a skipper, Andrew Tait, to film on a seine net trawler, the Chris Andra, which would take us around Shetland. I described the ship as being not much smaller than a cross-Channel ferry. This was an exaggeration. But for someone used to the wooden fishing boats of Padstow, it was a fish killer. I was particularly impressed with the size of the otter boards. These are the two heavy boards which go either side of the mouth of a purse seine net, shaped so that they glide through the water turning away from the stern of the boat so keeping the net open. I’m fascinated by fishing gear, lobster pots and keep boxes, ropes, nets, chains and trawls, so after we boarded I was leaning over the aft rail, part admiring the eight-ton slabs of shaped steel above me but also doodling with my Psion organiser, when David grabbed me by the back of my jacket and pulled me away just as one of the steel boards broke loose and sliced through the space where my head had just been.
Even then I wasn’t immediately aware of the danger, so in my own little world was I. I often don’t seem to really notice what is going on around me which can lead to a certain clumsiness. Over the years David has made use of this in filming to good effect. Once – I think it was in Taste of the Sea – we had been filming a simple dish, a fillet of grey mullet cooked over charcoal with an extra-virgin olive oil dressing; just olive oil, garlic, a few chopped chillies, briefly soaked in white wine vinegar to take away the excess heat, and coarse sea salt. To mellow the slivers of garlic, I dropped them briefly into a pan of warm olive oil, added the chilli, put the fillets on a warm plate and surrounded the fish with the olive oil and chilli, and sprinkled it with the Maldon sea salt. I was in my element, a little over-confident, very proud to be using my charcoal barbecue on camera (no ordinary gas grill, the real thing). I was also pleased with the new Japanese mandolin I had acquired – a razor-sharp gadget – ideal for thinly slicing vegetables. But maybe not, in hindsight, ideal for slicing something as small as a clove of garlic. It had a safety holder which was too big for the garlic. But as I said to the camera while starting to slice the garlic with my fingers perilously close to the blade, you only cut yourself on one of these once.
It was almost as if David knew what was coming because, of course, I did cut myself on it. Hubris because I was too absorbed in the effortless simplicity of the dish actually to put any care into doing it.
I shouted, ‘Fuck!’
David yelled at the cameraman: ‘Julian! Why did you stop filming?’
‘Rick’s cut himself, there’s blood everywhere.’
‘You’ve got no journalistic sense,’ David said in disgust. ‘I knew Rick was going to do that. You should have kept filming.’
The next shot is of me slicing garlic with a thin knife and wearing a huge blue kitchen plaster. And the next voice-over says: ‘If you just heard a clatter it was of a Japanese mandolin being thrown into the rubbish skip outside the back door.’
There have been a number of other incidents where my Inspector Clouseau clumsiness has made the filming all too painful. In the Seafood Lovers’ Guide, we filmed a clam fisherman dredging for quahog clams in Southampton Water. Apparently the first clams were thrown overboard at the end of a Cunard voyage, which explains how they got there all the way from America. Now he also dredged up a cannonball encrusted with barnacles.
‘How amazing,’ I said to the camera. ‘I’ll just bang on this on the gunwale to break off the barnacles.’
I did this not noticing in the excitement of filming that on the gunwale I had my other hand which I duly thumped.
I’ve been knocked over by a wave in Phuket, Thailand, doing a piece to camera walking along the water line with my trousers rolled up to my knees, holding my deck shoes and talking earnestly to the camera about the vibrancy of Thai cooking. I’ve burnt myself with hot olive oil filming cooking a paella. I have an almost pathetic enthusiasm when the cameras point at me: I want to be your friend. I’ll jump off the boat in Sri Lanka into the water with the other fishermen to scare the fish into the back of the net. I’ll swim in the Canal du Midi under the barge to help the skipper untangle some washing line from the propeller.
David uses my occasional lack of judgement to good effect. So it was very reassuring to know that when my awareness was impaired on the back of the Chris Andra he was there to save my life.
The quantity of herrings they caught on the Chris Andra is hard to believe. We discovered that the net they used was the size of a football pitch, that the haul was about 450 tons of fish and that, often, the haul is sold before it’s landed, so accurate are the sensors in estimating its size. I did a piece right by a stainless steel channel with a blue and silver stream of live herrings flowing in an icy slurry down into hold. The sheer volume of fish shocked and excited me as the net was pulled in and began to tighten around the whole shoal. It looked like a zeppelin tied to the side of the ship rising and falling with the swell. I used the size of the catch as an example to ask the question ‘Can we expect the oceans endlessly to produce such quantities?’ It was, I think, a powerful piece but I didn’t like doing it because the owners and crew had been very hospitable to us. Not only did they accommodate us in some style but they fed us remarkably well. Theirs wasn’t the normal life on small trawlers – bunks with dirty blankets, a smell of diesel and cigarette smoke, and girlie mags everywhere. It was individual cabins and bowls of mini Mars Bars and Crunchies on the galley tables. They also arranged for us to transfer from the boat to another of their trawlers going back to Fraserburgh so we wouldn’t have to do the five-day trip.
After the series came out, I had an aggrieved letter complaining that we had abused their hospitality. Since making the film, I’m no longer sure that such a massive fishing operation is so bad if the fishing is well controlled and restricted to a short season.
I was keen to spread my love of seafood yet at the same time worried that the world was running out of fish. Without admitting that most of what we like to do in life has a downside, I came to realise that it was OK to love seafood and to eat it, because the more people share this passion, the more they will be keen to preserve stocks and look after them wisely. I also recognised that we ought to become more familiar with less well-known species of seafood which are plentiful but under-used. Both points have turned out in a limited way to be true. There has been a much greater awareness of the fragility of fish stocks, and a proliferation of organisations dedicated to pointing us in the direction of ‘safe’ fish, notably the Marine Stewardship Council and the Marine Conservation Society. Films like The End of the Line have targeted the seemingly mindless overfishing of one species, the Blue Fin Tuna, and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has laudably pointed out the inanity of throwing just-caught fish back dead into the sea because they don’t meet fish quota requirements.
For a while my restaurants became a target for journalists who accused us of unsound practices because we put local cod on the menu at a time when many considered all cod in the British Isles to be endangered. Perhaps naively, I mentioned in a talk at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 2008 that not all local stocks were under threat and pointed out that in the south west the fishermen were reporting very good landings of some species under threat including cod – so much so that the quota had actually been increased. Needless to say, the next day part of what I said appeared in the Daily Mail.
Britain’s top seafood chef has vowed to go on using endangered species of fish in his acclaimed restaurants despite warning of over-fishing.
It reminded me of what I had learnt way back, editing the university newspaper: a news story has to be a story.
Shortage of fish has led to a greater awareness of previously lesser-known species. For one of these I think I can take some personal responsibility – the gurnard. Gurnards, when I was young,
were bait for lobster pots. I started using them regularly in the 1980s following trips to Provence because I saw they were an important ingredient in bouillabaisse, as well as bourride and fish soup. All the books I read about bouillabaisse pointed out that the authentic version absolutely had to include poissons de roches. The French used rascasse whose heads gave the famous Provençale stew its unique flavour. I had only ever seen one rascasse-related fish at Newlyn Market, a scorpion fish, but gurnards we had a-plenty and gurnard belong to the family of poissons des roches. I started using them in my soups and stews and then created recipes for them. For the book Seafood I wrote a recipe for fried gurnard with sage. It was intended to go with a technique for skinning a whole gurnard. I simply fried the gurnard in butter, cleaned the pan, added more butter, sage leaves, garlic, lemon juice, salt and black pepper, and poured the instant sauce over the fried fish. Gurnard sales have been soaring ever since 2000 when The Seafood Lovers’ Guide came out. They were less than 50p a kilo then; now in the summer months they can take as much as £14 a kilo, making their inflation in price a bit like property in Padstow.
I’ve now, after many more trips to the Mediterranean, identified the unique flavour of rascasse in a bouillabaisse. I think it’s there in gurnard too. If you cut up a gurnard’s head and fry it with garlic and olive oil and a couple of tomatoes, you can smell a sunny oiliness much more appetising than that of mackerel or herring; a smell that takes me back to the bouillabaisse restaurant called L’Epuisette in Vallon des Auffes in Marseille where I filmed with my friend Simon Hopkinson in French Odyssey. You can’t make a bouillabaisse out of any old fish. It has to be a rock fish, and what’s more it has to have its head on. It adds that almost overpowering mushy, oily taste – sort of off-putting – but in a bouillabaisse you need the warp and weft of a little bitterness. It’s like shrimp paste – the ying with the yang – almost like an almost unpleasant perfume, but how you miss it when it’s not there.
VI
For our next series David and I planned a Food Lovers’ Guide. I wrote:
Just as I insist on the best and freshest fish, I do the same with meat, game, poultry, dairy produce and vegetables. I’ve always felt that the most important part about cooking good food is getting the best produce in the first place.
However, Henrietta Green had already published a book with the same title and the same intentions, and she was already irritated with me for calling my previous book and series The Seafood Lovers’ Guide. I pointed out that the name had been invented by an American food writer, Patricia Wells, who’d produced her Food Lovers’ Guide to Paris ages ago.
‘That’s not the point,’ Henrietta said. ‘It would have been polite to have asked me.’
I could see where she was coming from. She had been championing small producers for some time and running a series of markets where they came to sell their stuff – and along comes me with my TV following and I pick up her idea. Nevertheless, it was an idea which could do with a lot more exposure.
Jane Root, the BBC controller, really saw the point of bringing small producers to a bigger audience. Then a friend of David’s, Jane McKlusky, who was running West Country TV at the time, came up with the idea of Food Heroes. This was a perfect title for what I was trying to get across. I had long been a fan of the Slow Food Movement, founded in 1986 as a result of opposition to the opening of a McDonalds near the Spanish Steps in Rome. Like many, I felt the oppression of the spread of fast food, and the dismal unadventurousness of everything tasting alike, and the gradual loss of knowledge about cooking and the ability to tell ordinary from outstanding. We had even more of a task because we didn’t have, in the British Isles, a tradition of small peasant producers like France, Italy and Spain. If we were to encourage the development of a culture of small producers of excellent food, in many cases we would have to start from scratch.
I have always had a mission to show people, not just at home but everywhere, that Britain is a place of really good-quality food. I’ve always wanted to dispel the idea that our cooking is bland and that our meat and vegetables are invariably overdone. I’ve always felt proud that in Le Guide Culinaire, Escoffier says that the best game in the world is the Scottish grouse. I think the best langoustine in the world comes from Scotland too; the best lobster and turbot comes from Cornwall; the best beef is the grass-fed beef that comes from my butcher, Warrens in Launceston. Making Food Heroes was a joy, mostly because it’s no hardship to be paid to travel round our gorgeous country. Much of the filming was done in May and June. How special it is to be outdoors when the landscape blossoms and is transformed from a vista of bare branches, with a slight green tinge to it, into a canopy of sheer bright greenness where the sounds of early summer are almost muffled by the thickness of it. To travel in a Land Rover under skies pendulous with clouds interspersed with blue patches casting dappled light on the fields, to a beer festival at Tuckers Maltings in Newton Abbot to discuss the relative properties of fuggles and golden hops and the quality of Devon barley; or to be watching the shadows of clouds racing down the green Cambrian mountains and valleys at the source of the Severn in mid Wales on the way to visit a black beef farmer; or to drive over a humpback bridge over the River Test near Longparish in Hampshire, gazing briefly at the clear water below with river weeds wavering in the flow.
It was nights of finding wonderful pubs including the Bear Hotel in Crickhowell in Powys; and the Queens Head, a beamed and thatched pub near the village square in Billesdon near Claire Symington’s Seldom Seen Farm in Leicestershire; and Crown Liquor Saloon just across from the Europa Hotel in Great Victoria St in Belfast, with its long red granite bar, carved wooden booths and exemplary pints of Guinness.
Before Food Heroes, I had viewed some British produce with ambivalence. The Australians have a phrase for my feelings – it’s ‘culinary cringe’. While I remained determined to prove that we had as good produce as anyone else, there were areas where I didn’t even believe myself. One of these was cheese. Like most British people, I had become used to rectangular blocks of Cheddar and Leicester which cried out for the addition of a lot of pickles in a pub. Running a restaurant and having to try to put together a half-decent cheese board, I tended to rely on French cheeses.
Early on in our Food Heroes journeys we stayed overnight at a hotel in Tewkesbury where the restaurant manager was French. He reminded me of the taunting French guard in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I asked him why there were no English cheeses on any menus in France and he said: ‘Because we don’t like them!’ and I laughed. But it hurt because I didn’t like a lot of them either, and I couldn’t see the point of a tasteless British cheese.
That is, until I went to visit Ruth Kirkham and her son Graham at Goosnargh in Lancashire and tasted her cheese. It was no way bland. Complex and agriculture in flavour – by which I mean reminiscent of pasture and farmyards – her Lancashire cheese was matured for up to six months, and at each stage was stronger and more rewarding, in the same way as old red wine is. Similarly, in North Wales I discovered a light fragrant cows’ milk cheese with far more character than I could ever have believed; it was a Caerphilly, a cheese I’d previously found too mild to bother with. No wonder that cheese makers are such interesting people – they are passionately committed. ‘Blessed are the cheese makers’ was a line David kept repeating from the film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, slightly in jest and slightly in awe. He was amused by the fact that many of them were bossy women who were intimidating but admirable and full of character.
In Ireland, near Kilkenny, I asked a far-from-intimidating farmer’s wife, Olivia Goodwillie, what was so special about her cows’ milk Lavistown Cheese. We were sitting in Lavistown House at a large table in her completely un-modernised kitchen. It could have come straight out of Molly Kean’s book on genteel, slightly impoverished Irish rural life, Good Behaviour. It was like the farmhouse kitchens you sometimes still see around Padstow, big central pine table, flagstones on the floor, a slatted wooden clothes dr
ier above the range – often still coal fired – and once-upon-a-time hams hanging from the hooks in the ceiling. A door straight out to the farmyard and, next door, a proper larder – a long narrow dark room with floor to ceiling shelves on which were jars of homemade jams, pickles and chutney. ‘I haven’t a clue,’ she said. ‘It just happens.’
It was in no way a perplexing answer. You start with full-cream milk, add rennet and a yoghurt-type of culture … and it just happens. No two batches of farmhouse cheese will ever taste exactly the same. Take the same recipe and make it at another farm and the cheese will taste subtly different. I realised it was like making wine and just as fascinating.
In Northamptonshire, we added Mrs King’s Melton Mowbray Pork Pies at Cotgrave to our portfolio of food heroes. Three brothers, Paul, Neil and Ian Hartland, all dedicated rugby players, whose grandfather had bought the business from the eponymous Mrs King, made the pies every day. The hand-raised hot-water pastry was exemplary, the pork was all local and the jelly in the pies not crystals of gelatine but made by simmering the trotters with salt and spices to produce something as interesting to taste as the meat itself.
A bacon factory in Ayrshire, Ramsay’s of Carluke, also springs to mind. Here they cooked us a breakfast of bacon butties to show that no liquid came out of the bacon when frying.