Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Maitre chef des cuisine of the Savoy Hotel, presiding over one of London's great kitchens with a staff of more than a hundred.
On the island
Eight records
reminds me of home, it reminds me of my upbringing. Uh you heard it on on Bay and Dry, which was a local radio station, and I felt it was just perhaps the right music to start off with.
Overture to The Marriage of Figaro
goes back to my mother actually who was a great lover of that uh piece of music and and we heard it a lot in our family.
it's about uh his three children he has got and he had two before and this third one somehow just tipped the balance. And Sue, my wife and I, very often feel like that as well because we've got three.
Savoy Havana Band / Savoy Orpheans
at the end of the evening when the caparet started we used to go round the door and to look at the stars up on the stage. And when the caparet was over they usually ... I used to start playing these songs, and the children always stuck in my mind.
reminds me of when I came back to the country the second time around the hot summer in 1976.
Clarinet Concerto in A majorFavourite
Jack Brymer, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Thomas Beecham
I came across that um I think about twelve years ago or something like that and uh it became part of my little collection and I listened to it quite often.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:01Tell me about the pigeon in red wine sauce that changed your life. Give me a flavour of it first.
The first thing which I found so astonishing about the pigeon was its tenderness. It was beautifully cooked. It was just pink, nice and pink. The depth of the red wine, they must have used a very good clarit, I think, to get a sauce like that. Although I always say even to this day, it is not the ideal sauce for pitchin. But then at the age of eighteen I thought it was absolutely great.
Presenter asks
1:48Do you think you're born with good taste buds? Is it a gift?
It is a gift in the first instance, but and then I think I sometimes think it's like with a car, you see, if you only have a Drifner Mini, of course it's very, very hard to imagine what a Royal Royce would feel like. And I think it's the same with taste bads. I think the more you eat or very often the more wine you drink, I mean I I would imagine great wine connoisseurs will have the the same kind of recollection as well. But I mean I haven't got it in wine, I must tell you that I probably don't drink enough of it. But you get to know these things.
Presenter asks
4:03Your kitchens serve hundreds of meals a day. Is there a danger that fine detail is sacrificed to order and efficiency?
The keepsakes
The book
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Sogyal Rinpoche
the book actually is a one I've read only about six months ago, and it's the Pattern Book of the Living and Dying. It's about Buddhism and the approach to death, which sounds terribly sad but it is not. It's actually a very cheerful book.
The luxury
My luxury I thought would be a wok, which I'd like to take along, because you can do anything in a book. You can poach, you can steam, you can fry, you can do almost anything in it and I thought obviously it would be the tool to give me the feeling of luxury.
I think that danger is always there. I think that danger is probably there in a small restaurant as much as in a larger kitchen. I think it depends very much there on the motivation of staff, how you motivate your staff, what kind of rapport you have got with them. ... Well, I stick I wouldn't like to say I stick my finger in most uh sources which code, but I've I think I've got my finger in many pies, so to speak. I think it depends very much on on your personal involvement and how deep you are in it.
Presenter asks
8:04What then are your gastronomic roots? Did food play an important part in the family home?
I think food was quite an important part, almost more a ritual part in in in our family. It was uh something like going to church on Sundays. It was every morning you sat down for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was very much a sort of traditional family where my father sat in the head of the table and he had the first helping and then it went sort of to mum and older brothers, sisters. And then you ended up as the youngest one, you ended up to have the what was left over, which was always too much anyway.
Presenter asks
11:28And what did your father say when you said you wanted to be a chef?
Well, dad had always different ideas for his children than than his children had themselves. I mean, he wanted me to go into a bank, and I couldn't see myself in a sort of dry and dusty bank for the rest of my life. Uh I don't think my mother could see me in there either. I think she she seemed to understand me quite well in my arguments and she supported me. And the kids were obviously all on my side. I mean that we all were against my father most of the time anyway, so that came quite natural.
Presenter asks
18:15After that first year, you went to work in Switzerland under chef Emile Perrin. How did that experience differ from your first year under Trompetto?
Monsieur Perrault was a completely different man. I mean he was a man who I would imagine did very little with a cool head. He did everything with with emotion and and and feeling. I mean he was everything a chef I thought then should be. He was warm, he was very human, he was terribly enthusiastic at seventy two about his business. Um he was a great cook and chef. I mean he wasn't just a chef, and he was a cook, you see, and I think that's about the greatest compliment you can pay a man.
“The first thing which I found so astonishing about the pigeon was its tenderness. It was beautifully cooked. It was just pink, nice and pink. The depth of the red wine, they must have used a very good clarit, I think, to get a sauce like that. Although I always say even to this day, it is not the ideal sauce for pitchin. But then at the age of eighteen I thought it was absolutely great.”
“It is a gift in the first instance, but and then I think I sometimes think it's like with a car, you see, if you only have a Drifner Mini, of course it's very, very hard to imagine what a Royal Royce would feel like. And I think it's the same with taste bads. I think the more you eat or very often the more wine you drink, I mean I I would imagine great wine connoisseurs will have the the same kind of recollection as well. But I mean I haven't got it in wine, I must tell you that I probably don't drink enough of it. But you get to know these things.”
“Food is not about lobster or caviar or or all these expensive things of foie gras, which of course is is great and and they are good things and we need them, I think, and there's a place for them. But I think good food is what you eat every day at home or or in a little cafe or in a little pistre. I think that's what food is all about.”
“cooking is made up of three things, I think. First of all, draining. Secondly, it is creativity. Um and obviously they're they're Some people who are hugely creative and others who are not and some people like myself who are sometimes creative and then for weeks they don't get anything like that. So it's a bit like, you know, f finding a truffle by a pig or something like that. And the third and the third thing about cooking, and I think that must not be underestimated, and I think that's probably fifty percent of it, is determination, application and and ambition.”