Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
FABULOUS COOKERY
IT WAS FILMED IN JUST THREE WEEKS – AND WITHOUT A COOKER. RACHEL KHOO ON HER NEW TV SERIES THAT SHOWS YOU HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF WHAT’S TO HAND
Rachel Khoo created the most inspiring new TV series in lockdown – read about her adventure, then try her delicious recipes too
TV chef Rachel Khoo spent her early years in the UK – Croydon to be precise – but her influences are international. Her mother is Austrian and her father Malaysian-chinese, which made for a mish-mash of flavours in the kitchen at home. ‘We’d have schnitzel one night, beef rendang the next, and a roast on Sunday,’ she recalls. ‘It was like the United Nations at the dinner table. My friends were having chicken nuggets and chips so I wanted those, but I appreciate it now.’
The family moved to Bavaria when she was 12 and she wrote her first cookbook in English – The Little Paris Kitchen in 2012 – when she was living in Paris, in an apartment the size of a shoebox. In 2014 she moved back to London where she became a columnist for Weekend, but a few years later she married a Swede, so it was off to Stockholm.
She speaks English, French and German and is learning Swedish, but she’s found her programmes in demand all over the world. She’s filmed shows in Australia and is huge in Japan, where her voice is dubbed. ‘That’s quite weird,’ she laughs. ‘I met the woman who does my voice. She’s also the voice of Lady Mary in Downton Abbey, when it’s dubbed in Japanese.’
Rachel, 39, should have been on yet more travels for her latest TV project. The plan had been to film a show in three European cities – London, Paris and Amsterdam – but coronavirus scuppered that. ‘Because of what was happening we’d moved from Stockholm, where we live, to stay with my husband’s parents in the Swedish countryside, miles from anywhere. I got a call from the producer asking for ideas about what we could film instead, and if there was a way I could do something at home.’
What happened next just sums up these extraordinary times. Rachel’s mother-in-law agreed that her house could be used as an impromptu film set. She handed over the kitchen and everything in it. In around three weeks an entirely new show called Simple Pleasures was filmed, and it’s very much a Rachel Khoo production. From her first TV show, her approach has always been about the home-spun and intimate, but this was perhaps a more intimate adventure than anyone expected.
The programme isn’t overtly
pitched at a lockdown audience, but the feel is very much of these times. The recipes, which you can try for yourself at the back of this magazine, are about fresh, local ingredients and storecupboard staples, nothing that’s too difficult to get hold of. Run out of eggs? Rachel has a recipe for an egg-free meringue. How about some French-style peppers stuffed with paprika rice, Mediterranean vegetable cannelloni or old-school rice pudding? All super-simple and not requiring endless pots and pans or complicated gadgets.
There’s one scene in the programme where she uses a tin opener that looks as if it came out of the ark. It doesn’t even have a twist handle. ‘Yes, that’s my mother-inlaw’s,’ she admits. ‘Luckily she has quite good taste so when it came to crockery we were fine, but if you look, you’ll notice that the same few plates are used for the whole show. Her kitchen is all white, too, so we wanted to put some curtains up, but there was no way of getting any so I ended up sitting up at night sewing them myself.’
Then there were the logistics. Normally filming involves dozens of people, but here there was only a cameraman in the room who also did sound and lighting, while the director was running things remotely via Zoom. Social distancing rules wouldn’t allow more people in the operation – nor, incredibly, for Rachel to use the cooker. ‘It was in the corner so if I was using it the cameraman couldn’t get in the kitchen, so we had to work with a kind of induction hob which we put on a makeshift island unit I’d actually found in the garage. I had to scrub the cobwebs off it.’
Also in the mix were her two boys, aged three and one. Ever tried to film with a toddler in tow? She wouldn’t recommend it. ‘My oneyear-old thought, “Camera equipment on the floor – nice, I’ll chew on that.” In the end we had to film around the kids’ mealtimes so they didn’t get too “hangry”. And come 4.30pm we had to call it a day because if we didn’t, all hell would break loose.’
It’s a fascinating next chapter for Rachel, whose career certainly hasn’t been predictable. When she left university (she studied art at Central Saint Martins in London) she worked in PR but food was always her passion and she did several cookery and patisserie courses, including one at Leiths School of Food and Wine. In 2006 she moved to Paris, studied at Le Cordon Bleu school and began a TV career with The Little Paris Kitchen series, in which she was filmed cooking for guests at a pop-up restaurant in her miniscule kitchen.
While she seemed to flit between France and the UK with ease, the move to Stockholm was a whole other matter. She says she moved to Paris ‘for the patisserie’ but moved to Stockholm ‘for love’. She and her husband Robert met at a party and when his work took him back to his home country, she packed up again. ‘At the time, of course, the thinking was that it was easy to travel so I could pop back to London.’
It turns out she’s fallen in love with much about Sweden. The health and social care in the country is second to none, she says. ‘You pay for it with high taxes, but that childcare support is there, and it’s fantastic.’ Her husband was able to take nine months off after they had their first child, which allowed her time to write The Little Swedish Kitchen. Again, it was pitched at a non-swedish audience but ended up being translated into Swedish, which she finds hilarious, ‘because it was a Brit telling Swedes how to cook their own food’.
Obviously the biggest change in her life has been her new status as a mum. She sounds as relaxed about motherhood as she is about life, and her approach to feeding her kids sums it up. ‘I don’t make adult food and kids’ food. I just make one dish and if they don’t like it, they don’t like it. The one-year-old tries everything. The three-year-old picks things out. He likes more simple stuff.’
This is reassuring. Even if Mum is on the telly because of her cookery skills, a child will turn up their nose? ‘Oh my goodness, yes. They are ruthless. Never mind food critics, children are just honest. If they don’t like something they will spit it out.’n
‘Children are honest, they are ruthless food critics’