“Food is an act of love. You grow it, prepare it, and share it with your loved ones. It’s an amazing communion”
All it takes is a tree. Raymond Blanc tells Rachael Oakden a story of romance and rediscovery through falling in love with native fruits
Raymond Blanc OBE has put a lot of thought into apple crumble. The secret, he says, is to cook the topping separately, avoiding the problem of escaping steam creating a soggy layer of uncooked flour. “People may say that I’m cheating,” says the self-taught chef, restaurateur and author, whose latest book, The Lost Orchard (Headline Home), is in part a celebration of the great British apple. He’s cheerfully unapologetic about flouting convention if the end result is crunchy, toasty magnificence. When it comes to his pursuit of gastronomic excellence, there are no rules that can’t be broken, no barriers that can’t be breached.
The chef-patron of the Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire, where he’s spent eight years planting a heritage apple orchard, has been following his own determined path towards culinary excellence since he was 20. That was when he was told that he’d left it too late to become an apprentice chef. A restaurateur in his home city of Besançon took pity on him, offering him a job as a cleaner instead. And so began a remarkable 50-year journey that sees him now at an Oxfordshire manor house with two Michelin stars, 12 organic gardens and two orchards.
One of Raymond Blanc’s orchards is British, full of heritage apple varieties, all but lost in the industrial food revolution of his adopted country. The other is French, containing some of the same apple, apricot, peach, plum and cherry varieties that he feasted on in his parents’ and grandparents’ gardens in the countryside of the Franche-Comté region between Burgundy and the Jura mountains. Side by side, he says, these orchards are symbolic. “This is one happy marriage of a young man who comes to England, who has nothing, and falls in love with this house and grows it beautifully, harmoniously and as truly and authentically as I possibly can.”
SOWING THE SEEDS
Raymond Blanc’s story is one of uncompromising determination to share the pleasures of good food and good hospitality. His mouth-watering 2008 memoir A Taste of My Life paints a village childhood that sounds idyllic: foraging for mushrooms and catching freshwater crayfish that his mother would turn into simple dishes using herbs and vegetables from the garden. For the young Raymond, however, it wasn’t all adventure. “I come from a working-class background. We had a garden that had to feed a family of seven. I was working in that garden from the age of six. It’s hard work when all your friends are playing football.”
He later realised, though, that his upbringing had taught him about the seasons, about the different fruits and vegetables that could be coaxed from the soil throughout the year. “At 12, I knew every single variety. If my mum sent me to fetch some potatoes, it would never be just potatoes. She would say ‘Get me some Ratte,’ and I knew it would be sauté potatoes. ‘Get
me some Maris Piper,’” – he says ‘peeper’ in his exuberantly rich native accent – “and I knew it would be French fries. There’s a deep knowledge there, and it is the basis of my simple philosophy, of my gastronomy: that food is an act of love. You grow it, you prepare it, and then you share it with your loved ones around the table. It’s an amazing communion.”
That philosophy has been at the core of his cooking ever since. No doubt it was honed by the shock of arriving in the culinary desert that was provincial Britain in the early 1970s, where a posh night out was prawn cocktail and steak and chips in pub restaurants that reeked of cigarette smoke. He’d been banished to England, or at least made unemployable in France, for breaking one rule too many: having worked his way up from cleaner to glass washer and eventually commis ( junior chef), he got sacked (and nearly knocked unconscious with a frying pan) for suggesting to the head chef that one of his sauces might be too salty.
He took a job as a waiter at an inn in Oxfordshire, where he got engaged to the landlady’s daughter – his ex wife, Jenny, with whom he has two sons – and eventually became head chef. The regulars were beguiled by quenelles of pike and duck à l’orange, but they couldn’t resist poking fun: so ardent was his desire for provenance that the local butchers played a trick, sending him on a wild (duck) chase for the all-but-extinct Aylesbury Duck. He and Jenny opened their
“His upbringing taught him about the fruit and veg that could be coaxed from the soil throughout the year”
first restaurant, Les Quat’Saisons, in 1977. It won a Michelin star in 1979 and a second in 1982. That same year Raymond fell in love with a 14th-century manor house and began its transformation into Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons.
COMING TO LE CRUNCH
Blanc doesn’t include his recipe for crumble among the small but precious collection of recipes at the back of The Lost Orchard ( he provides instead a recipe from Laverstoke Park in Hampshire, where he had the best crumble he’s ever eaten). But his feelings about the filling are even stronger than his views on the topping. He’s not a fan of our beloved Bramley: “So acidic; they need too much sugar to make them palatable.” He likes instead the Cheddar Cross, bred in 1916, which makes an almost-perfect creamy purée. Or the Blenheim Orange, dear to his heart not only because it was discovered in 1740 in his adopted county, but because it breaks down quickly into pale, sweet velvetiness.
The stories of nearly 40 heritage apples, as well as pears, plums, peaches, figs, quince, medlars and cherries, are lovingly gathered in The Lost Orchard, his account of the creation of the orchards. “It is a love letter to the British apple,” says Blanc, now 70, who spent weeks testing different apples, meticulously noting how they performed as eaters, juicers and bakers. He also put them through their paces in two classic French recipes: tarte tatin – “It’s the simplest thing, please do it,” – and tarte Maman Blanc, his mother’s recipe, which she used to make with Reinette Grise du Canada and for which her son now finds Lord Lambourne and Captain Kidd outstanding.
His dream of an orchard, he says, was inspired by his grandfather, the keeper of a grand house with bounteous fruit orchards. But there were two pivotal moments that made it a reality. One was a tasting of heritage apples at Le Manoir organised by The Royal Horticultural Society, at which Blanc discovered his beloved Cox’s Orange Pippin. “It was the best apple experience of my life. It had everything. Amazing
texture, juiciness, crunchiness. Layer after layer of aromatics: lemon, banana, mango, passionfruit.”
The other occurred during the filming of a television programme in the Vale of Evesham. “Let me paint a picture for you that still haunts me,” he writes in The Lost Orchard. “It is of thousands and thousands of dusky purple plums, fallen on the ground and lying unharvested and unwanted, in an abandoned orchard.”
THE TIME IS NOW
So began his project to champion all the lost and forgotten fruit varieties that have been decimated during the past century. “I am a hopeless romantic, but I’d love to rediscover our own apples, whether it is our beautiful Blenheim Orange from Oxfordshire or Claygate Pearmain from Surrey or Devonshire Quarrenden from Devon. If we could colour again our communities with these, that would be fantastic.”
This quiet campaigner has been talking and writing about sustainability and seasonality since the early 1990s. But he believes now that society is at a turning point. “Seasonal means close to home, it means flavour, colour, texture, nutrients. If it’s close to home, your farmer keeps his farm, your village keep its post office. If you don’t import food, you create less pollution. I really think there is going to be a shift to growing more of our own food, rediscovering our local heritage. It’s exciting. We are going to create a new world. But maybe again that’s the romantic speaking.”
The impact of his orchard, this book, is, Raymond says, “a molecule” in the movement towards change. But as well as inspiring readers to seek, eat and cook with heritage fruit varieties, he hopes it’ll encourage people to plant their own fruit trees. “All you need is about 80cm of sunny wall. Growing a tree is really beautiful. That baby tree, if it is fed well, will grow and bear many fruits, which will feed the family and create beautiful moments around the table.”
The Lost Orchard by Raymond Blanc is published by Headline Home.