Shooting the Cook

‘And now my little gastronauts,’ said Floyd to the camera—and I may not have this word perfect, but it went something like this—‘I want to tell you about this chap here. He’s called a weaver and over in France they serve him in bouillabaisse. He’s got a wonderful sweet flavour and a firm texture but over here he’s regarded as a nuisance because people might tread on him and have to be carted off to hospital.’

He then went on to suggest that the camera show a close-up of the spines of the weaver fish. ‘Look at these pricks,’ he said (rising emphasis on the word pricks I noticed), ‘because they could do you serious harm—and there seem to be an awful lot of pricks in this fish market.’ Point taken.

That evening Floyd visited a tarot card reader. He didn’t have to go very far because she was sitting near the entrance to the restaurant where we were eating with the crew. I couldn’t hear what she was saying but I could tell that she fancied him and it looked as if the feeling was mutual. They were drinking wine and laughing, and occasionally glancing back at the table where I was sitting with the crew. Eventually the consultation ended and he returned to his seat. With a beaming grin he told us the cards could foresee a tremendous future for him. He would become a household name and all his money worries would be a thing of the past. However, before he reached the heights of his powers the relationship with the ‘joker’ (I assumed he meant me) would be too strained to continue and would cease. Bloody hell, I thought, ‘we haven’t made one programme yet and already I have a sense of doom’. It took a few years, but the tarot reader was right.

Fair stood the wind for France (#ulink_2a0ed868-5300-52be-a7a6-298605cfc0ce)

Halfway through filming our first series, Floyd on Fish, we caught the ferry to Saint-Malo. The idea was to test that old fish merchant Fred Brimmacombe’s theory that the French adore practically anything that comes from the sea whereas we, with a few exceptions, prefer cod, plaice, and haddock.

Just a hundred miles south of Plymouth there’s a whole different attitude to the fishy delights that come from this piece of sea separating our two countries. The thing that interested me was why that should be. Was it history or circumstance, maybe due to hardship or war?

When I first set eyes on the town from the deck of the ferry I thought how beautiful it looked, like a huge Walt Disney castle with mighty walls and towers and turrets rising from the sea. Conversely, I thought of the first thing that would greet passengers when they sail from France to Plymouth—a large, smouldering scrap metal yard right next to the docks. I felt sure, after seeing this delightful town from the ship, we’d find people eating small hillocks of shellfish on every street corner and I wasn’t wrong.

We were here for three days, enough time to film the fish market in the morning, maybe a restaurant at lunchtime and possibly the famous oyster beds in the afternoon. After leaving our kit at the hotel it was time to get our bearings and begin to explore the town. It was late afternoon now and beginning to get cold. The all important fish market was empty at this hour, the stone counters washed down ready for business the next morning. We walked through the narrow ancient streets with their high walls. It was like a film set in which you might turn a corner and glimpse a weary knight returning from the Crusades, leading his trusty steed in search of lodgings for the night. Just six hours on a ferry and we had arrived in a different world.

After a couple of drinks we thought we’d find somewhere in which to eat all sorts of fish for the entire evening. Floyd announced, ‘I’ll find a really good restaurant but you’ve got to trust me. I don’t want to read any guides, I’ll just do it by sight, smell, and gut instinct.’

He examined the menu of the first restaurant, built into the town wall by the main entrance. We waited patiently while he had a peep inside, before declaring it far too expensive, but perfect for Americans who didn’t know any better. We continued, like a band of hunters, with Keith as our German pointer flushing out pheasants. He’d pop into a hotel and come out a few seconds later only to give it the thumbs down. There were six of us, including Clive the cameraman, Timmy on sound, Andy, the assistant cameraman, who also helped with the lights, and Frances Wallis, my trusty Scottish assistant and mother to us all—and we were all ravenous. I was dreaming of half a dozen oysters, followed by fish soup and maybe a large grilled Dover sole and a bottle of fresh, clean-tasting Muscadet, but still we traipsed on. Fortunately Saint-Malo is a compact town.

Finally, Keith stopped outside a small place with steamed-up windows called Au Gai Bec (At the Happy Mouth).

‘This is what I was looking for,’ he said. A warm glow, the sound of good conversation and clinking plates were coming from inside. ‘You can keep your Michelin stars. Steamed-up windows: the first sign of a busy, happy restaurant.’

We went in and the warmth and smells of buttery fish soup, garlic, and a hint of Gauloise hit us straight away. Curiously it wasn’t dissimilar to Keith’s Bistro back in Bristol. It was packed, but the owner, who wore Buddy Holly glasses, asked us to wait and have a drink at the small bar. From where we were standing you could glimpse the kitchen where a young woman and an older lady—her mother perhaps—toiled over an antiquated stove. It was perfect.

That evening was one of the happiest we ever spent as a film crew on the road. The food was quite wonderful. We shared a large platter of fruits de mer, like a glossary of seafood from the continental shelf: oysters and shrimps, clams of every size, winkles and whelks and raw cockles. Next we had a freshly made cotriade, a Breton fish stew made with that day’s catch, which included meaty chunks of conger eel, mackerel, and sardines. We were the last customers in the place, a perfect opportunity to get to know the owner, Jacques Yves. We didn’t need to tell him how much we enjoyed the food, but we did anyway. Over a fine pear tart and sorbets made with Calvados we told him of our mission to understand France’s love affair with fish. He assured us that we’d come to the right place and promised to help us in any way he could. In true Field Marshal Montgomery fashion we declared that from that moment on the Happy Mouth would be our brigade headquarters—and it was, for a number of years to come.

The next day involved a very early start and already, in that lovely restaurant where we were so happy, it had gone past midnight. Jacques Yves said that to wind down he usually had a nightcap on his way home, in a little bar not far away from here.

‘No, no,’ I protested. ‘It’s important we all get a good night’s sleep because we have to film in the fish market at first light and that is the sole (no pun intended) reason we came here in the first place. So let’s have no more talk of nightcaps. It’s bedtime now and that includes everybody.’

Approximately two hours later Keith and I tottered back along the cobbled streets to our hotel, feeling extremely happy with ourselves. Of course, Clive, Timmy, Andy, and Frances had sensibly gone to bed as soon as the meal was over and Keith and I had only popped in out of politeness really, but Jacques Yves was quite right, it was a lovely little bar, and once the locals found we were from the BBC they wouldn’t let us buy a drink.

The next morning I had a hangover of humungous proportions and worse, far worse, I’d slept through my alarm call. Even the hotel manager hadn’t been able to wake me. And so the others all went off to film at the market while I slept on. It was an unforgivable act and I was deeply ashamed. In times of war I’d have been tied to a cannon wheel and shot—deservedly so. However, as luck would have it, there weren’t too many locals out buying fish that early in the morning. Apparently, the market wouldn’t start to get busy until ten o’clock when the sun had crept over the high walls of the town, flooding the streets with golden light. So Keith and the crew had returned to the hotel for café au lait served in huge ceramic bowls and warm, fresh croissants with apricot jam. Thank you God.

When we returned to the market the stallholders seemed much less grumpy than their British counterparts. Maybe it was because they were so busy. There were rows and rows of tables piled high with oysters, all neatly marked in order of size. In my limited experience I knew the smaller native oysters—the flat ones with smooth shells—to be by far the best tasting. Then there were heaps of lively pink and apricot-coloured langoustines, clearly landed that morning, judging by the way they were trying to walk out of the market. The langoustine should be the culinary symbol of Brittany. Here the locals eat them simply boiled and served with mayonnaise. I made a note we had to try some before catching the ferry the next morning.

There was a large cauldron of whelks being boiled in seawater then scooped up with a huge wire ladle and unceremoniously plonked into fish boxes. I knew my hangover was fading fast when that hot shellfish aroma from the whelks, reminiscent of freshly cooked lobster, started to make me think about lunch.

Keith was on top form in the market and knew all the names of the fish on display and how best to cook them. We discovered that most of the brown crabs had come from Cornwall and Devon, and that fishing boats from Plymouth very often called in to land their catch. I’m not sure if it was strictly legal, but it made sound sense if you’d just caught a boatful of red mullet and John Dory in the middle of the English Channel. The prices would be a lot better than at home because the locals love eating fish like these. I wouldn’t mind betting it was the sort of trade that had secretly been going on since long before the Napoleonic Wars.

After an hour or so we’d filmed everything we needed and I thought it would be a good idea to visit the famous oyster beds in Cancale, a short drive away to the east. I was expecting something quaint and pretty, perhaps a few ancient thatched cottages huddled alongside a creek, where gnarled old men toiled in sailing boats dredging up oysters. So I was a bit taken aback by the sight of miles and miles of flat muddy shoreline, covered, as far as the eye could see, with black sacks. On closer inspection the sacks were made out of plastic mesh and were full of baby oysters the size of thumbnails. The mesh ensured that the sea would give them the precious nutrients they needed to grow, and the sack gave them protection from seabirds and stopped them from being swept away. The tiny oysters looked like so many pieces of chipped stone, but such was their reputation that in four years or so they could be gracing the tables of the Ritz and the Savoy.

It was a scene reminiscent of an L. S. Lowry painting, dotted with matchstick figures, some of them with rakes, some driving tractors, and others bent double, sewing up sacks. There were little paths made of concrete that wove their way along the beach and down to the shoreline. In the distance we spotted a line of schoolchildren following their teacher. At first we thought, ‘What on earth are children doing in the middle of this muddy beach on a school day?’ And then we realized this was why the French are so appreciative about food; they learn about it from an early age. We traipsed along the beach with the camera equipment and sure enough the teacher told us that this group of eight-year-olds would, as part of their education, visit farms, cheese-makers, and other local producers to learn about food, where it comes from and how it is grown and reared. I thought of the children at home who thought that milk came out of bottles and fish really did have fingers.

Over here, Clive (#ulink_861a9e10-7cc9-5287-bba2-ff9724278bb8)

On our return from France something happened in Bridport that changed things for ever. It was here that Floyd found the person he really wanted to be on television; the persona that the technicians at Plymouth had pronounced crap, and that John Purdie had predicted was destined for stardom.

During the morning we’d been filming the scallop boats returning to the narrow harbour at West Bay. Nowadays this part of the Dorset coast is famous for its hand-dived scallops. Divers wearing aqualungs scour the seabed looking for scallops of the right size. It’s a great way to preserve the stock; as with line-caught fish you take what you need and leave the rest for another day. All those years ago this method of fishing was just starting in Lyme Bay, but most of the local scallop fishermen still used small trawlers to dredge for them. Someone said it was a bit like using a tractor to weed an ornamental flowerbed. The trawler scooped up everything that came before it and its heavy chains could sometimes break the shells of the scallops. It was a couple of hours or so before each dredge was brought to the surface, which meant the shellfish, along with the rocks and mud and all the rubbish from the seabed, were tossed around as if they were in some infernal washing machine.

That afternoon we had planned to film Keith cooking king scallops in a pub, The George, in the centre of Bridport, which was very popular because they served really good coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice, and fabulous steak and chips. The problem was they were so busy we couldn’t get into the kitchen because the staff were still bustling around preparing lunches. We would have to wait, so maybe it would be a good idea to have a pint or a glass of wine or two.

Julie, Keith’s wife, had joined us, keen to see how her husband was coping in his new role as a television chef. She looked perturbed when another bottle of wine turned up, but when it came time to film, Keith seemed on sparkling form, having had just the right amount of alcohol to soothe his nerves and sharpen his wits—a delicate balancing act. He began by opening the scallops and cleaning them and went on to sauté them in butter with wine, garlic and parsley.

Then, in a seminal moment he said to the cameraman, ‘Why are you looking at me when you should be looking in the pot?’ Like an obedient dog the camera went jerkily over to the pan where the scallops were frying gently. ‘Look,’ he commanded. ‘Back over to me, if you please.’ The camera creakily returned to its original shot and Floyd announced, ‘I’m not a cameraman, I’m not a director. I know nothing about making television programmes, because I’m a cook. What I do know, however, is the star of the show isn’t me. It’s the food. So go back on to the pot and don’t come up again until I tell you to!’

Julie was looking anxious. As soon as we’d finished filming she came over to me. ‘David,’ she asked. ‘Please don’t leave that bit about the camera in. It makes him look so drunk and arrogant.’

But for me Keith’s outburst was a turning point that set a style for the programme for years to come. It was funny, engaging, and different, like one of those moments in a play when the actor tells the audience what they really think of the other characters. My favourite film for years and years was Tom Jones, with Albert Finney in the title role. I loved the way he’d turn to the camera and share a few thoughts with the cinema audience before the action moved on. Keith telling Clive, the cameraman, exactly what to point at made the scene so much more personal and immediate, and it turned Clive into a household name. ‘Over here, Clive. Come up to me, Clive. Over there, Clive…’ became a hallmark of the show. What Floyd had done, in fact, was make the audience become more involved, because he wasn’t just directing the camera, he was directing the viewer’s eye on to what was important. It was something new, something that you could never have orchestrated. It was just Floyd’s inimitable style. And actually, it was very useful, too, since in those early days I still hadn’t quite worked out how to cover the entire cooking process with just one camera. It all chimed perfectly with the foremost maxim in the world, which is: ‘The simple things are the best.’

PART II (#ulink_d794a430-9621-5f29-9b57-01ceb674faa9)

Just for starters (#ulink_a9325b3f-6aed-5f11-b8da-e7a31244ea58)

Food plays such a huge part of my life; it dominates my work and, at the risk of sounding tedious, quite a bit of my conversation. In fact, I don’t think I’ve got any friends who aren’t interested in food. They say that the average male thinks about sex every four minutes, well I reckon I think about food—and occasionally sex—every four minutes. I’ll drift off and think about pies, the kind of rabbit pies with mustard that my mother used to make shortly after the war. In the Seventies, when television executives started to discuss the possibilities of breakfast television, I thought at first it was going to be a series about people cooking breakfasts around the world. I was quite disappointed when it turned out to be a daily news magazine.

But back then my knowledge of food was limited. I hadn’t lived in a little town in Provence and, unlike Keith, I had learnt about things like salamis, olives, bread, and wine from choosing and trying stuff from the aisles and counters of the new Carrefour supermarket which had opened up in Bristol. Because I enjoyed cooking so much my friends thought me quite sophisticated, but until then I had never smelt a truffle, let alone eaten one. Caviar was a complete mystery to me and I thought sweetbreads were bull’s testicles.

One of the things we shared from our childhood, though, was a love of catching fish, mainly trout, and cooking it in the fresh air: Keith, as a young boy, growing up in Somerset, fishing on a reservoir near Wiveliscombe, and me, with my friends, Bob Lipscombe and his brother Michael, fishing on parts of the River Itchen that flowed from beyond Winchester to Southampton. Subconsciously, I think this was why we filmed so many cooking sequences outside. It was never really discussed; it just happened.

I think the Itchen is the most beautiful river in the country with its gin-clear water and waving beds of weed, the perfect environment for the handsome speckled brown trout which would lie almost motionless, save for the movement of their tails keeping them in position against the swift current. On weekends and summer evenings the three of us boys would spend our time playing on the banks and fishing. We had to pluck up courage because we weren’t supposed to be there. The river was strictly off limits and could only be fished by very rich people who paid to use large stretches of it in the summer. Technically we were poachers, albeit small time, but nevertheless we were breaking the law of the land. We local lads thought it our natural right to catch the odd trout from the river that flowed past our homes, even if the landowners and their water bailiffs didn’t see it that way.

One of the most feared water bailiffs was called Arthur. He had a large white Alsatian dog and was thought to carry a shotgun in which the cartridges were loaded with salt crystals instead of lead shot. The word was that they stung mightily. Arthur was the keeper of the salmon pool—this was where the freshwater of the River Itchen met the salty water of the Solent and it smelt of seaweed. Sometimes, through chain-link fencing, we’d watch the people who had paid for the privilege of fishing this magical spot as if they were an exotic species in a zoo. We could see that some of them weren’t particularly fussed about fishing and would prefer to sit and chat over sandwiches or a cigarette. What a waste of precious time.

Sometimes the silvery salmon would jump clear out of the water and, as if in slow motion, they would almost come to a stop before they fell back into the dark waters. We would watch like cats gazing at birds through a window, shivering with excitement. When the temptation proved too much the three of us would go out in the early morning to fish the water meadows that ran for miles along the banks of the Itchen. They were crisscrossed by small streams and sometimes little bridges made out of red brick overgrown with grass. Other times the water would be forced through a series of sluices before it rushed into a deep pool fringed with yellow and purple irises and kingcups.

In this flat landscape we could see for a mile in any direction. Any figure we spotted on the horizon made our hearts beat faster. A dog, especially a black Labrador or an Alsatian, might mean a bailiff was close by and it was time to run, though, fortunately, this stretch of water was off limits for Arthur and his fearsome white dog.

By baiting a small bronze hook with a worm and gently trotting it downstream underneath the overhanging blackthorn bushes, we could catch brown trout. They weren’t very big, about half a pound, but they were strong fighters and it was a pleasure to land them.

Once we’d caught two or three we’d to go back to the den we’d made from old bits of corrugated iron and tarpaulin. It was in a wood close to where we lived, next to a muddy, scruffy tidal tributary of the Itchen, where people used to dump their old prams. We’d thread sharpened twigs through each trout from head to tail and grill them over a camp fire, turning them so the skin cooked evenly.

To eat with them we’d make a thing called a twist. We would mix up some flour and water and knead it to make a dough. Then we’d twist it round a stick—hence the name—and put it over the fire where it would bubble and blister and eventually go smoky black. We’d cut it up with our sheath knives, sprinkle the pieces with salt, add a knob of butter and wow! If my mother had served up hot black dough and undercooked fish at home I’d have seriously considered running away, but out there in our beloved camp with our eyes stinging and streaming from the smoke, they tasted wonderful. Such are the pleasures of eating outdoors.

I think my fixation with food began in the days of rationing shortly after the war. Rationing continued for nearly ten years after the war had ended; in effect, the first ten years of my life. There wasn’t much food about, apart from parsnips, tripe, rissoles, rabbits for those quite wonderful pies, herrings and pilchards. I had no idea what rationing was, of course; the only thing I knew was that food was to be eaten and not necessarily enjoyed—although for the most part I did enjoy it—and that the little buff-coloured ration book was the source of my mother’s culinary woes. I suppose this was the period of the line ‘You’re not going to get down from the table until you’ve eaten every last thing on your plate.’

There were exceptions to this rather dull food. Sometimes my mother would be given a couple of pounds of pork chipolatas by the local butcher. (She played in the local whist drive with his wife.) Other times we would catch the bus and visit one my mother’s friends who lived in the country. This was an altogether better world where we’d be given boiled ham with parsley sauce and fresh broad beans from their amply stocked garden. The people who lived in the countryside were a lot better off than those in the towns and cities. They would feed their hens with boiled peelings from the vegetables, mixed with bran, and the malty smell was overwhelmingly delicious, just like the smell from a brewery. I couldn’t resist trying the mixture. It would have been better with a little butter and a dusting of white pepper, but it was better than tripe and better than liver. Lucky hens.

These were the days of tripe and offal, sticky spoonfuls of malt, concentrated orange juice that came in medicine bottles with corks, tins of condensed milk (a luxury), and cod liver oil; but from time to time something rare and beautiful would appear in the middle of the dining table: steak and kidney pudding, in a big white bowl covered with a tea towel, tied with string. It was a memory I’d play over and over just before going to sleep: the sight of a large spoon disappearing into that pale golden suet pastry and then coming up with a steaming mound of steak and kidney in rich velvety gravy. It was the stuff of my dreams.

My earliest memory of food was when I was learning to read. It was an illustrated fairy tale about a village that grew a giant turnip. It grew and grew until it overshadowed the cottages. In the end the blacksmith made a huge cauldron and the whole village feasted on a delicious turnip soup for days to come. The illustrations looked so lovely, with bits of the purple and yellow turnip, with its green leaves, simmering away while the villagers sprinkled it with pepper and gazed longingly at it and drooled. Even reading books like Treasure Island stimulated my appetite when, in the opening chapter, Billy Bones, a drunken pirate captain, stops at an inn and asks for a plate of bacon and eggs. Apparently that’s all he wanted to eat, a plate of bacon and eggs, and a bottle of rum. Forget the rum, I used to spend some time conjuring up what a plate of bacon and eggs would look like. I don’t think four ounces of rashers, the permissible weekly amount then, would have covered the plate.

Even singing Christmas carols in the church choir made me feel hungry. ‘Bring me flesh and bring me wine,’ said the carol ‘Good King Wenceslas’, and I’d imagine hunks of meat roasting on a spit in a huge fireplace with flagons of red wine nearby—an image no doubt equally inspired by a film I’d never tire of seeing at the Savoy cinema in Swaythling on Saturday afternoons: Robin Hood