Shovelling a pizza into an oven may not be the most complicated of culinary arts, but there’s a certain knack to it and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall clearly remains unconvinced that his newest pupil has what it takes to execute the manoeuvre effectively. “Now this is the tricky bit,” he says. “Are you going to go for this or am I going to do it?” In the end he lets me get my mitt on the shovel second time around. “You can do it with a double shuffle or one great hoick but you don’t want to send it splatting to the back of the oven.”
Splat. “Mmmm. Has it gone to the back?” Er, there does seem to have been contact. “Mmmm. May be difficult to get that out.”
It is all go at River Cottage HQ. Beside the remedial pizza-making class, Hugh has been making porridge in front of the cameras for his next series and supervising a magazine shoot. A magazine is interviewing one of his chefs, staff bustle in and out of the converted farm buildings and others toil in the garden. Oh, and one of his assistant chefs has just sliced a portion of her finger off and departed for casualty. “She seems fine,” he grimaces. “The worry is you go into shock.” He did the same while cooking on a trawler a couple of years ago and his reaction had to be heavily bleeped.
Fearnley-Whittingstall, 44, has created quite a River Cottage industry on a farm on the Devon-Dorset border. The original River Cottage was vacated years ago and this is the third version, bought as somewhere to film the TV programmes and run all the enterprises; books, master classes, a store and canteen in Axminster, another canteen in Bath and a website which seeks to match would-be growers with vacant parcels of land. The man himself and his family live on 30 acres 15 minutes away, with three beef cows, a dozen sheep, a couple of pigs and two goats.
The latest production is River Cottage Every Day, a fat volume in which he makes an admirable stab at persuading us that we too can eat like him all the time, not just when we are throwing a dinner party or cooking Sunday lunch for a dozen hungry carnivores.
There is not a cow’s tongue casserole or a human placenta with shallots and garlic in sight. But you will learn how to mix up that leftover beef with some mustardy lentils and mint, or rustle up a quick spinach, bacon and goat’s cheese frittata.
“In the past I have tended not to be shy of process and things that take a little bit of time. But I wanted to remind myself that my own cooking every day is very simple and is often a matter of compiling things with leftovers or a quick assembly supper for the kids . That doesn’t mean stinting on quality or freshness of ingredients or ethical ingredients.”
He says that you have to be prepared to spend some time in the kitchen. “You can’t make food appear magically from nowhere on your table. And I never want to stop encouraging people to believe that the time they spend cooking is going to be quality time not drudge time. That’s the most important thing.”
When I suggest that people lead busy lives and often don’t have time to cook, he says that is true but then goes on to challenge us to think about what we are spending our time doing. “You have got to ask yourself, if you are always looking to save time in the kitchen, what are you saving that time for? Is it for the gym? Is it for watching telly? Or could cooking fill that space in a positive way?”
His evangelism for cooking with fresh, well-sourced ingredients is “never going to get everyone. But we have changed peoples habits in some cases, changed peoples lives. I do get stopped by people and they say ‘we keep chickens’; ‘this year we started an allotment’ or they started baking their own bread.”
He undertook his own food journey as a teenager. He grew up with a fondness for food and was so keen on making cakes that his mother bought him a sweet thermometer for his seventh or eighth birthday. But his tastes were unsophisticated. “The food I loved, I loved with passion. Findus Crispy Pancakes, boy did I love them. Fish fingers: completely addicted. Also my mum’s spaghetti Bolognese. I used to be really fussy. There was a whole list of foods I wouldn’t touch which definitely included mushrooms or tomatoes in any shape or form, except ketchup. Couldn’t put them in my mouth without gagging.” Only when he was a teenager and his father started growing tomatoes did he learn to love them. He fell for mushrooms when someone took him hunting wild fungi.
He was at Eton a year below Boris Johnson and is delighted that the Mayor of London is promoting a scheme for 2,012 new growing spaces in the capital by the Olympics. “Even Boris! Who used to delight in describing the gnarledness of organic vegetables and was deeply cynical about all that. We’ve always got on well.” After Oxford he wangled a job at the River Café but eventually was fired. “I didn’t have the rigour or discipline. I did forget to clean up after myself.” He remains on good terms with Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray.
Although every year he does a couple of dozen of the numerous cookery demonstrations at River Cottage HQ, he rarely cooks at his restaurant in Axminster. “I am not a restaurant chef.” Indeed, his criticism must be the most delicately expressed of any ever voiced in a professional kitchen. “You have been very generous with the tomato,” he says eying my pizza. “Not necessarily a bad thing, but I think you might find that is a bit wet underneath.”
Would he ever eat a supermarket pizza? “Well to be honest I wouldn’t eat anything from a supermarket.” His Chicken Out campaign highlighted the conditions in which chickens destined for supermarket shelves are reared and caused a rumpus .
“Anonymous meat is the thing I am most wary of. If you sense a reluctance either on the packaging or the menu I believe you are entitled to assume the worst.” If he is out filming and someone comes back with a pile of pre-packaged sandwiches “I will just pass on that. I will eat a bag of crisps and a chocolate bar.”
Many of the dishes in his new book are made from leftovers and the most interesting section is on packed lunches, about which he is characteristically excited. “Psychologically taking something from your home to your place of work is really special and of course lunch boxes are the way to do that. Made for you by your partner that’s very special, but if it’s been made for you by yourself that’s a little treat you have done at home. From a health point of view, taking a nice pile of your home loving bugs with you to work rather than picking them up on the way — I don’t know, I’m not an expert, [but] it makes sense.”
He usually makes a lunch box for Marie, his wife, but this morning she made her own: flakes of bream that he had caught earlier in the week and cooked for supper, over some ratatouille and pumpkin corn bread that he cooked for the TV cameras. His children, aged 13, 10 and 6 have school lunches. His fourth child is due next year.
At home they will cook “probably one sometimes two biggish things a week and eke it out after that.” He eats less meat than he did . “I have a certain reputation as a rabid carnivore. Not that I feel the need to counter that but I do want to remind people that vegetables are centre stage. You don’t have to have great slabs of meat. Meat can be a seasoning.
“I have talked a lot about meat but I have always said less is more. Really good meat and eke it out and treasure it. Surely there can be no more precious food than the flesh of an animal that’s died . I don’t think I am about to flip and become a vegetarian but the ethics of meat is a constant quite near the front of my mind.” That doesn’t sound like the most ringing endorsement of carnivorous life. I tell him a vegetarian friend who has been monitoring his programmes is convinced he will eventually end up rejecting meat. “Well, we’ll see, we’ll see. Its not going to happen tomorrow I can tell you.”
For all his anguish about how we produce our food, he is a jolly cook as we swig back the organic nettle ale (“Been approached by a couple of supermarkets but don’t really want to go there”) and eat the pizza peeled off the back of the oven. The young chef who cut off a chunk of finger appears, her hand bandaged. “You know we found a bit,” he tells her cheerfully.
Before I leave we wander back into the kitchen where something is burning. He opens the door of the oven and disappears in a cloud of smoke. “Aha!” he declares, with the delight of a man who has found exactly what he is looking for. “I think there’s a little bit of your pizza at the back here.”
River Cottage Every Day by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is published by Bloomsbury at £25. To order it for £22.50 inc p&p call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
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