Gourmet gem stands test of time
Graham Kerr celebrates with reissue of cookbook that led to his ‘galloping’ career
NEW YORK Graham Kerr is having a group of guests over to his home so he’s decided to whip up a batch of his Farmhouse Vegetable Soup.
It calls for a blended medley of carrots, onions, garlic, parsnips, sweet potato and onion. The recipe is from his groundbreaking The Graham Kerr Cookbook and it’s tried-and-true — he’s been making it for more than 50 years, for royalty and commoner alike.
The dish is also a way to chart the remarkable life of Kerr, who began as an energetic TV pioneer with a love of clarified butter on The Galloping Gourmet, swung dramatically toward health food following tragedy and now takes a middle path embracing nourishment and delight.
“It’s a thick soup which I used to make with cream,” he says. “I now take out some of the vegetables, whiz them up in a blender with some evaporated skim milk, and pour that back in the place of cream. I find it just as unctuous.”
That his soup has endured from late-’60s ham and hedonism to today’s Pilates and probiotics is a testament to the strong architecture of the recipe. That strength has prompted publisher Rizzoli to republish Kerr’s 52-year-old cookbook this spring.
“This book is close to my heart because it’s a method of cooking which is good. You only need to change the ingredients and the weight of some of them and it works just as well today as it did 52 years ago,” Kerr said.
The book came out in 1966, several years before Kerr first leaped over a chair on The Galloping Gourmet. Kerr’s clear and concise methods for everything from carving chicken to poaching fish are timeless.
Cookbook authors Matt and Ted Lee are behind the push to reissue forgotten culinary gems and they were stunned to find so much still relevant in The Graham Kerr Cookbook.
“He’s really expressing a very enlightened way about food, the likes of which American culture wouldn’t see expressed in popular culture for 40 years,” Matt Lee said, citing Kerr’s embrace of using meats nose-to-tail, his thriftiness and attentiveness to food waste by using the whole vegetable.
Kerr, 84, was born in London to a hotel manager father. He was trained in the French culinary traditions at college and briefly became manager of the Royal Ascot Hotel in London.
In 1958, Kerr moved to New Zealand, where he was named chief catering adviser for the Royal New Zealand Air Force. His break into
television occurred two years later — courtesy of an injury.
The Air Force was going to film a live TV segment with a physical education instructor but he sprained his ankle. Kerr was ordered — “I said no and they said ‘This is an order,’ ” he recalls — to do something on-air. So he did something basic. He cooked eggs.
That eventually led him to gallop: Kerr and his producer wife, Treena, moved to Canada and created a cooking show that showed off Kerr’s charisma and humour on The Galloping Gourmet, which ran from 1969-71 — taped and produced in Ottawa and shown on CBC. Through syndication, it ultimately reached 200 million viewers around the world each week.
A car crash in 1971 left Kerr and his wife badly injured. While they recuperated, the family sailed the world. When Treena suffered a heart attack in 1986, her husband reformed his culinary ways and tried to wring as much fat, salt and sugar out of his recipes as possible.
“I did go through a phase in my life when everything started with ‘b’ — it was brown rice and bulgur and barley — and it really tasted like the backside of the moon, whatever that must taste like,” he said.
These days, he loves local cheese and vegetables, lamb loin and makes porridge with local fruit, non-fat Greek yogurt, skim milk — and a splash of hazelnut creamer.
Now a widower, he loves to share his culinary skills with friends and strangers alike.