James hits the road around America...

THE TV CHEF TELLS ELLA WALKER ABOUT EXPLORING US CUISINE, AND HIS GREAT FRIEND ANTONIO CARLUCCIO

IT might be two years since he quit Saturday Kitchen, but TV chef James Martin is still faintly defensive of his decision to leave the hit BBC show.

“There was no channel to go to, I didn’t jump ship or anything like that, contrary to what people said,” he explains. “It was too much. It was just work, work, work, work, and I didn’t mind it, but then I wasn’t getting any younger. I could do it when I was 30, I’m bloody 45 now.”

A work-life balance had been somewhat elusive for the Yorkshireman, who didn’t take a holiday from the Saturday Kitchen studio for a decade, spending his weekends wistfully “linking to Rick Stein going out and about”.

“I did really get pangs of jealously,” he admits – but it’s finally his turn to barbecue beside a creek.

The book and accompanying ITV series sees Malton-born James eating and cooking his way across the US, travelling 13-odd thousand miles in eight weeks, by motorbike.

“A lot of TV land is, you arrive in a car, sit down with a chauffeur and off you go; I didn’t want to do that,” he says. “None of that bloody stuff – I want whatever fauna to hit me in the face and to talk about that when I get there.”

When he started the trip, Trump had just got into power, and, exploring middle America, says James, “you realise why”.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he recalls of Texas and Louisiana, where he says the mentality is: “‘I’m having my gun, I’m having my pick-up; don’t tell me otherwise’. You can walk around a supermarket and buy a M16 machine gun,” notes James, disbelievingly, “but to them, everybody else has got ‘em, [they’re thinking], ‘I’ve got to protect my family’. I’m not saying it’s normal, far from it, but you can understand it.”

Driving along one road in Texas, it became something of a joke among his crew that every three miles there was “a Dunkin’ Donuts, a rifle range or a lap-dancing club – for like 100 miles! It was quite surreal”.

Focusing on the US through its cuisine though, rather than purely its culture, gives you a whole new perspective on the place. “Food is a great leveller,” says James. “Once you’ve adjusted to the portion sizes there’s so much more to grub in the States than burgers and barbecue – even if it’s hard to completely detangle food from politics.”

Most poignant, though, ended up being a visit to an artichoke farm, where James made pasta with artichokes, cavolo nero and Parmesan, a dish his much-loved friend, the late Antonio Carluccio, once cooked for him.

“He showed me how to prep artichokes properly,” he remembers. “So I cooked this artichoke dish not knowing what would happen, but I did it in the middle of a field on an artichoke plantation.”

The book is dedicated to Carluccio, who Martin says had a “massive” impact on him. “I remember being at award things, and probably the two most uncomfortable people in there were me and him,” he recalls. “It was all going on at one about two years ago; he’d won an award and I’d won an award, but we weren’t even in the building, we were outside just chatting.

“Food was our great love. He, like me, didn’t like pretentious cooks – he liked people who were passionate about their jobs.”

James Martin’s American Adventure, photography by Peter Cassidy, is published by Quadrille, priced £25.