Under a Mackerel Sky

by Rick Stein

  The truth of it all was that while making French Odyssey, we were having the time of our lives and the odd little tiff just made it better. All of us would jump at the opportunity to do a trip like that again. Who knows, maybe we will.

  On French Odyssey, David had somehow imbued our barge with a sense of a journey, by gradually building up my excitement as we got ever closer to the Mediterranean. He kept me on my toes with references to sunnier climes and comments on the changing landscape after the appearance of olive trees and citrus groves. In Marseille, after making the bouillabaisse with my friend Simon Hopkinson, we steamed out of the mouth of the Rhône past Port-Saint-Louis into the Mediterranean Sea, with me saying, ‘I just want to keep going.’ After we’d finished the piece to camera and had turned round and were making our way back to Port-Saint-Louis, David suddenly suggested that I should jump overboard and literally keep going by swimming furiously out to sea. Naturally, wanting to please, I was keen to do just that. I like a swim very much anyway. Fortunately I noticed a large piece of wood whizzing at speed on the outgoing flow of the river and I suddenly realised that by the time they’d turned round to pick me up I would have been miles out to sea.

  Mediterranean Escapes sort of flowed on from French Odyssey. It started on a ferry going from Marseille to Corsica, and continued to numerous islands, ports and beaches. We covered a vast area with diverse cuisines, and tried linking them through flavours such as olives, olive oils, grapes, tomatoes, garlic and fish; we also tried looking at the Mediterranean as the centre of Western civilisation. But I think if you were to classify the TV series as music albums you’d say French Odyssey was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Mediterranean Escapes was The White Album.

  I was able to put many more Mediterranean dishes on my menus in Padstow than had been the case with dishes derived from French Odyssey. And my food memories were exotic: baklava made with fresh green pistachio nuts, grouper cooked with charcoal. Fabulous, warm, freshly-made hummus, served in a scruffy cafe in Tarsus, St Paul’s birthplace, topped with sizzling hot oil and chilli. In Morocco, at the blue city of Chefchaouen in the Rif mountains, I was given a cookery lesson in how to make a perfect lamb tagine with apricots and prunes.

  The next series, Far Eastern Odyssey, continued the flush of new and exciting recipes for my restaurants. I decided that the combination of hot, salty, sweet and sour was the glorious assault on the senses which we all really craved. The heat from chilli is perhaps an essential part of what makes food satisfying. Maybe not as much chilli as you get in south-east Asia, though. The first two or three days in the orient were habitually accompanied by a definite ache in the stomach caused by the amount of chilli I was taking on board but, once I had become used to it, I found that the combination of plenty of rice, a small amount of protein, plenty of vegetables and a lot of spice was healthy. You feel that your body is responding with joy to what you are giving it. I’m no dietitian but I think that reverence for food is a simple way to ensure that you will live a long time in good health.

  I was conscious that I was finding dishes that I could easily put on the Padstow menu. Charming little Thai, Cambodian or Vietnamese salads with maybe some prawns, rice noodles, coriander, mint, chilli, lime, palm sugar and fish sauce. Or slices of raw beef with green mango or papaya shredded and tossed with a spicy dressing plus some texture from roasted rice or cashew nuts or crisped onions.

  We went to a fishing village on the banks of Tonle Sap Lake near Siam Riep in Cambodia, and found ourselves in a haze of wood smoke: everywhere the fishermen’s wives and children had spread hundreds of thousands of little fish from the lake on trestles and were salting, drying and smoking them in the sun. It was the dry season, so the water levels happened to be low but all the houses were on stilts three to four metres high. We climbed up the rickety stairs to the living room of the aunt of our guide and watched as she prepared a salad, comfortably cross-legged on the floor; the floorboards were set with gaps and the water with which she scrupulously washed her preparation dishes poured through them to the ground far below. Even at the time I was thinking that I could easily adapt her dish: crispy smoked fish shredded in a fiery salad which was fragrant and fresh-tasting too. I managed to get near to the original taste by drying out hot smoked mackerel.

  In Bali we visited a Swiss chef called Heinz Von Holzen who was running a cookery school and restaurant called Bumbu Bali at Nusa Dua. We had lunch at his restaurant and then filmed him making a seafood stew using just local seafood and the local spice mix called bumbu Bali which is basically just a pounding of fresh vegetables, herbs and rhizomes, i.e. galangal, turmeric, ginger with chillies, garlic, shallots, lemon grass with some local candlenuts, shrimp paste, fresh nutmeg, vegetable oil and lime juice. The resulting paste he simply fried then added coconut milk and poached some fish (prawns and squid) in the fragrant stock. He said that his Indonesian food is totally authentic but added that, unfortunately, it is rare to find it made as faithfully as he does. He also pointed out that he added some Swiss precision to the process and that what he achieved with this dish was an exact cooking of the seafood so that it was perfectly tender and juicy.

  When filming in Bangkok, I met up with my friend David Thompson. In the mid-Nineties he’d had a restaurant in Sydney, called Darley St Thai. I had been astonished by the subtlety of the Thai food he was cooking, accustomed as I was then only to green chicken curry and hot and sour prawn soup, tom yung gung. David Thompson used a variety of textures. Crunch from chopped nuts and roasted rice; crispness from green mango shreds, shallots, deep-fried fish skin; tantalising smoky flavours from palm sugar and tea-infused fish. There were little parcels of spiced fish or meat wrapped in leaves, satisfying spicy jungle curries. Now I met him again at the Or Tor Kor Market where he cooked a yellow curry with prawns and lotus shoots. Like Heinz, he seemed to have discovered a wealth of authentic recipes almost forgotten by most Thais. During our walk through the market he bought a couple of fatty preserved pork sausages, deep red and spicy, and a handful of bird’s-eye chillies, and explained that if you eat one with the other the fat of the sausage coats your mouth and stops the chilli burning. Pointless, you might think – but the subtlety of the ensuing heat is a pleasure in its own right.

  So enthusiastic was I about meeting David Thompson again that I was moved to quote G. K. Chesterton. We had been talking about the scents in the markets and how we ought to educate our sense of smell. I was inspired by the fragrances of red, yellow and green curries, Thai holy basil, different varieties of salted fish, shrimp paste, fish sauce.

  They haven’t got no noses,

  The fallen sons of Eve;

  Even the smell of roses

  Is not what they supposes;

  David looked at me through the camera lens and said, ‘What is he on?’

  I often wonder what I’m on. I guess a bit of a roll. Since Far Eastern Odyssey, David Pritchard and I have made a series in Spain which gave me the confidence to create recipes which, though based on Spanish methods, have been changed to reflect my own taste in food. There’s a recipe from Navarra, for example, where I’ve taken a cordero al chillindrón, slow-braised lamb with red peppers – a dish loved by Ernest Hemingway – and much increased the amount of pimento picante in it because I can’t get enough smoked paprika, so much the flavour of Spain to me. My recipe is almost the Spanish equivalent of a curry.

  About ten years ago, David chose to film a short sequence in Cornwall and, as luck would have it, selected the fatal cliff near Polventon. It was early summer. There was the pink thrift beneath my feet and the blue sea below. I was to read a poem by Douglas Dunn about a dish I was going to cook.

  Consider please this dish of ratatouille.

  Neither will it invade Afghanistan

  Or boycott the Olympic Games in a huff.

  David noted my lack of élan, and later he asked me why I’d seemed curiously out of sorts. I explained. Why on earth hadn’t I told him, he asked. I said I hadn’t wan
ted to influence his choice of site. ‘Prepare this stew of love, and ask for more,’ ran the poem. How could I shatter that idea on a beautiful morning? If I could sit there and not show it maybe it would help me.

  These days, I don’t only do cookery TV, I indulge other interests such as music and literature, often linked to food. I’ve mentioned John Betjeman and Daphne du Maurier. I did another programme on the often luxurious cookery of nineteenth-century Italy and the operas of Rossini, Puccini and Verdi. I tried to suggest that these composers who all loved their food were, if not directly influenced in their opera writing, at least filled with a wish to embrace life in their work with the same passionate enthusiasm.

  It was David Pritchard, of course, who linked my love of the blues of the southern American states with food. We went to Mississippi to talk to people about blues and southern fried catfish. He arranged for me to interview BB King. We travelled to Indianola, Mississippi, where the great man had grown up, and waited outside in 100-degree heat for him to show up on a tour bus. He was due to play at a blues festival named after him. Eventually, the bus drew up – but he didn’t get out. We waited some more in the heat while he took an afternoon nap in his special bedroom at the back of the bus. Finally, he was helped down the bus steps and into a wheelchair.

  After all that anticipation, I just blurted out, ‘Mr King, are you looking forward to some good food?’

  He answered with dignity, ‘I look forward to coming home every year. If I had the time, I’d stay here for five or six weeks.’

  ‘But you love the Delta food, don’t you?’

  He patted his stomach. ‘You don’t have to ask that.’

  He mentioned how many friends he had in London, and then he was wheeled off.

  David had told me to ask whether the food in his childhood in Mississippi had been influential in shaping the blues music for which he was famous. What a terrible question, I was thinking at the time. In the programme, we had set out to draw some correlation between the local food and the blues. A bit like asking The Stones if fish and chips had been an influence on their early music. I only mention that because I happened to be in the fish and chip shop in Chipping Norton when I first heard The Rolling Stones. ‘Come On’ was on the jukebox. I’m certain fish and chips didn’t influence them but the memory lingers on for me.

  I’ve just finished making a new series in India. India presents a dilemma. I suspect that I am not alone in feeling pity and horror – fear even – at the sheer pressure of people, the slums, the poverty, the beggars, the smells, the cruelty to animals, the dust. How can you be enthusiastic about anything in a continent of such hardship? How can you even think of food when you can see all around such hunger? Even after three months of filming, I can’t begin to answer these questions. I can only say that India casts its spell of magic. It’s not that your heart becomes hardened; it’s that you realise that you can only change some things, small things – you can’t change the vast picture – and that you should meanwhile open up to all the things that are wonderful about India. Enjoy the humour, the colours, the sensuality, the history, the beauty, the variety, the laughter. And above all, enjoy the food – the unbelievable food – of India. Half the programmes have been shown and the feedback is very positive. People say I seem to have been enjoying myself. Indeed I was.

  PART FIVE

  Back to Australia

  I was 50 when I first met Sarah Burns. It was August 1997 and I had been contacted by Carolyn Lockhart, the then editor of Australian Gourmet Traveller, who asked me if I would be interested in coming to Australia to be the foreign judge of an annual competition they were running with the aim of finding the best restaurant in Australia. Carolyn came to Padstow with her husband Bob, and I got on very well with them, as indeed I do with most Australians. Today, importing someone from outside Australia to do the judging would be strange, but I still think it was a good idea as it removed any suggestions of favouritism. It didn’t take me long to make up my mind. Business-class flights and three weeks eating food which I’d become very enthusiastic about and drinking wines which I really enjoyed … what’s not to like? Sarah Burns was the publicity manager of Gourmet Traveller. I spoke to her on the phone about arrangements. She was breezy and had an abrupt sense of humour which I thought I understood.

  On Malaysia Airlines they gave me satays, skewers of beef and chicken, with masses of sweet lumpy peanut sauce with a tantalising taint of shrimp paste. I poked my cheeks with the pointed skewers as I gnawed off the spicy chunks of meat, and I ended up scooping up the delicious sauce with the skewers like chopsticks and dropping it down my shirt. Later I had nasi lemak for breakfast – coconut rice with fried anchovies, peanuts and sliced boiled eggs and a curry sauce – still, in my opinion, the best of airline food available anywhere. The smell of the jasmine rice is the scent of south-east Asia to me.

  Landing in Sydney, I was met by Carolyn Lockhart at about 6 a.m. I arrived at the Sheraton in Elizabeth Street overlooking Hyde Park on a brilliantly bright winter’s morning and made my way to the swimming pool on the top floor of the hotel. I swam with young businessmen, like those working out in the gym next door. I was moving on to a better life. I had slept a lot on the plane but the time difference seemed to make my brain work faster and thereby take in more.

  ‘See you in the morning at quarter to eight and don’t be late,’ Sarah Burns said, when I met her.

  I wasn’t sure whether she was serious or not.

  The next morning I wasn’t late. I started talking to Sarah on the flight to Brisbane. Her father, Tony, lived in a small village in Sumatra and had just confronted a tiger in his garden. Her mother had died when she was eight, and Tony had never got over it. She had a brother, Anthony, a sister, Samantha, and two half-sisters, Georgina and Annabelle, and a stepmother called Janine and a step-grandmother called Betty who appeared to be an enormous influence in her life. Her father had left Australia to help his brother Keith in a coal-mining venture in Indonesia but he had never come home.

  The family had originally had huge houses in Sydney and Melbourne. Her stories were funny. One was about her uncle, Kevin, who had been delivered to school as a five-year-old by the chauffeur, decided he didn’t like it, and got a taxi home by himself and hadn’t been required to go back till he was eight. I couldn’t help but be attracted to her tales of the eccentric behaviour of her large family which had perhaps had more than its fair share of ups and downs. I told her about my family, which was not without a certain flamboyance too. It was an extraordinary conversation; it was as if I was talking to someone I already knew.

  She told me I could call her Sas, and confessed that she had had no idea who I was before she’d been asked to publicise the tour; in fact, they’d wanted Simon Hopkinson but he couldn’t do it. Great!

  We got to the Hilton at Brisbane and she took me to lunch at a restaurant called Two Small Rooms. I’ve come to enjoy the way that the Australians have of making a title romantic just by sticking to the bare bones of it. The most charming example of this to me is a winery in the Mornington Peninsula called Ten Minutes by Tractor, referring to the fact that it’s a ten-minute tractor ride from one vineyard to the other. Two Small Rooms was just two small rooms of a single-storey ‘Queenslander’ house. These are single-storey wooden houses with corrugated iron roofs, verandas and wooden floors on stilts to let the air circulate and keep the building cool and allow for water to flow in a downpour – of which there are plenty in Brisbane. I looked at the menu and chose Jack’s mud crab omelette. There again was that use of the prosaic which ends up being anything but. A plump omelette filled with the meat of the white mud crab which comes from the mangrove swamps of Queensland. It was served with stir-fried veg flavoured with lime, chilli, garlic, palm sugar, fish sauce, mint and coriander. It was everything I was coming to love about Australia: a fluffy omelette, great crab, exciting Asian flavours. I put the recipe in Seafood Odyssey. Jack’s memory lives on in his omelette of choice.

 
After lunch Sas went shopping and I went for a swim in the hotel pool outside on the ninth floor, this time in the cooling late afternoon air, office blocks all around, and the bright colours as the shadows grew darker. That evening we went to the first of the restaurants I had to judge. My fellow guests were a local freelance journalist called Jan Power and a Catholic priest from South Brisbane, Peter Dillon. The conversation was lively, the food not so good. Indeed I was rather worried that if this was to be the standard on the trip I was in for an embarrassing time. I had escalope of kangaroo with a cream and Marsala sauce which I didn’t enjoy. The problem with kangaroo is that it’s really lean meat, leaner even than veal, and even with a creamy sauce, it tasted tough and dry. I’ve never got quite used to eating kangaroo because it reminds me of my days back in Deepwell – the railway camp near Alice Springs drinking billy tea in a caravan with a kangaroo hunter. I don’t feel any compunction about eating animals but the disdain with which this man spoke about the ‘vermin’ which were kangaroos and his enthusiasm for dispatching them in large quantities was depressing. He had blood under his fingernails. When he described the stink of disembowelling them, I felt sorry for the kangaroos, remembering a tender D.H. Lawrence poem: