COOKING CAN BE A FLIRTATION – BUT THERE’S NO SUREFIRE HIT

In 2003, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall revealed his secrets of seduction – and how being sacked made his career.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is living in a rented Dorset rectory next to a Norman church. On Sunday mornings the sound of hymns drifts through the house, which is down a little lane with glorious views across fields and hedgerows to the coast.

Hugh, 38, has left River Cottage where he made his beguiling TV series in which he showed us how to grow vegetables, keep livestock, fish, cook, conserve and cherish the countryside. He and his French wife, Marie, have now bought an old farmhouse with 40 acres and, when the renovation work is finished, they will move in with their four-year-old son, Oscar, and new baby, Freddie.

Marie was a journalist and was introduced to the charming, rather scruffy, eccentric Old Etonian by a mutual French friend who described him to her as ‘Hugh the Cook’. It was an apposite description because cooking was part of Hugh’s seduction technique, which he highly recommends to any besotted chap. ‘When you’re cooking to seduce there isn’t a surefire hit, because people like different things,’ he says. ‘But if you’re trying to guess what they like sex-wise you can do that as you cook for them. You think, “Well, if she likes this, I bet she’ll like that”. So there can be a flirtation. The first dish I cooked that Marie really loved was courgettes and pasta.’ The dish clearly worked because when I later ask Marie about Hugh’s seduction dish, she smilingly recalls that courgettes and pasta supper. ‘That’s a relief,’ says her husband.

Hugh owes his skills in the kitchen to his training in London at 192 and at the River Cafe, run by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers. ‘I think they must have had a tricky conversation with the accountant one day,’ he says. ‘We

knew somebody was going to go. I was sure it wasn’t going to be me, but it was. Ruth was very nice. She said I wasn’t as disciplined as the other chefs, and she was right.’

He went off to France to cook for restaurant critic Quentin Crewe.

‘If he was entertaining for lunch or dinner, we’d flick through Jane Grigson and Elizabeth David. That’s when I started to think I preferred cooking for people on a more informal level.’