THE BOOK RICK AND ROLL
A new culinary memoir by one of the world’s favourite chefs is poignant and delicious, writes Jane Shilling
‘As a child,” Rick Stein recalls, “I took pig evisceration as normal.” Useful early training for a future celebrity chef, no doubt.
When it comes to vivid memories of food, Stein has a knack for the Proustian moment: his father’s tomato and onion soup, which gave him his first insight into the power of simple food; feasting on St Austell ginger beer and crisps in the back of the family Jaguar; Parisian andouillettes with their “intestinal taint”; “a type of homemade cottage cheese known as cherry curds, so-called because it was made from the first milk after a cow had newly calved and contained traces of blood . . .” Yum!
Stein grew up on a farm in Chipping Norton, UK. It sounds like an idyllic childhood — boyish scrapes and fishing holidays in Cornwall. But it was darkened by Stein’s father’s violent mood swings — signs of what would now be diagnosed as bipolar disorder: “My mother spent much of my childhood trying to hide the worst from me. I merely knew that my father was someone I was scared of.” In 1965, when Rick was 17, his father killed himself by jumping off a cliff.
Academically, young Stein was a slow starter. He flunked his A-levels and, after a stint as a larder chef at the Great Western Hotel, he caught a boat to Australia, where he stayed for two years. The experience included beer, girls and surfing, as well as lesspleasurable stints working in a slaughterhouse and on a railroad. It also included a vast quantity of reading — Conrad, Hemingway, Waugh and Dostoevsky.
Back in Blighty, an English literature degree followed at Oxford. Having failed to get into the BBC, he ran a mobile discotheque, the Purple Tiger, followed by a club (with lots of fighting and licence infringements), which in 1976 morphed into the germ of what was to become “Padstein”: a restaurant in the then gritty fishing port of Padstow.
From there on, Stein makes his transformation into culinary celebrity sound almost easy. In 1984 his establishment was voted the best restaurant in England in a newspaper poll. There followed a visit from television chef Keith Floyd. Floyd’s director, David Pritchard, offered Stein the opportunity to make a series.
The ensuing Padstein phenomenon of books, television series and culinary empire is briskly dealt with in the final sections of the memoir. There are passionate recollections of meals in exotic locations, larded with literary quotations. He writes lyrically about food and with brutal honesty about himself. He is generous about his first wife, Jill, with whom he still runs the restaurant business, and sweetly grateful to his second, Sarah (known as Sas). On camera, he can give the impression of being grumpy and bumptious, but there is little sign of that in this engaging memoir, in which he seems haunted by self-doubt. Only in the final pages, when he revisits the site of his father’s suicide, does he at last seem like a man who has found peace after a long, gruelling journey. As a reader, you hope for his sake that it is so.
HE RAN A DISCO, THE PURPLE TIGER, FOLLOWED BY A CLUB
‘Under a Mackerel Sky’, by Rick Stein, is published by Ebury (R275)