Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Rick Stein's Cornish delights
His family connection goes back more than a century, and in a new series the restaurateur reveals there’ s so much more to the county than the beaches
For a man whose name is practically synonymous with the county, Rick Stein is adamant. He may have made his home there for decades, but in no way can he call himself a Cornishman. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he laughs. ‘My boys are Cornish because they were all born there, but I’m quite happy just to be an admirer.’
He’s much more than that, of course. From boyhood holidays to the time when, in his twenties, he moved there and in time opened his now-renowned restaurant in the fishing village of Padstow, Rick’s had a long-term love affair with this lush corner of the UK. It’s a passion he’s channelled into Rick Stein’s Cornwall, a new 15-part series in which he burrows behind the familiar postcard images to show some of this tourist Mecca’s hidden side, from art and history to music and its tin-mining heritage – along with a couple of resident celebrities including Dawn French. There’s a foodie vein running through it too, of course, with
Rick cooking up a few of his favourite recipes and introducing the viewer to some of his own suppliers.
It’s unashamedly indulgent TV, which is exactly what Rick wanted it to be. ‘Our series is feelgood, no question about it,’ he laughs. ‘But at the same time for most people, I suppose Cornwall is about beach holidays so it’s trying to say there’s all this other stuff as well. There’s so much to see, so many places to visit that are just a bit different, and that’s what we’re trying to get over.’
He’s in a jovial mood as he chats over the phone from his Cornish home, his wife Sarah (who he affectionately calls Sas) hovering in the background. He’s fresh from a dip in the sea, something he tries to do most days when he’s there, even braving it without a wetsuit. ‘It’s actually warmer in the sea at this time of year in Cornwall than it is in March,’ he says. ‘And it’s very good for you, though if I’m in for more than ten minutes at this time of year I’ll put a wetsuit on.’
Even today, aged 73, he can remember those first magical boyhood glimpses of the sea that marked the start of annual summer holidays at the clifftop Art Deco house his father had built in Cornwall in the 1930s. ‘It always made a great impression on me,’ he recalls. Arriving in the county from the family home in Oxfordshire was ‘like entering this new, wonderful world,’ he says, ‘a bit like going into Narnia through the wardrobe.’
Yet the family association with Cornwall actually stretches back to the start of the First World War, when his German grandparents bought a house in the county. ‘My grandparents were born in England but spoke German and had a German name.
Obviously in the First World War there was a lot of anti-german feeling so they bought this holiday house to get the children away, or at least give them a break from London, to a place where the sentiment was less robust,’ he explains. ‘So we go back a long way, but very much as tourists.’
By the 1930s his father had decided to build his own house there – although the building, perched like a ship overlooking the sea at Trevose Head, was actually an experimental affair. Rick visits the house in the first episode and explains, ‘It was built a bit on the cheap because my dad and uncle were actually trying out a new material, plasterboard, and they built this house to see how it would weather Atlantic storms,’ he recalls. ‘So it was never made to last a long time, and it’s still difficult to maintain because it’s not built to withstand the elements, but it looks beautiful.’
A lot has changed since those days, of course: when Rick first moved to Cornwall in the 1960s shortly after graduating in English from Oxford University, the county still felt remote. ‘During the summer it was lovely, but in the winter it was hard to find people to mingle with,’ he reflects. ‘Now, though, there are so many more lively people living here all the time that it doesn’t feel anything like as lost. Although in some ways one has also lost a bit because, in those early days, once the tourists had gone you’d get Cornwall back for six months.’
An ‘accidental restaurateur’ who initially opened a nightclub in Padstow before it lost its licence, Rick recalls how, when he decided to open his seafood restaurant there with then-wife Jill in 1975, a local comedian he played rugby with at the time pooh-poohed the idea. ‘I said to him, “Jethro, you ought to come down and have some fish at my restaurant.” He said, “I don’t like fish.” I said we would do steaks as well, and he told me they’d still taste of fish,’ he laughs. ‘So, things have moved on.’
Cornwall’s artistic heritage as well as its culinary delights come under Rick’s scrutiny in the series. In one episode he talks to Anthony Frost, the son of late abstract artist Terry Frost, about the extraordinary collection of talent fostered around the seaside village of St Ives. ‘He talked about the incredible density of first-rate artists in that small Cornish fishing town and what it was like to be among that,’ he says. ‘Understanding the impact these artists had on the world art scene was quite something.’
For years a less picturesque industry underpinned the economy. In the 1870s Cornwall led the world in tin mining, with about 2,000 mines. ‘The miners were proud, but conditions were awful,’ he says. ‘Life expectancy wasn’t much over 30. Their lives would have been like you see today in some dreadful mine in South America.’
At one point an expert takes viewers right down the mines, under the sea, and points out their deadly legacy. ‘When the groundwater dissipates there’s arsenic left on the walls. They used to get kids to go in and scrape the arsenic off. They suffered terrible sores and collapsed lungs,’ he says.
The last Cornish tin mine, South Crofty near Redruth, closed its gates for the last time as recently as 1998, and two decades on, Cornwall’s majestic beaches, abundant scenery, seafood and art draw thousands of people every year. Many other parts of the UK offer similar splendours, of course, but Rick thinks Cornwall has a unique quality. ‘It has become so much part of people’s collective imagination,’ he says. ‘There is definitely something special about it.’ ■
‘The sea’s warmer now than it is in March’