My Stir-fried Life

by Ken Hom

  LEE’S ready meal attack at the Dorchester did nothing to destroy our relationship, even if it ruined a carpet. I asked him to join me at Obsession, an annual food extravaganza that takes place at Northcote (formerly Northcote Manor). It is a country house hotel beside the Ribble Valley in Lancashire, where Nigel Howarth is chef-patron and Lisa Goodwin-Allen is executive chef.

  The event lasts for a week, and on each night a well-known chef cooks for the guests. I have done this gig twice, both times accompanied by Lee, and it’s great fun: we arrive at the hotel a couple of days before the dinner, giving us plenty of time for prep and, yes, luxury.

  The 10th anniversary of Obsession was particularly memorable. On the night of our dinner, the restaurant was full: there were about a hundred guests seated in four rooms, and in each room there were television monitors screening the action from the kitchen, enabling the diners to see how we were getting on. This sort of visual entertainment is common in restaurants nowadays, but at the time it was novel and exciting. We were getting on very well. The kitchen was full of activity and energy and, from the comfort of their seats at the tables, the guests could see the dishes coming together in the kitchen.

  Lee had done such a brilliant job I thought I would get him a glass of wine. It was a large glass of Rioja. Lee was at the hot plate and his back was to me when I walked up and said, ‘Here, Lee, thank you. You know, we’re doing well here. There you go…’ On hearing my voice, he spun around and happened to be holding a large tray of food. The tray, in turn, knocked the massive glass of Rioja, which flew from the vessel onto my face and my chef’s jacket. No ordinary chef’s jacket. It was white, with the familiar words ‘Ken Hom’ skilfully hand-embroidered upon the left breast.

  The whole kitchen stopped, froze. Lee was devastated. ‘I am so, so sorry.’ I burst out laughing. As did the guests in the restaurant, probably, as they watched it on TV. There were attempts to sponge down my chef’s jacket, but they weren’t successful. Lee describes it as ‘one of the worst moments of my life’ but it was my fault; I walked up behind him.

  I asked Lee to work with me on a few other projects, including a charity event in 2010 for Cherie Blair. The function was held at Tony and Cherie’s home in Buckinghamshire, and Cherie invited us to spend the weekend there: arrive on the Friday; Lee and I would cook for the dinner on Saturday night; there would be lunch and a chill-out on the Sunday. The event was set in the diaries for April.

  Of course, no one had predicted the full effect of that volcanic eruption in Iceland. The eruption was minor, but it sent volcanic ash into the sky and southwards. There were concerns about aircraft safety, and suddenly flights were cancelled throughout western and northern Europe, affecting travel all around the world for weeks to come. There was pandemonium as everyone tried to find other means of getting from A to B. In my case, the B stood for the Blairs.

  Lee did not have any problems. He arrived at the Blairs’ house, underwent the security checks and made his way to the kitchen, where he met Cherie Blair and thought, How surreal is this? He had no idea how surreal things would become. I was due to arrive on the same day as Lee, but the airborne ash scuppered that, and my flight was cancelled. All flights were cancelled. Meanwhile, Tony was stuck in somewhere or other, unable to beat the ash and make it to the event.

  As Lee started to set up, he also began to panic. He was terrified that he would have to cook the dinner on his own, and was simultaneously anxious that only a few people would make it to the event. Cherie was hoping for large donations to her charity, but what if there were no guests and the food went to waste? I arrived a couple of hours before the dinner was meant to be served, to find that Lee was perfectly organised. The dinner was a fantastic success.

  Lee and I had been given rooms in a separate cottage on the grounds. The following morning, he was up at seven-ish and started to pack up his car. He remembered that his kitchen equipment – a deep-fat fryer and knives – was in the kitchen of the main house, where we had cooked the meal. So he thought he would dash up to the kitchen to retrieve the equipment. He jogged through the main garden, up some stone steps, and through patio doors and into the kitchen.

  He had taken only a few steps into the room when two armed guards in black sprang from nowhere. They were holding automatic weapons, pointed at Lee. One of them shouted, ‘POLICE!’ Lee put his hands into the air, and his body froze. I mean, he had come to help me out and was only after a deep-fat fryer. Being held at gunpoint wasn’t part of the deal.

  ‘GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR!’

  Lee knelt down on the floor. He figured this was it; his time had come.

  In transpired that one security shift had clocked off and another had clocked on, and the first team had not told the second team that there was a chef in the guest quarters.

  One of the guards mumbled into his mouthpiece and, thankfully, Lee was given the all-clear and helped to his feet. With some dexterity, he gathered his deep-fat fryer and knives, and then sprinted at cheetah-speed back to his car. Lee and I had breakfast with Cherie and had a laugh about it, although Lee told me, ‘I was shaking in my boots. I’ve never been so scared.’

  LEE also helped me out when I was in China a few years ago. I was travelling with Ching-He Huang, and we were making a fascinating TV series for the BBC. Meanwhile, I was also collecting, compiling and writing recipes for the book that would tie in with the series, Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure.

  As I was in China, I was without a kitchen and needed someone to taste test the recipes. Lee would be the perfect person. It was straight-forward enough. I would send him the recipes, he would cook them. He would taste the finished product and give me his critical feedback, thus helping me towards the necessary changes. I also appreciated his view – was something too spicy, for instance? I like very spicy, but heat on the palate is not right for everyone, of course.

  Each week I sent him two or three recipes, over a five- or six-week period. I had not accounted for the effect on his domestic life. One day Lee’s wife came home and looked into the garden. ‘How dare you!’ she shouted. Lee had removed the washing from the washing line and shoved it into a laundry basket. On the line, where there had once been sheets, there now hung three Peking ducks, basking in the sunshine.

  Another day, when it was snowing, Lee sparked up the barbecue to smoke ducks in green tea. The ducks were phenomenal, but his barbecue melted a nearby snowman built by his daughter. He was rapidly losing popularity at home.

  29

  Life and Living

  LUNCH TODAY WAS Japanese curry. In my small but much-loved kitchen in Paris, I prepared this comforting, one-pot dish in only a minute or two. In a large pan, I browned a few chicken thighs. They came out of the pan and in went the basics of this curry: that is, finely chopped onions, carrots and potatoes (which I had quartered).

  I poured in chicken stock, followed by Japanese curry, which is sold in chunky, soft ‘blocks’, a bit like a large stock cube – break off as much as you want and chuck it into the mix. In keeping with the Japanese palate, it is not too spicy. Anyway, I returned the chicken to the pan and let the whole lot simmer in a slow oven for about an hour, before serving it with a mountain of rice and a bottle of chilli-infused olive oil, in case any of my guests wanted to up the heat.

  I buy the cubes not in Japan but in Thailand. Just like Ella Fitzgerald, I love Paris in the springtime, but every year, around about March, I tend to migrate south to Thailand, where I have a home and enjoy the sunshine.

  Aside from stocking up on Japanese curry cubes, I usually have a thorough medical check-up. I stuck to this tradition in March 2010, when I visited my doctor in Thailand shortly after receiving my OBE at the British Embassy.

  I must digress for a moment, as the OBE deserves a mention.

  It all began at Charles de Gaulle airport, as I returned from a trip and switched on my mobile after the plane landed. There was a message from the British Embassy in Paris, asking me to phone. The following conver
sation took place.

  ‘Hello. This is Ken Hom returning your call.’

  ‘Oh, hello, Mr Hom. We were just checking to see if you are alive.’

  At this point, I was getting flashbacks to the Ken Lo moment; the previous time I had been considered dead.

  I said, ‘I am very much alive.’

  ‘Jolly good,’ said the Englishman on the other end of the line. ‘Well, in that case, we were just checking to see if you could receive an OBE.’

  I almost dropped the phone. You know how special Britain is to me, and I was so moved to be told I would receive the award in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. The ceremony would take place in June 2009, but I could not be there as I had planned to visit my mother. She was old and frail and I wanted to see her.

  I felt that I had achieved something for my mother. It gave her face and made her feel proud, as if she had done the job well and it had all worked out in the end.

  For most of my life she had been unable to understand why I did what I did for a living. Over the years she had said, ‘Can’t you do something else besides this cooking job? Become a dentist or a real estate agent?’ Then one day she saw a photograph of me. I was standing beside the Chinese President inside No. 10 and the photograph appeared in the Chinese newspapers. That’s when she phoned and said, ‘Maybe you should keep cooking.’

  In a peach-sweet twist – and I sense another quick digression – the President, Jiang Zemin, was not as thrilled as my mother. The photograph was taken in October 1999, after I had cooked for him and Tony Blair at the Prime Minister’s Downing Street residence. They dined on crab wontons in aromatic broth, stir-fried persillade king prawns, fritto misto of Asian vegetables, and herbal vegetarian fried rice. Dessert was ginger crème brûlée.

  Zemin’s visit marked the first to Britain by a Chinese head of state. While his Excellency had been briefed about me, he was not expecting to be at my side for the photo-call. In the brilliant blaze of flashbulbs, I took a look in the President’s eyes, and could tell he was puzzled and bewildered. He was very gracious and smiled, but I could sense he was saying to himself, ‘Why the hell am I being photographed with the cook? We don’t do this in China. I mean, he is the cook. He’s just the guy who makes a meal for us.’

  Anyway, as I had a home in Paris, it was agreed that the OBE ceremony would take place in November at the British Embassy in Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which doubles as the ambassador’s spectacular residence. One of my guests was Alain Ducasse, one of the world’s finest chefs and a friend for many years, as well as a man with a delicious sense of humour. When I thanked him for coming, he said, ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Ken. I’d heard about the embassy and just wanted to see it.’

  Laughter is so important.

  GOING back to the tests at my doctor’s in Thailand. One of them is for PSA, prostate-specific antigen. It’s a protein produced by the prostate gland, and the level of PSA in the blood is often elevated if there is cancer. My test for PSA showed an anomaly, but when I saw a specialist he explained that this irregularity could be due to a number of reasons, all of them benign and nothing to worry about. ‘Come back in two weeks for another test,’ he said, and I kept to my diary and went to Hong Kong.

  A fortnight later I was back in Bangkok, having a second PSA test. This time the results showed that the PSA had not dropped but was much higher than it had been in the first test. The result was positive – or negative, depending on how you look at it. The doctor recommended a prostate biopsy to determine if cancer was present. Life is funny, isn’t it? One moment you can be talking about the moreish succulence of something like Japanese curry; the next you are contemplating your very fate.

  I told Ron Batori. He said that the chairman of his company had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and he had undergone an experimental form of treatment that worked for him. The treatment was called ‘proton beam therapy’.

  It is a type of radiotherapy. While conventional radiotherapy uses high-energy beams of radiation to destroy cancerous cells, surrounding tissue can also be damaged. This can lead to side effects such as nausea, and can sometimes disrupt how some organs function. Proton beam therapy uses beams of protons (sub-atomic particles) to achieve the same effect of killing cells. A ‘particle accelerator’ speeds up the protons which are beamed into cancerous cells, zapping them dead. Unlike conventional radiotherapy, in proton beam therapy the beam of protons stops once it ‘hits’ the cancerous cells. This means that proton beam therapy results in much less damage to surrounding tissue.

  In 2014, this type of treatment was a point of major discussion in Britain. There was a manhunt when the parents of a five-year-old boy, Ashya King, took him out of Southampton General Hospital without the doctors’ consent, and to Prague, where their child could undergo proton beam therapy. Ashya had a brain tumour, but he made a full recovery.

  Ron’s chairman steered me in the right direction for medical care. This began with Dr Preecha in Thailand. He is renowned around the world for changing men into women and women into men. That’s his claim to fame, and he just happened to know the right doctor in Kobe, in the south of Japan.

  He said, ‘I will send you to Doctor Okuno.’ Indeed, Dr Preecha did not just send me to Dr Okuno; he accompanied me to Dr Okuno, and personally introduced us. Dr Okuno did an MRI scan, then took me to the medical centre for further tests and to check that I qualified for the treatment: it does not work for everyone.

  As with others who are in a similar situation, I read up about the treatment on the internet. There were contradictory reports, but I decided to go ahead with it, and am pleased that I did so. In a younger man, the cancer cells are more active, and because of my age – I had recently turned sixty – I could have waited and monitored the cancer to see how it developed. Waiting clashed with my psyche. I am the kind of person who thinks, Let’s not wait.

  I was told to return for treatment for a couple of months from the end of June, into August. Over this period, I was to undergo thirty-seven individual treatments, each one involving a zap of the protein beam. Oddly, I was not suffering any symptoms of cancer other than that common symptom, which is … shock. What’s more, I would not need chemotherapy, and therefore the potential side effects were minimal. However, the treatment was experimental. This meant that medical insurance would not cover the treatment. I reckoned, I don’t drive a car. Other men spend their money on cars. I would rather spend mine on this treatment.

  AND so I went to live in Japan. I had been many times to Japan, but never lived there, which was what the treatment required. Living somewhere is very different to visiting. Being a resident enables you to become immersed in the culture and, of course, to eat Japanese food for every meal of the day over a couple of months. I made the most of it.

  I had grown up in a Chinese household, as you know, in which my mother frequently reiterated the horrors that our fellow countrymen had suffered at the hands of the Japanese. Yet here I was with my life being saved by the Japanese. They didn’t owe me. I owed them.

  I visited Kyoto and Osaka, enjoying travel – everything works in Japan, and the country is truly amazing; I realised then how much I loved it. I went to Hiroshima and asked myself: is there food that is unique to the city? Here is the answer … They do a noodle dish, in which noodles and vegetables are cooked on a smoking-hot plancha – an egg is broken over them, sizzles and foams, and the whole lot is then flipped as it continues to cook rapidly on the grill.

  I don’t speak Japanese but was learning all the while and, if I could not find a restaurant, I asked for directions and a kind soul would show me to the door. In Tokyo, I met Gwen Robertson, the Financial Times editor in Japan, who took me to a vegetarian restaurant at the Golden Temple in Kyoto. I was facing death, but I was discovering something new, and not only novel food experiences. Indeed, the food of Japan enriched and deepened my understanding of the country, and I found it to be a life-enhancing episode. I almost regretted leaving Japan, but something happened
which ensured my eventual departure.

  MY mother fell ill during this time. In July, when I was in the middle of my treatment, her health deteriorated following an operation to remove a tumour. She was in Chicago; I was in Japan, and tried to find a way of catching a flight to the States to see my mother, and, if possible, return in time for the next course of treatment. I was constantly on the phone to my mother’s doctor, who reassured me, ‘Don’t worry, she’s not in pain.’ Then came the inevitable doctor’s questions, such as, ‘Would you give permission not to resuscitate her?’

  I said, ‘No matter what, I don’t want her to suffer. Give her painkillers, but don’t make her suffer.’

  On 15 July, my mother passed away as she slept. I have always felt that she sacrificed so much for me, and I believe that this was the ultimate sacrifice: that she was going so that I could stay. I say that although she died unaware that I, too, had cancer. I did not see the need to tell her. Perhaps instinctively she knew that I was in trouble.

  Following her death, I had to carry on with life and the necessity to survive, to live. What else can you do? I had learnt this from my mother. She did not moan or whinge about anything. Instead, she just got on with life. She was never a person who spoke a lot. For instance, I didn’t know much about her family until I took her back to China when I was researching my book The Taste of China. I wanted to take her back to her roots, and that is when I discovered that she was from a very wealthy family, and that she had grown up with her own maid. In fact, we met the maid – she had gone into the property business and become a multi-millionaire.