Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
As a boy Chrıstmas was frosted with romance
Walnut Whips, icicles like stalactites, and his late mother lifting him up to put the star on the tree. As he shares his best-ever festive recipes with you, Marco Pierre White recalls the sheer joy of Christmases past. By Frances Hardy
Marco Pierre White is improvising, conjuring culinary magic out of Christmas leftovers. He’s making a turkey cocktail: it’s an impromptu recipe created, with his customary elan, out of thin air. He cuts up thigh meat, adds chopped boiled egg and bacon crumbs, binds it all together in a mayonnaise laced with cranberry sauce and gravy, beds it in shredded lettuce and watercress, then tops the concoction with a final flourish – a shard of turkey skin baked to a crisp in a hot oven. Sheer genius!
Who wouldn’t want Marco – the first chef in Britain and the youngest in the world (at the time) to win three Michelin stars – mentoring them through their festive cooking? ‘If I’m invited out for Christmas lunch I always insist on doing the washing up and cleaning down. That’s correct,’ he says. He is a man of punctilious courtesy and good manners. But he’s also happy to pitch in and save the day if food-related disasters loom.
‘I went to Christmas lunch with friends at their country house a few years ago and the kitchen staff were struggling to cope with the timings. There was plenty of food but there were about 40 guests and I don’t think they’d cooked for that number before. So I got stuck in.’
Marco, of course, a titan of the British restaurant industry in the 80s and 90s, remains quite relaxed about catering for such numbers. We can only imagine the relief as he strode into the kitchen, a 6ft 3in culinary colossus armed with apron and meat cleaver, to save the day. ‘I just helped. I broke the turkey down to bones, thighs and crown, and made the gravy.’ (For your information, if he’s doing this at home he’ll season stock and meat juices with a Knorr Stock Pot and thicken with Bisto granules. After all, we love a soupçon of nostalgia with our turkey breast.)
So he redeemed the day! ‘I did my bit,’ he smiles. ‘And the one thing about classical training is that you’re taught how to get out of sticky situations and hide your mistakes.’
There is something endearing about his talent for understatement. He trained with the masters of French cuisine – Albert Roux who, incidentally, taught him to use frozen rather than fresh sprouts for Christmas lunch – then Raymond Blanc, who helped fine-tune his palate. And in turn he trained a younger generation of great chefs (Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay are both his protégés). But he still peels his own spuds, and today he delights in the joy of feeding others. ‘There is more pleasure in cooking for people I love than for people with a wallet. It’s as simple as that,’ he says.
This festive season Marco, who turns 59 in a few days, is bringing his own blend of expertise to Weekend readers, guiding us through our Christmas cooking step by step with simple but sumptuous recipes created for us that he has cooked especially for our photoshoot. There are shortcuts, tips and, of course, that turkey cocktail – both in the magazine today and in the paper next week. He’ll be showing us the ultimate in culinary wizardry: how to have a Michelinstandard Christmas without the stress. ‘Why not have a roast turkey without the madness of all the traditional vegetables?’ he suggests. ‘Serve it with a risotto or macaroni cheese instead. It’s sensational!’
So he demonstrates how to make a porcini risotto – a nod to his beloved late mother’s Italian heritage – and how to elevate macaroni cheese by layering it with Parmesan crumb and soft-boiled eggs. But if you’re a stickler for tradition he also guides you down the roast spud and vegetable route via red cabbage, roast parsnips with walnuts to those frozen sprouts. ‘Just throw some butter in a pan then add the sprouts. The water
‘Grandad would send white truffles from Italy’
evaporates from within them and then the sprouts drink the butter.’
What about a richly self-indulgent Boxing Day trifle? Marco allows us a little labour-saving shortcut here, too, so although he shows us how to make our own crème pâtissière, he suggests mixing it with Bird’s custard – another taste from his childhood in a council house in Leeds in the 1960s.
In October we introduced readers to Marco’s cookery course, Delicious Food Cooked Simply, part of a new e-learning service from the BBC called Maestro. Anyone can subscribe – Daily Mail readers get a discount (see below) – and be inspired by the dishes he’s perfected, including classics like steak au poivre and linguine al pomodoro as well as scrambled eggs with smoked salmon that’s perfect for Christmas or Boxing Day morning. It’s the sort of present foodies will love, and already it’s proving a phenomenal success.
Cooking has united his family in lockdown, as it has for much of the nation. He has three children, Luciano, 26, Marco Jr, 25, and Mirabelle, 18, from his third marriage to Mati (they separated in 2005 and are currently divorcing), and all three live with him at the Rudloe Arms, the rambling hotel he owns in the Wiltshire countryside.
When he thinks of his favourite Christmases past, he goes back wistfully to the rose-hued ones of his early childhood in Yorkshire when his mother was still alive. Italianborn Maria-rosa died of a brain haemorrhage when Marco was six, leaving his father Frank to raise him and his two elder brothers Clive and Graham. (Baby Simon, 13 days old when his mum died, was brought up by childless relatives in Italy.) He remembers the heady anticipation of a visit from Santa. ‘One Christmas Eve – I must have been five years old – I crept downstairs in the middle of the night to see if Santa had been. There were stacks of unwrapped presents marked with our names, Clive, Graham and Marco, under the tree. I looked through mine and saw a basic Action Man doll, the cheapest type because I was six years younger than Clive, who had a top-of-therange version. So I swapped them over. Sneaky, wasn’t I?’ he smiles. ‘I put the more expensive doll in my pile and crept upstairs back to bed.
‘On Christmas morning my father was wrapping the presents. I could see him as my mum opened the door and peeped through. “Well, Santa has been!” she said, throwing open the door at last so we could all troop in. And that was when I was caught. I opened my Action Man – and had to hand it over to Clive. I never let on that I’d been down in the night, and my parents never knew. I think they were completely confused.’
Annual rituals were observed: after the presents they tucked into a full English breakfast. Marco’s father, a chef, ‘cooked bacon with the rind on then cut it off and gave it to the robins.’ His father went to the pub while his mum cooked lunch, ‘the kitchen
fogged with steam from the boiled vegetables, Mum juggling the pans… and being inquisitive I would sit there, clinging to her side, watching.’
There were retro English sweets galore, ‘tubes of Mintolas and Munchies; Fry’s Chocolate Cream, Turkish Delight and Walnut Whips. I remember the indulgence of Christmas: you had more sweets than for the whole year put together.’ More exotic were the Italian delicacies. ‘Nougatine, chocolate-wrapped and almond-studded, candied fruits and maraschino cherries, and Nonno [Grandad] sent white truffles in cotton bags and a Pandoro Christmas cake from Verona.
‘It was a magical time for children, not as commercial as it is now. We’d collect holly and mistletoe from a nearby orchard and go carol singing. I sang solo – so low no one could hear me!’ he laughs. ‘I remember being fascinated by crackers and the way Mum always made it so I won the trinket inside.
‘She was wonderfully dexterous and I can still see her silhouette, bent over her Singer sewing machine, making toys. She’d sew with extra focus at Christmas, making them to sell to the local department store and giving some to poor children. There were little gonks with big eyes, elves, Father Christmases for the tree. I loved the magic of it all; the icicles that formed like stalactites when overflow pipes froze, the special time at school when lessons stopped and we decorated the classroom. Everything was frosted with romance. My mother would take me to Lewis’s department store in Leeds to marvel at the window displays. I remember the liveried lift attendant with a sense of wonderment. Was it because I was a child that I found it quite mesmerising and beautiful? We live in a world of excess and entitlement today, but then, if you wanted a bike or a sports bag, you waited until Christmas.’
Those glorious Christmases of his young childhood are freeze-framed
‘We’d collect mistletoe and go carol singing’
in his memory. ‘When my mother died in 1968 my world went from technicolour to black and white,’ he says. ‘But I’ve tried to relive my early Christmases with my own children.’
When they were young he’d shut his restaurants for a fortnight. He remembers taking his kids to visit Santa’s grotto at Harrods; Mirabelle recalls watching Tommy Cooper together on TV. The holiday itself was often spent with Heston Blumenthal and his parents at their home in Buckinghamshire. ‘They had a lovely house with glorious views and were wonderfully kind; great foodies. Christmas and Boxing Day lunch was traditional. I went for years as a young man, then with the children when they were little.’
At the hotel today there is a sprinkling of festive magic. Wooden trestle tables are set for lunch with
Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor, centre front) with her seven siblings. Below: Lord and Lady Featherington