Rick Stein

Speaker 40:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety nine, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:32

My castaway this week is a chef. Twenty-five years ago he opened a restaurant in a small Cornish town because he'd failed to make a living doing anything else. Today it's a temple to the art of cooking fish and people from all over the world descend on it to taste its delicacies. Its owner has become a celebrity, popular on television and selling his cookery books by the thousand.

Presenter0:54

Now, after a public school education, Oxford University, and this late blossoming career, he says, I felt so hopeless and useless as a youth, but I've made a success. There must be lots of other people like me. He is Rick Stein. I'm not sure there are a lot of other people like you,

Presenter1:11

For the simple reason that what you discovered was that inside you somewhere you had a natural talent for something, didn't you?

Rick Stein1:19

Yeah, I did, I suppose. I mean, um, it it was a bit late in coming, but I I did begin to realize that I could cook. And I I do now think that cooks are born, not made. Really good cooks. It's something.

Presenter1:32

Do you? What what is it, then? What is it that you've got that we haven't?

Presenter1:37

Well I

Rick Stein1:37

Fly having

Rick Stein1:39

I think it's enjoying giving pleasure to other people. Um um it's sort of living vicariously. And the way I cook, I'm always thinking, would they like that? and putting myself in their position. And I think some cooks just

Rick Stein1:54

Cook a little bit.

Rick Stein1:56

Without an audience, really. I mean, it's like.

Presenter1:59

I'm not sure.

Rick Stein2:00

going on on stage live. I mean, it it brings the best out of it.

Presenter2:04

Seems to me you're not at all proud. You will go to another restaurant and think that's really nice and go home and cook it and serve it in yours, won't you?

Rick Stein2:10

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I'm not at all bothered about, you know, giving my recipes away, and I never think that anything I do is that sort of special anyway. And if I see somebody's done something really good, I suppose the most successful recipe I've ever nicked is is salmon with sorrel sauce, and it came from the Troi Gras brothers in the Rhône. And it's just one of the we started cooking it in the mid eighties, and it just was an instant success and always has been. I've got loads of sorrel in the garden just for this one dish. And I feel quite sort of, well, sad that I never thought of it in a way. But when you come across a brilliant dish like that, you just constantly go back and just think how wonderful it is.

Speaker 42:20

Mm.

Presenter2:51

It's just a perfect combination, is it, salmon and sorrel?

Rick Stein2:53

It is.

Presenter2:54

What's the best recipe you've ever been inspired to create?

Rick Stein2:59

Very difficult, but I think um

Rick Stein3:01

I mean there's one dish that's very successful for us which is a combination of cod. It sounds extraordinary this cod butter beans, fennel and aioli. But it's it I had the idea of a sort of provencal aioli, but I did it all warm. And there's a really nice sauce with it that's got a little bit of chili in the background and it's almost what you might call a fish gravy. It sounds a bit coarse that, but it just works and it looks great. And I'm really pleased with that because it's just such an unlikely success really.

Presenter3:35

You won't be able to knock that up on a desert island, but there should be some fish about, which we shall talk about. Tell me about your first record you want to take there.

Rick Stein3:38

You

Rick Stein3:41

Well, I mean the first records well, I had to have it. It's the uh Padstow May Day song. And I mean, May Day means just everything to me. I mean, it's it's just so lovely that that I live in this place where they have this festival that that

Rick Stein3:56

counts for everything. I mean, it's more popular than Christmas.

Rick Stein3:59

It's a fertility festival and it's a celebration of the the rebirth of the year in early summer. And those themes go right to everybody's heart, and that's why it counts for so much for people, because it's true. It's it's what life is really about.

Speaker 44:17

Unite and unite and let us all unite For summer is a come today And whither we are going we all will unite In the merry morning of May

Speaker 44:37

The young men have had snow they might for a summer in the gnome.

Presenter4:45

Steel Ice Pan and the Padstow May Day song. Padstow called Pad Stein sometimes these days because he do you hate it?

Presenter4:54

But you have kind of taken over. What you've got your main restaurant, which has got rooms, you've got a cafe, you've got a delicatessen, you've got another small hotel. I mean, you must have had a huge effect on the local economy.

Rick Stein5:07

Well, I suppose I have, yes,'cause it's you know, it's only a fishing village and um

Presenter5:11

How many people do you employ?

Rick Stein5:13

A hundred and thirty. I just had the latest figure and I was thinking, oh gosh, it's getting bigger and bigger.

Presenter5:19

But you began your business life there, I think, twenty five years ago, running a kind of club. What was it? Padstow's answer to Rick's bar.

Rick Stein5:29

Well I j I left um I went to Oxford. I left with um no clear idea what I wanted to do, but I just loved discos at the time and um I bought this place with a partner on the quayside in Padstow because I thought I could run this great disco and play all the songs that I loved and get really nice people to come in and enjoy it all. But I missed the point that Padstow's a tough long-standing fishing community and most of our customers were fishermen or friends of fishermen and they used to get well tanked up in all the pubs in Padstow and then come to us and then fight. Fight mercilessly and we were just powerless to deal with it. I mean we I suppose in retrospect we should have got bouncers and all that stuff but we were just rather nice and rather innocent.

Presenter6:21

What happened in the end?

Rick Stein6:21

What happened

Rick Stein6:22

Well, we got closed down by the police.

Presenter6:25

Hmm.

Rick Stein6:25

We were devastated. I mean I was held to be not an f a fit and proper person to hold a license.

Rick Stein6:32

But in retrospect, it was just the best thing that happened could have happened to me.

Presenter6:36

Because what they left you with, therefore, was a restaurant license. Yes, it was. It was all you had.

Rick Stein6:39

Yes, it was all you had. Yeah, I don't know whether they did it out of a sense of sort of sorrow for us or whether it was a bureaucratic mistake.

Presenter6:47

Or a piece of inspiration.

Rick Stein6:49

Bean, it'd be nice to think it was.

Presenter6:51

So you opened as a restaurant. What did you cook? What did you offer?

Rick Stein6:54

Well, it's just because in the this was the mid seventies, 1975, and uh the the the only good produce around w w was fish really. And it I didn't have any sort of tremendous acumen about d opening a fish restaurant. It it just seemed to be the right thing to do to get us out of trouble. And we just started cooking very, very simple fish, grilled bass and um sea bass and uh steamed lobster or not steamed boiled lobster or cold lobster with mayonnaise. But because the produce was so good, it it it was okay right from the r the word go.

Presenter7:30

And did you know when you began cooking like that for people, did you realize this is what I wanted to do?

Rick Stein7:37

No, I mean it was I was quite traumatized by the whole business of losing the license and being held and not a fit and proper person actually. And so I went into cooking to sort of like as my sort of salvation in a way. But then as people started I mean you know, chefs rely on customers to give you a pat on the back and that started to happen.

Presenter7:58

So that was when you started to feel less hopeless and less useless.

Rick Stein8:01

That's right, yeah. Yeah.

Presenter8:03

Record number two.

Rick Stein8:04

Well, actually this goes right back to my sort of r real childhood, and um it's Julie Andrews singing um Wouldn't It Be Lovely from My Fair Lavely? It's just that.

Rick Stein8:15

I mean, I did have a very secure childhood and I mean it actually reminds me of my sister Janie who died about ten years ago. But it it's just when you've got sort of records like that in the back of your memory, nothing can go wrong really in your life.

Speaker 48:31

All I want is a room somewhere, Far away from the cold ignite air.

Speaker 48:40

With one enormous chair Wouldn't it be lovely? Lots of chocolate for me to eat Lots of coal and making lots of meat

Presenter8:57

Julie Andrews singing Wouldn't It Be Lovely from the original cast recording of My Fair Lady. Why Padstow, Rick? Because you were born about as far away from the sea as you can get in the Cotswolds, weren't you?

Rick Stein9:08

Well, in fact, my grandparents bought a house just outside Padstone, not the same one that we lived in, which was built by my father and uncle, but very close to it, before the First World War. And th I mean they had quite a bad time in the First World War because it with a name like Stein and they were German. They were pretty unpopular. They lived in Surrey, in Weybridge in Surrey.

Rick Stein9:31

And people were really hostile to them because of the First World War, of course.

Presenter9:34

Well they'd be regarded as enemy alien to the bottom.

Rick Stein9:36

Absolutely, yeah.

Presenter9:38

So they rushed off to Cornwall.

Rick Stein9:39

Well, they sent the children off to Cornwall, my father and um his um brother and sisters. Because in Cornwall it

Presenter9:45

Pooh.

Rick Stein9:47

I suppose it's different in a way and uh it's so far away and I think it's certainly at that period maybe the Cornish didn't f think of themselves as um part of the country or maybe they still

Presenter9:58

But you went there anyway as a child and and you you knew it and it's always been part of your life. But then I think in nineteen sixty five the family decided to move down there to live.

Rick Stein10:10

Yes, they did. Um my father retired. He was he was not well actually. It was a manic depressive and he was getting worse and he retired early and they went well, we all went to live in Cornwall.

Presenter10:21

So you'd have been what, about eighteen, I suppose.

Rick Stein10:22

Yeah, yeah.

Presenter10:23

And then something terrible happened. Your your father committed suicide.

Rick Stein10:27

He did, yeah. I mean, it's sort of inevitable looking back, but it's it's it's a bad thing having a father that commits suicide because

Rick Stein10:35

I mean I think that the chief emotion apart from sort of shock is sort of embarrassment really. I mean uh at eighteen you're sort of um trying to be grown up and you've got this terrible mad father who you know jumped off a cliff. So I mean it was sort of quite bad. And the the one thing you you you want to do is get away from it.

Presenter10:56

But did you understand or you say he was a manic debasif did you see it coming? Was it a terrible shock?

Rick Stein11:00

I mean it was a it was quite a shock to me'cause I I mean I knew he had these sort of mood swings, but I mean at that age I didn't really know the full implications of it. I mean the the way I reacted was to almost pretend it hadn't happened, you know, that it hadn't affected me. And the and the initial s uh way I dealt with this was just run away, was to go to the other side of the world. Um and I went to Australia for about a um a year and a half and America and Mexico.

Rick Stein11:29

But I remember ringing up a friend of mine and saying, What do you think? I'm and this was a a man in his forties then.

Rick Stein11:35

And what do you think do you think I'm running away? And he r wrote back and said, uh running away to sea never did anybody any harm.

Presenter11:41

Tell me about your next one.

Rick Stein11:43

Well, I mean this comes from that period of traveling around the world. I mean I was on my own a lot of the time because I decided to do it on my own, which was probably a mistake because you get so lonely.

Rick Stein11:53

It it just reminds me of uh being in America and getting on and off, um, greyhound buses and staying in sort of YMCAs and

Rick Stein12:02

Yeah, it's a tough old time actually. Until it just it takes me right back.

Speaker 412:06

And I would send a message to find out if she's talked But the post office has been stolen And the mailbox is loud

Speaker 412:22

Mama

Speaker 412:24

Can this really be the end To this stuff inside a movie With the Memphis Booz again?

Presenter12:33

Oh

Presenter12:37

Bob Dylan, and stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again. It sounds, Rick Stan, as if this travelling was a was a kind of test. Did you did you actually caught danger deliberately?

Rick Stein12:48

Well I suppose i it wasn't deliberate, but it did happen.

Rick Stein12:53

One of the worst times or the best time for me was on a track maintenance gang and all the other

Rick Stein13:00

people in that gang were ex convicts or convicts on the run. And I got on terribly well with them. But once in once or twice there were some very, very sort of ugly moments.

Rick Stein13:15

The man well, man, he was about my age, in his early twenties I suppose, um who was in charge of the gang, was a um ex prisoner from various prisons all over Australia, mostly in Sydney. And he was very intelligent, but he'd obviously had a deeply troubled childhood.

Rick Stein13:32

And w I was a little in awe of him, but wa one night we had this dog. It wasn't a dingo, it was just a sort of friendly dog called Warrigal that that lived round the camp.

Rick Stein13:42

And he suddenly announced he was fed up with Warragle. He said, I'm going to kill that dog.

Rick Stein13:47

and he threw it down a well, the the place where the camp was was called Deep Well. I was really nervous because you suddenly realize that th this man could b be really violent like that.

Presenter14:01

The impressive thing though, it seems to me reading about you is is not really all that daring do out there. It's that you came back to England. You'd only got two E's at A level, I think, and you suddenly decided you were going to go to Oxford, and at age twenty two you got into Oxford to read English. That is really courageous, isn't it?

Rick Stein14:20

Well, yes, I mean I I suppose I because I come from qu quite an academic background and I just thought this running away I maybe I ought to give academia another try. So I worked very hard to get into Oxford and in those days as long as you had two A levels that was okay because everything hinged on the entrance exam.

Presenter14:43

Yes, but a two E offer doesn't normally mean two E's.

Presenter14:47

But did did you feel, therefore, that you had something to prove? I know one of your older brothers ha uh got a first from Oxford. Did you feel hang on, they're gonna think I'm the Dimbo round here, I'm gonna show'em?

Rick Stein14:47

But it's a

Rick Stein14:58

Yes, I did feel, but it didn't really work very well. I mean, I think looking back on it, I just think it still was a bit not for me looking back on it. The problem with universities then was that people came straight out of school, straight into university, and really somewhere like Oxford, which favoured then, though it doesn't nearly so much now public schools. You just had the same atmosphere, and it was like going back into school. I was, what, 23, I think, at the time, and I finally got there. So I was a bit of an outsider then, anyway. But I really enjoyed the course. And the really nice thing was I had John Bailey, who was Aris Murdoch's husband, as a tutor. And he could see that what really I liked about English literature was the experience of it and actually doing all that academic tearing it apart. I didn't want to know about it. And he enjoyed that in me. And did you eat? Did you cook?

Rick Stein15:53

Well, in those days it was pretty trendy to to be

Rick Stein15:57

interested in food and cooking. I remember Len Dayton of all people had bought out a a cookery book and

Rick Stein16:04

He was in there going on about Sabatier knives and things and it was

Presenter16:08

Michael Kane did it in the Ipcris file, didn't he? Didn't he? Yes. All of a sudden it was a macho thing to do.

Rick Stein16:12

Indeed it was. And we used to have dinner parties. It's discarded.

Rick Stein16:19

And invite people around. Why did you cook? Well, I remember one splendid occasion when we did jugged hair and we went to the covered market in Oxford and

Presenter16:20

What did you cook?

Speaker 216:21

Yeah.

Rick Stein16:27

and bought a hare and uh we bought some wine from the college, some really posh um red burgundy.

Rick Stein16:34

Was ever so good?

Presenter16:36

And meanwhile you were making money with your mobile disco, so you were very busy, cooking, discoing, and you didn't get a first after all.

Rick Stein16:44

Not on your life did I get a first. I just scraped a third.

Presenter16:48

Who was looking? Record number four.

Rick Stein16:51

Well this is I love Van Morrison. I mean sometimes he's just so over the top it's it's just not true. He's he's patchy but when he's good he is just brilliant. And I d this is this is a celebration of of mundane things and but it just gives it such a sort of aura of nostalgia that I just love it.

Speaker 217:11

Coming back from Dean Patrick, stopping off at St. John's Point.

Speaker 217:17

Early all-day birdwatching in the crack is good.

Speaker 217:25

Stopped off its trying Fort Locke early in the morning.

Speaker 217:31

Drove through Shigley, taking pictures and on to Calais.

Speaker 217:35

Stopping for Sunday papers at the Lacalle district.

Speaker 217:39

Just before Coney Island.

Presenter17:42

Van Morrison and Coney Island. So there you were, Rick, running this small fish restaurant in Padstow through the second half of the seventies and into the eighties, with your wife Jill, whom you you'd met and married by then, and making a decent living, I'm sure, but but nothing exceptional.

Presenter17:58

But you'd committed to cooking and you were enjoying it. Did you think during that time about moving up country? Did you think I can't sit here for the rest of my life just cooking fish for the locals? I better get up there and compete with the big boys?

Rick Stein18:09

Well yes, I mean funnily enough that the Bob Dylan track that on earlier, I remember thinking, is this really the end to be stuck inside of Padstow with the August blues again? There's this sort of slightly frustrating feeling we weren't getting anywhere and I was. I was thinking of upping sticks and going to maybe Oxford or maybe London where I mean what you're looking for is p inform people that know about food. I mean once you do realize that you're doing something a bit serious with food then you want you want an audience.

Presenter18:39

So why didn't you?

Rick Stein18:40

Well, it was actually my sister Janie had always said, Don't move, just remember the raw materials and and that is so important. And looking back on it, I'm so glad we didn't because the whole thing about having a a fish restaurant on the coast in a pretty place like Padstow is it is people's people have this idea of going on holiday to somewhere like Paddetow and finding a restaurant like ours, and all you have to do is just do it. It's obvious, isn't it?

Presenter19:11

Oh and wait well, yeah, if it works, but you waited ten years, then there was the big turning point, wasn't there?

Rick Stein19:16

Yeah, well we we won a um

Rick Stein19:18

a s a national restaurant competition. It filled a restaurant. We got tons of interest. I mean in so much that we were on our knees really because we just couldn't cope with the business. But it sort of kicked us into another gear and it did give us that platform.

Speaker 219:21

Uh

Presenter19:32

Another

Presenter19:34

And since then, of course, has come the the television exposure and so on, which did the trick even more, and now you've got the Porsches and the rollers queuing up and people have to book months in advance. But then you've ceased to be what you set yourself up as in the first place, because now you run not a simple restaurant, you still cook food s fish simply, but you run quite a grand restaurant with

Rick Stein19:44

Have to book

Presenter19:58

Grand prices, and one doesn't blame you, you know, carpe diem and all that. But

Presenter20:03

You know, you've got away from the gap in the market that you saw and that you believe people ought to have.

Rick Stein20:09

Well, that's true, but but actually the cooking is still simple. Um the the reason that the prices are grand, it sounds like I'm sort of defending myself too intensely, but

Rick Stein20:19

Good prime fish, like turbot, sea bass, dover sole costs a lot of money. Okay, we're doing very well out of the restaurant, I wouldn't deny it, but it is expensive to put on prime fish in a restaurant.

Presenter20:34

And can you get it locally in Cornwall?

Rick Stein20:36

We can, yes. I mean, we're still lucky in that respect. I mean, of course, our requirements as a one restaurant are minute, and we still get everything we need. Next piece of music.

Rick Stein20:46

Well, this is uh lovely this. Uh it's actually we used it in the um seafood series on on the telly that I do, but um it's by Malcolm Arnold and he lived just outside Padstow in the early seventies and uh I was really friendly with him at the time and it was just great funny he used to have fantastic Czechoslovakian lager I remember in the in the sort of late sixties, early seventies when you'd never never even thought that they brewed beer in behind the iron curtain and great Russian gaspers and um Havana cigars and we were all in our early twenties and he was just just fantastic.

Presenter22:23

The London Philharmonic playing part of the Vivace, one of Malcolm Arnold's Cornish dances, conducted by Malcolm Arnold himself. So tell me your view, Rick Stein, of the average British fish consumer then. He is worried about the bones.

Presenter22:37

He he thinks it's something he should only eat on Fridays as a kind of penance, I think.

Rick Stein22:41

That's true. And the the problem is that that it's all about supply and demand. Because we don't buy that much fish, the supply doesn't tend to be as fresh as it could be. And therefore it's like a catch twenty-two, like a vicious circle that we don't buy enough, the the it isn't fresh enough and round and round it goes, whether you go to France or Spain or the coasts of Italy, and generally the fish in even in supermarkets in France, the fish is is not too bad.

Presenter23:11

So it's our fault, really. We the consumer are are responsible for the demise of the fishing industry, are we?

Rick Stein23:16

Well, I I think we are. I mean, it's a very difficult argument to hold, I suppose, but what I sort of feel is that if we cared more about seafood, we'd care more about making sure it wasn't fished out. We'd back our either, whichever way you look at it, either our fishermen or the the the people that decide where uh fish should be fished. I mean the whole business of fish quotas and conservation methods is so complicated and such a muddle.

Presenter23:49

Well, what it means is a lot of a lot of stuff that's caught is tipped back, is dumped back at sea, isn't it?

Rick Stein23:54

Well it is. I mean here simply the reason is that you've got a quota on something like hake. You go out, you fish your quota, you've got another say another day to fish. You look at the hake and half of it's a bit small. You know when you go back to the market that the big hake's going to fetch maybe twice as much. You dump all the small hake and go after the big stuff.

Presenter24:15

Dead in the morning.

Rick Stein24:15

Dead in the water.

Presenter24:16

And of course British fishermen also dump a lot of things that that that a French fisherman wouldn't because we won't eat them.

Rick Stein24:16

Yeah.

Rick Stein24:23

And that's true as well, th that there's an awful lot of um what they now call non-quota fish that there's not much of a market for in this country.

Presenter24:31

But on the other hand, you know, it's all very well you would have us eat these things.

Presenter24:36

We come back to but they're a bit worrying gooseneck barnacles, spider crabs, and you'll knock up the odd shark Vindaloo. I mean, it's pushing it a bit for us, really, isn't it?

Rick Stein24:46

Absolutely not.

Rick Stein24:50

Really, if you I mean I do a bit of work for one of the supermarket chains and and the sort of depressing fact is that everybody wants fillets of cod and place. And whether it's in season or out of season, that's what they get. And if you look at a f a place when it's out of season, y there's no way you should be eating it.

Presenter25:09

But do you understand at all our reservations about these things? Have you ever been offered any kind of seafood that is the equivalent of kind of monkeys' brains or sheep's eyes? You must have been put off by something.

Rick Stein25:24

Well, I suppose so I mean w in this the last series I did, we were in Thailand and we were offered this um crab and the only part you eat of this crab, which seems a bit of a waste of time, are the rows of the female crab and they cook them on a barbecue. And the taste is just of sort of charred shell. But the the thing that slightly alarmed me was the chap in the restaurant said, Are you allergic to shellfish? And I said, Well, no wine. He said, Well, it can kill some people.

Presenter25:51

Record number six.

Rick Stein25:53

Yeah, well this is um actually for my wife Jill because uh it just reminds me of uh when I met her when I was twenty one and just come back from Australia on that mammoth trip. It just takes me back to surfing and the beach and that's all part of you know my life just as much as seafood is.

Speaker 426:10

It's all a medicine, dark and cold and

Speaker 426:14

Conversation

Speaker 426:16

Girls we knew when their hair was soft and long, and the beach was a place to go.

Speaker 426:26

Sundays and wave sunshine California girls in

Speaker 426:33

Goldsmith warmed out weather let's get into Canada

Presenter26:40

Do It Again by The Beach Boys.

Presenter26:43

Do you use the sea? Do you go and sit by it? Do you have all these thoughts sitting looking at it?

Rick Stein26:49

Well, I mean, it's certainly one of the things I really used to like doing at um when I was cooking and getting extremely hot and bothered was just to go out after cooking and just go off to Travaux's Head in my car and just put some music on and um and just drive very slowly out to Travaux's Head and just sit looking at the surf at night. If it was moonlit, it was lovely and and just sort of relax. I mean that what is it about the sea? I mean it just sort of relaxes you.

Presenter27:14

And you need to be relaxed and calm,'cause you do so much. As you say, you don't cook any more, but you make television programmes, you write books, and now you want to open a a seafood cookery school.

Presenter27:25

Are you going to teach in that as well?

Rick Stein27:27

Well a bit. I'm not gonna put myself down as the sort of main attraction, but I'll certainly do guest appearances there. Well I I think it'd be very nice for people really.

Presenter27:35

Is it for amateurs or for experts?

Rick Stein27:37

Oh, amateurs. I I don't want to offer diplomas and things. It's just for s people want to know how to cook nice fish at home.

Presenter27:44

Again in Cornwall.

Rick Stein27:45

Yeah.

Presenter27:46

Nearby. Employ more people.

Presenter27:49

Add to the economy even more. But in the end, of course, there's only so much of you to go around. Do you think you're going to start spreading yourself a bit thin?

Rick Stein27:57

Well, I don't think so, because one of the things that's really worked for me and it's extraordinary is that because I had to give up cooking all the time because of the T V and writing the books, I had to employ really good people to do the job. So we've got a really good head chef, Paul, and we've got a general manager and a financial controller, as we call her. And the whole business is run really well now, which when Jill and I used to do it on our own, it was a real seat of the pants job. But when people come to Rickstown's in Padsda, they want to know Rick's

Presenter28:29

Times cook their fish.

Rick Stein28:31

Well

Rick Stein28:32

Maybe, but I think

Presenter28:34

Well, they want to meet you anyway. They want to see you. They want to know you're there, that your hand is on your hand. Well, I am.

Rick Stein28:38

Well, I am I am there when I'm there. I mean I do go into the restaurant and talk to lots of people. But I still I just think it's the sort of the style and the thoughts behind it and the recipes of course and the menus are

Rick Stein28:50

Are what really count, and also the quality control, which I'm still very much involved with. They call number seven.

Rick Stein28:58

Well, um I love this. I mean any record that has a a couple of lines i in it saying um two degrees in bebop, a PhD in swing, he's a master of rhythm, he's a rock and roll king, it's got to be worth it.

Speaker 429:15

There is no like country with a phone

Speaker 429:18

He's a man to me

Speaker 429:23

If you like the sound, there's the champion feet here, can be

Speaker 429:32

Man so

Speaker 429:33

Yeah.

Presenter29:42

Little Feet and Rock and Roll Doctor. So a desert island for you, Rickstein. You've probably been to quite a few. Where do you imagine yours might be?

Rick Stein29:49

Oh, I think probably uh in the Pacific somewhere, um, you know, sort of beyond Fiji.

Presenter29:55

How uh how soon would you get very miserable alone on a desert island?

Rick Stein29:59

I'd probably I mean, I'd be all right, certainly, w with the fish.

Presenter30:02

Well, if there were I was going to ask you that if there were a a fish dish that you might have as your last supper, what would it be?

Rick Stein30:10

Well I probably couldn't do it on the desert island, but but the one dish I like and people find it extraordinary that I really like is that classic French dish Ray aux bernoir or skate with black butter as we call it because actually most shark is I find a bit overpowering but I think skate or ray is a perfect balance of flavour and texture.

Presenter30:30

Not too bony.

Rick Stein30:31

No,'cause I mean it's the the sort of the the sort of I don't know how you describe the fillet of of skate, but it just peels away from that cartilage so sort of satisfyingly. And black butter, which is just cooked salted butter with vinegar and and parsley added and thrown over the top of the skate and then capers.

Rick Stein30:52

It it's just a a tremendous combination. And it's like all the great dishes in the world. They're simple ideas that that just are perfect. You know, take anything away and it doesn't work, but together it's great.

Presenter31:06

Last record.

Rick Stein31:07

Well, it's actually a piece of Mozart, and it's not that well known, but I sort of like it because it's not. It has to me all the sort of Mozart themes, that slight sort of resignedness to the sadness of life, but done in a very light way. And it's not his greatest piece, but who cares? It works for me. And it just reminds me of summers in Cornwall and a sort of feeling of slight peace and relaxation. But there's always that little edge to Mozart, I think, and I love it.

Presenter32:39

Werner Tripp and Hubert Jelineck with the Vienna Philharmonic playing the opening of Mozart's concerto for flute, harp, and orchestra in C major, conducted by Karl Munschinger.

Presenter32:49

If you could only take one of those eight records, Rick, which one would you take?

Rick Stein32:52

Well, I think I'd probably take that. Um, I I just don't I mean, I I'm not so sure a desert island's anything but a bit of a tough assignment, and I I wouldn't want too much nostalgia on my desert island really, and I'd just want a bit of peace and a little bit of sadness, but not too much.

Presenter33:07

What about your book?

Rick Stein33:09

Well, Anna Karenina, um, it's just I just think it's the best book in the world. I mean, it just because all her life's in it. And um and I mean, Tolstoy was just s so human, you know, and in every way. I know he had his faults, but I mean, not not in the books. They're just all encompassing. And I just think it's a greater book than War and Peace.

Rick Stein33:28

That's the one for me. And your luxury. Well, it's Thai fish sauce because seeing as I would be catching a lot of fish, it's made by fermenting anchovies with salt and then using the liquid that drains off as a flavouring agent. And it just lifts fish. If you had a bit of citrus fruit on the island as well, and maybe the odd chili, well, I'd be certainly happy eating my fish.

Presenter33:58

Rick Stein, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Rick Stein34:01

Thanks a lot.

Speaker 434:10

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.