المدونات
في كانون الثاني 11, 2025
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But it's extraordinary what you get used to. In 1969, when I opened my restaurant in an unfashionable part of Notting Hill, I'd be up at 4am to buy ingredients at various markets, grab some sleep in the afternoons and then work until after midnight.
So I cleared the office and a copper arrived to take away the envelope. After a couple of hours, the police told me to collect it. The contents? A dental brace with two teeth, embedded in a lump of marmalade toffee. And a large orthodontist's bill.
Thankfully, the tap water was extremely hot, so I used it to poach two 10lb salmons. Then I searched the warren of kitchens and stores and found an electric tea urn, which I commandeered for boiling the potatoes. The beef had to go into the lukewarm Aga.
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My first real job was cooking three days a week for the law firm McKenna and Partners in Whitehall. Intent on developing my skills, I set about cooking my way through the 1,200-plus pages of the Constance Spry cookery book. The partners were extraordinarily good about it. When I got to the chicken chapter, they ate chicken, in different guises, for weeks on end.
No one guessed anything was wrong. Of course, I was tempted to rat on the Verulams' chef, but then I thought: ‘Hell, how would I feel if my boss didn't consider my cooking good enough for an important dinner?'
The first was for making lunch and tea for passengers on a train called the Orient Express. For the main course, we decided on a fish terrine, for which I needed small circular moulds. However, there were none to be found.
My only option was to hare off to my new school and try to make 70 pints of soup. But first, I went to a deli and bought them out of cream cheese plus tins of mussel, cream of artichoke, Vichyssoise and cream of onion soup. Then the teachers fanned out to the shops with instructions to buy more.
Once, while experimenting with making cream cheese and yogurt, I left a bowl of fermenting milk behind a radiator. The next time I arrived for work, the place was full of men in white coats and surgical masks looking for the source of the smell.
At last, I was blindingly sure of what I wanted to do: I was going to become a cook. Easier said than done: at 20, one of the few things I'd ever made was a Christmas cake with concrete icing that had shattered Dad's bone-handled carving knife when he tried to use it as a chisel.
We didn't cook a thing — just strained out the lumps and whisked it all together. It worked: a few days later, I received a letter from the Tate organiser, singling out the soup as ‘unctuous and delicious'.
So while the wedding party was at church, I raided the cupboards of the bride's mother and whipped out all her sheets. Later, she took me to one side. ‘How clever of you to have our monogram on the tablecloths,' she said. By the late Sixties, I was working all hours, not least because I was making 12 pork terrines a week for Balls Brothers pubs in the City.
As well as running the restaurant, I began writing a cookery column for the Daily Mail. All went well until I wrote a recipe for a ginger peach brulée that called for an ounce of ginger. Tragically, I'd failed to specify that it was stem ginger — and, of course, an ounce of ground ginger is enough to blow your head off.
Before breakfast, we went to buy the bread: baguettes in one bakery, croissants in another and gateau in a third. ‘But why do we go to all those shops? They all sell everything,' I said. She rolled her eyes at my stupidity.
That evening, I watched Madame make the children's supper: everyone from the Toddler Lunch Ideas upwards got exactly the same thing — tiny rare steaks, salad with French dressing, boiled potatoes, followed by a sliver of apple pie. It was all fresh and made from scratch by a woman who knew what she was doing.
I was saved by the head butler, Declan. First, he failed to announce dinner, so drinks over-ran by half an hour. Then, when the guests were seated, he had his waiters spin out every action to funeral tempo.
The salmon was the best I've ever produced. But the fillet was still raw, so I bunged it on the iron top of the Aga, without a frying pan. I managed to heat the sauce by suspending a saucepan in the tea urn, which was also warming the peas.
My most stressful near-disaster was when we got the contract for a Tate Gallery dinner for grandees, sponsors and potential donors. On the night, I arrived and my nose detected an unmistakable stink. The chef I'd employed had somehow allowed the mussel velouté (soup) to ferment.
Whether I really deserve to be sitting in judgment on great chefs is debatable. I was never the chef at Leith's restaurant; I've never been a fanatical foodie; and I've always been perfectly happy to nick ideas from other chefs.
I must have had plenty of triumphs or my business would never have grown, but it's still the horrors I remember. One of the worst was when I went to cook at Lord Verulam's mighty house near St Albans, Herts.