Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A food writer and former food editor of The Observer, known for bestselling, award-winning cookbooks with an easy, tasty style.
On the island
Eight records
The Teddy Bears' PicnicFavourite
Henry Hall and Val Rosing with the BBC Dance Orchestra
When I was um about nine, I used to be left alone in the house at night and I had to put myself to bed. And it was a creaky house with lots of dark wooden boards and panelling. And I used to put this record on. It was my sort of comfort blanket.
I bought an icing set. I saved up my money for an icing set, absolutely. But I could save up for a single. So I bought this, The Supremes Baby Love. It's my first ever purchase.
I would love to be able to sing. And when I was at school, I used to go to Sunday school and I thought it was all about singing loudly. I thought the louder the better. And then I was taken aside by the choir master, who actually said Is there any way I could just tone my voice down a bit? And this is just one of the most beautiful pieces of music.
It sounds a bit shallow that that my mood can be completely changed by a piece of music, but it can. No matter how sort of down I might be, there is one piece of music that just has me up and I have to say dancing around the kitchen on my own
Very occasionally, um I feel I can be I can almost enjoy being sad nowadays. I think I'm okay with it. All the music I ever listened to really was happy music. Now I'm I'm quite okay with sitting and indulging and wallowing in something and Chet Baker, particularly his version of The Thrill Is Gone, is a very sad piece of music, but it's um one that I thoroughly enjoy.
I wanted to include something from uh my very favorite album, which is um The Beatles Revolver, but I found that when I started to cherry pick tracks, they didn't work, so I went to my second favorite album, which is Roxy Music's Avalon.
When I was in my twenties I had a chance of going on holiday alone with a backpack to India. and I took one tape on my Wilkerman which I thought would keep me going for the entire holiday. And there was a point during that during that trip when I just was aware of being incredibly happy.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
I've recently um discovered a little bit of early music and this piece is the uh the Heliod Ensemble and Palestrina's uh Canticus Canticorum.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:40When you wrote the memoir of your childhood, did you go back and taste [the foods] and did they unlock memories for you?
When I wrote Toast, my autobiography, I tasted everything in the book. But funnily enough, it wasn't actually the taste of the food that unlocked the memories. It was the smell of it. It was unwrapping a chocolate flake.
Presenter asks
14:29How did [your father] cope, first of all, domestically, in the house [after your mother died]?
Well the answer is he didn't. Dad had never cooked, he'd never made a bed, he'd certainly never washed an iron sheet. And suddenly he had to look after this little boy, and of course I was quite a finicky eater. So he would come home from work, covered in oil, from the factory, and would have to make a meal, and night after night after night it was cheese on toast. And then he would give me a little chocolate mini roll for pudding. And he couldn't cope. He couldn't deal with it. It wasn't his world.
Presenter asks
16:13In what ways was [Joan Potter] not like your mother?
Mum was very gentle. She was a very elegant woman. and was one of those rather old fashioned people who wouldn't leave the house without the shoes to match the bag, and she always wore a brooch. You never saw her putting on make up. And suddenly the woman who replaced her was, you know, the woman with curlers in her hair and two inches of cigarette ash hanging off her her cigarette. She was a woman who um swore she was so different to mum.
The keepsakes
The book
Derek Jarman
I'm going to miss my garden, too. I'm really going to miss it. So the book I take is Derek Jarman's story of the garden that he created in the shingle opposite the Dungeness nuclear reactor.
The luxury
Howard Hodgkin's painting 'Learning about Russian Music'
I'm not going to be happy with the endless stretches of beige sand and blue sea. I need something that is incredibly colourful. And my luxury would be a painting, and it would be a particular one. It would be Howard Hodgkin's learning about Russian music. ... They just fill me with energy and I love that that picture.
Presenter asks
24:14When did you realize you could write for a living about food, or when did the breakthrough come?
I'd been asked by a customer at a at a cafe I was working at um if I'd test some recipes for a magazine that she was setting up. I tested them and found that actually some of them didn't work, and I just wrote a little introduction to her saying look these recipes aren't going to work. Don't publish them. And she liked what I wrote and and and said, Well, do some of your own then. So I did, absolutely terrified. And it suddenly felt very comfortable. I thought I love this and I liked the writing, introducing the recipe, as much as I did the technical side of actually developing the recipe and making sure it worked.
Presenter asks
29:26What do you think your Dad would think of you now if he could see your success?
I don't know. I'm still a cook, aren't I?
“I'm still angry. If you sit down and read Toast from beginning to end, it's probably, I don't know, six to seven hours. He made my life a misery for six to seven years. And no, I'm not going to forget that. I can't forget it.”
“I really thought that being a chef was all about cooking, and it's not. It's as much about teamwork and organization. Now I don't do teamwork. I don't do team games to this day.”
“I'm not sure that good cooking is part of our national DNA. ... We've had a heritage, I think, of food that was fodder was there to keep us warm in a cold climate. We didn't really eat for pleasure, we didn't eat to be excited by food, and now we're discovering that we can.”