Interviews by Killian Fox 

Heston Blumenthal: The meal that made me a cook

Heston Blumenthal and four other top cooks reveal their culinary epiphanies
  
  

Heston Blumenthal
Heston Blumenthal had ‘never eaten a lobster before and certainly never been to a Michelin-starred restaurant’. Photograph: Phil Fisk/Observer Food Monthly

Heston Blumenthal: leg of lamb, L’Oustau de Baumanière, Provence

Chef owner, the Fat Duck, Bray, Berkshire

Memories are important to Heston Blumenthal. They are the raw material of his wildly imaginative creations at the Fat Duck, and the experience of eating there is designed to stir up powerful feelings of nostalgia, right down to the name of each dish. Current examples include, “Can I have some money for the ice cream van?” and “Then we went rockpooling”.

The pivotal memory for Blumenthal himself, the one that made him want to become a chef, is of a meal in Provence in 1982, at the two-Michelin-starred restaurant L’Oustau de Baumanière. His family usually holidayed in Cornwall, where Blumenthal remembers eating crayfish off Formica tables by the seaside. But that summer his dad, who ran an office equipment company, decided to mark a good year at work by taking the family to France.

Blumenthal was 16 at the time but not yet a food lover. His mother was a good cook and he can remember getting excited about fish and chips at Micky’s in Paddington and drinking jasmine tea at Lee Ho Fook in Chinatown, but he had “never eaten a lobster and certainly never been to a Michelin-starred restaurant”.

His recollection of that dinner in Provence is remarkably clear, as if it happened yesterday. “They park your car for you,” he begins, “and you walk up some steps and there’s a farmhouse at the foot of bauxite cliffs. You know that warmth as the sun is setting, and you can hear the crickets starting and you get the smell of lavender? At the time I can’t remember if I recognised it as lavender or not, but the smell was overwhelming. We sat out on the terrace. It was dark but all lit up – like an enchanted wood. I remember the chink of glasses and I have a very strong memory of the soft crunch of the waiting staff’s feet on the gravel.”

Leg of lamb is the dish that is most imprinted on his memory. “It was wrapped in puff pastry and carved at the table. It came with some dauphinoise and green beans. We had a mullet dish with basil and tomato. Dessert was a crêpe Baumanière, baked with a soufflé filling.”

The extraordinary food was just one element in a dizzying rush of sensory information. “Everything seemed massive – because I was small, but also because certain details are magnified in your memory. The wine list seemed as big as a billboard, the cheese trolley was the size of a chariot.” He sums up the experience in terms that anyone who’s eaten at the Fat Duck or watched one of Blumenthal’s TV shows will recognise: “It was as if I’d fallen down this rabbit hole into a wonderland.”

The impact was immediate. “Back home, I became absolutely obsessed with the great chefs of France and I would hoover up their cookbooks – I remember translating the Troisgros brothers’ Nouvelle Cuisine into English word for word with a French-English dictionary.” He cooked obsessively at home and when he started working odd jobs – photocopier salesman, debt collector – he would save up for six months and then blow all his money on eating out.

When I ask how things might have panned out had he not eaten at L’Oustau de Baumanière, Blumenthal acknowledges that his life could have gone in a completely different direction. But he insists that even with that meal in Provence under his belt, the path towards the Fat Duck was a meandering one. He needed to discover Harold McGee and start questioning everything about cooking; he needed to stumble upon the recipe for parmesan ice-cream which inspired him to toy with preconceptions of food; he needed to take up kick-boxing, which gave him the discipline to see him through years of experimentation.

Even the week-long stage at Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir which dissuaded him from working in other people’s kitchens – “because I didn’t want the creativity beaten out of me” – was a factor.

The size of the rundown pub in Bray that he converted into the Fat Duck in 1995 was important too. “Because the kitchen was so tiny and the kit was second-hand and rubbish, I had to find ways of getting my food to a level of precision.”

Blumenthal’s interest in multi-sensory dining – using scented dry ice to intensify flavours, creating an audio soundtrack to add extra dimensions to a seafood dish – could also be explained in terms of the small size of the first Fat Duck and the scale of the memories he was trying to recreate. “My memory of L’Oustau was growing but I had a pub with one door on the side of the road. I didn’t have a mountain or a water fountain in the background or the crunching gravel or the lavender, I didn’t have the valley of olive trees in Provence. So I brought all that inside.”
thefatduck.co.uk

Clare Smyth: fennel velouté, Gidleigh Park, Devon

Chef and restaurateur

The first British female chef to hold and retain three Michelin stars, Clare Smyth grew up on a farm on the Co Antrim coast. “Food was important but in a more rustic sense,” she says. “We would drink milk fresh from the tank. We ate a lot of potatoes.” Cooking was a chore and chances to eat out were limited. “In Northern Ireland,” she says wryly, “it was more a case of quantity, not quality.”

What her upbringing did instil was a formidable work ethic. At 16, she took a weekend job at a local restaurant. She started out washing dishes but was soon filling in for absent chefs and discovered that she thrived under pressure.

“I was fascinated by cooking,” she says. “Most kids are into pop stars, I was into glamorous chefs.” To her parents’ dismay, she left home for catering college in Portsmouth. Smyth earned some first-class experience – at Bibendum in London, and St Enodoc hotel in Cornwall – but it wasn’t until, aged 18, she interned with Michael Caines at Gidleigh Park in Devon that she “really began to understand food”.

At the time, Caines had one Michelin star to his name and a second on the way. He had lost an arm in a car accident shortly after getting the job and Smyth was amazed at his dedication. “It was inspirational,” she says. “He was also a gentleman. As a young girl in a kitchen, seeing how he conducted himself, I was really blown away by him.”

What opened her mind was a fish dish – monkfish, she thinks – but it wasn’t the fish that made the permanent impression: it was the fennel velouté (a light stock thickened with a roux). “Fennel is such an elegant flavour,” says Smyth, “but I remember being surprised at the other ingredients he used, like dried orange peel and star anise – and I think some Noilly Prat [vermouth] as well. All quite aromatic flavours, but balanced perfectly. I’d never tasted anything like it. I knew right then that I wanted to cook at that level.”

It didn’t take her long. At 22, she moved to Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant on Royal Hospital Road, which had just won its third Michelin star. Stints under Alain Ducasse in Monaco and Thomas Keller at his New York and California restaurants followed, with Smyth working her way up from the bottom in each place. In 2008, she returned to Royal Hospital Road as head chef, aged 28. Now she’s setting up on her own in London.

That velouté didn’t just deepen her understanding of food, it also doubled her determination and sharpened her focus. After Gidleigh Park, “I looked for the most difficult kitchen I could find,” she says, reasoning that “you have to work with the best, put yourself under the most pressure … That’s the only way you can really learn.”

Stephen Harris: lemon tart, Nico at Ninety, Park Lane

Chef owner, the Sportsman, Seasalter, Kent

When Stephen Harris was served the lemon tart that set him on course to becoming a chef, the first thing he did was bang the plate to watch it wobble. “It was a perfect triangle of tart with a crisp, brown crust and an amazing lemon custard that magically kept its shape.” Then he tasted it and all decorum fell away. “I just started laughing like a madman. It was totally inappropriate, but that was the only reaction I could have, it was that good.”

Harris, whose north Kent pub the Sportsman won best restaurant at the National Restaurant Awards in June, was dining at Nico at Ninety on Park Lane. He was a financial adviser at the time but, despite a keen interest in cooking, admits: “I don’t think I really knew what a Michelin-starred restaurant was.”

It had been a good month in the office so Harris and two colleagues decided a celebratory lunch was in order. Then one of the best restaurants in London – chef-patron Nico Ladenis was striving towards his third Michelin star – Nico at Ninety was not the kind of place where you’d hammer on the crockery or express approval with manic bursts of laughter. “It was very formal,” he says. “Posh, posh, posh.”

He immediately knew the meal would be special. “To start I had a ravioli of salmon with a chive velouté that was so intense it rocked my whole body. The main course was a braised knuckle of veal with a mustard sauce and carrots cut into squares.” But it was the dessert that tipped him over the edge. “It had a powerful lemon flavour, sweetened just enough to balance it. It came with a little tulip-shaped biscuit with a scoop of ice-cream in it and a pool of raspberry sauce. It was mind-blowing.”

If the lemon tart made Harris want to become a chef, the overall experience at Nico at Ninety triggered an idea that he would eventually realise at the Sportsman. “I remember saying afterwards, ‘Isn’t it a shame only rich people eat like this. Why can’t you get food this good without all the folderol?’ Then I thought, hang on, if you take away the fancy location, the army of waiters, the expensive napery and crockery, and it’s just a plate, a knife and a fork, I could serve food as good as this in a place where you wouldn’t have to go through the whole drama. A lemon tart in itself isn’t an expensive thing. It’s labour-intensive and technically difficult, but if you crack the technique, that doesn’t cost anything. That’s just being smart, working out how it’s done.”

He didn’t waste any time. The following evening, he had a dinner party for which he “copied” the Nico at Ninety meal. It was successful enough for him to begin studying other great chefs – Marco Pierre White, Pierre Koffmann, the Roux brothers. “I’d buy their books, look at the recipes, then go to their restaurants and order dishes that were in the books. Then I’d go home and copy them without referring to the recipes. I would cook these dishes knowing what they were supposed to taste like: that was the big difference.”

In 1995, at the age of 33, he left his well-paid job in the city and became a commis chef on £8,000 a year. “I wasn’t doing it to learn how to cook,” he says, “I wanted to learn how restaurants ran.” In November 1999 he took over a rundown pub outside Whitstable and set about turning it into the best restaurant in the country.

If he were to relive that meal, would it have the same impact? “I think it would,” he says. “I’d pay anything to go back and have that meal again.”
thesportsmanseasalter.co.uk

Asma Khan: dum biryani, Kolkata

Cook, Darjeeling Express supper club

Asma Khan can trace her desire to cook back to her sister’s wedding and the moment the main course failed to arrive on time. Rather than serve the groom’s family first, as is the custom, the cooks at her grandfather’s house in Kolkata made the mistake of sending out the dish to their employers. Horrified at the offence this might cause, Asma’s mother sent her daughter into the kitchen to sort out the problem.

Khan was 18 and had never so much as boiled an egg. “I come from a royal family – Rajput on my father’s side, Bengali on my mother’s – where none of the women knew how to cook,” she says.

The troublesome dish was a Kolkata dum biryani: layers of rice, mutton, potatoes, saffron and spices covered with a dough seal and heated over a wood fire for 12 hours. When Khan – “in all my finery, dressed head to toe in jewellery” – rushed into the kitchen to help, the cooks were breaking the seal. “I had never smelled it this close before,” she says. “By the time it comes to the table, it has already lost a lot of the fragrance.” She describes the moment in almost spiritual terms. “The aroma hit my soul. I was mesmerised. The chef put a grain of rice in my hand. I tasted it and thought, I’m going to cook like this one day.”

It took a long time to realise that ambition. Khan married a few years later and in 1991 moved to Cambridge with her husband, an economics professor. “He told my family he knew how to cook,” she says, laughing. “He could only cook one chicken curry and, man, I never want to eat that again. After two miserable years I started to learn.” The first recipe she picked up was the dum biryani from Haji, the chef who made it at the wedding.

What she really wanted to do was cook professionally, but instead she completed a law degree in London, followed by a PhD, though she had no intention of practising. “I just wanted to cook. My husband was horrified, but nothing made me happier. So on the day I did my viva [an oral exam], I started my food business.” She was 43 and she felt liberated. “Indian women spend their lives doing things to please other people. I was born with those chains, now I’m not in chains.”

The first public dinner Khan hosted, at the German Institute in South Kensington in 2012, sold twice as many tickets as she hoped, inspiring her to start a supper club at her home. Word spread about her cooking, which she describes as “old-fashioned food that you don’t get unless you know an Indian family”, and she ran a successful nine-month residency at The Sun & 13 Cantons pub in Soho, awarded four stars by Evening Standard restaurant critic Fay Maschler. Now she’s gathering her most popular recipes into a book while continuing to cook at venues around London. (A restaurant isn’t on the cards right now because she has two sons, 11 and 16, to look after.)

Khan says she has no regrets that her cooking ambitions took so long to realise: “When it is my time, that’s when it happens.” About the biryani, which she still makes on special occasions, she is similarly philosophical. “Every time I make it, I feel nervous,” she says. “There is something emotional about it, because once the rice is sealed, your fate is sealed. With other dishes, you can tweak them, taste them. Here you can do nothing. You only know what’s happened to it when you open it.”
darjeeling-express.com/supper-clubs

Uyen Luu: Mum’s caramelised sardines

Cook and author

One of the downsides of having a parent who’s a perfectionist in the kitchen is that it can be a struggle to start cooking for yourself as an adult. This is what happened to the food writer Uyen Luu, who runs a popular Vietnamese supper club in Hackney. Her mother wouldn’t allow her to help in the kitchen at home, and when she went abroad aged 20 and started pining for home-cooked food, she hadn’t the faintest idea how to make it.

Luu had left her film and video course at Central St Martin’s in the middle of term, travelling to New York with three friends to seek work experience on movie sets. They were on a tight budget and, she says, “there was only so many bagels with cream cheese I could eat. I missed Mum’s cooking so much – until then I’d taken it for granted.” Unable to produce caramelised sardines or tomato soup with sea bass in their tiny East Village apartment, Luu phoned home.

That longing for familiar food was something Luu’s mother, Nga Le, felt when she arrived in London in 1982 with two young children. A refugee from Saigon, where her family were suffering under the communist regime, Nga found herself in a place – Highbury – which offered little to remind her of Vietnam. Nga had never learned how to cook until, craving the flavours she’d left behind, she met other members of London’s Vietnamese community and started absorbing their knowledge.

Fifteen years later, Luu was amazed to discover that her mother’s cooking wasn’t as complicated as she’d imagined. “I called her for the caramelised sardines recipe. She told me to get a pot, fry the onions or shallots with a bit of sugar, brown off the fish, and then add coconut water and let it reduce. I was like, ‘Really? Is that all?’ It was so easy.”

Vietnamese cooking: Uyen Luu’s home restaurant

And how did it turn out?

“Pretty good,” she says. “But it didn’t have my mum’s touch.”

Inspired, Luu began cooking in earnest. “There were great supermarkets nearby that opened late, and after a night of partying I’d go out and buy things to cook at 2am – it was so exciting.” Her interest continued to develop back in London but it didn’t become professional until she was 32. “When I moved into my current house in Hackney, I had lots of dinner parties. Everyone was so delighted and it became like an addiction for me.”

Luu has been running her supper club for seven years, cooking for upwards of 30 people at a time. She hosts cookery classes and has written a cookbook. When did she stop calling her mother for cooking advice? She laughs. “I still call her,” she says. “She still has things to teach me.”
uyenluu.com

 

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