Читать книгу Riverford Farm Cook Book: Tales from the Fields, Recipes from the Kitchen - Jane Baxter - Страница 7
ОглавлениеMy four siblings and I are obsessed by food. It all comes from our mother, who was a fantastic cook and, contrary to the fashion of the times, drew her inspiration from the seasonal produce grown in her garden and on the farm. Every day she served wonderful, generous lunches for the family and many of the farm staff. Looking back, I am struck by how similar the lunches we shared around a long kitchen table then are to the ones Jane serves for our guests in the Field Kitchen today. They both demonstrate a passion for simple, gutsy food, served with informal generosity, combined with an unhealthy appetite for butter and cream – but then we are principally a dairy farm.
Bolstered by occasional but erratic amateur success in the kitchen and by an unflagging enthusiasm for my vegetables, I did briefly harbour fantasies of becoming a chef whilst in my thirties. Fortunately the fantasy passed, but the seed of an idea lingered on, nourished by preparing occasional feasts at the farm for staff, customers or school groups. Meanwhile, our box scheme flourished out of an enthusiasm for sharing the farm’s produce at its best, with people who wanted to know where it came from. A farm restaurant was a logical step but it took a lunch at Alice Waters’ wonderful Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, to sow the seed.
Wanting your own restaurant is an affliction common to many middle-class, middle-aged men and has been the ruin of quite a few. Anthony Bourdain, author of the wonderful Kitchen Confidential, puts our ailment down to a pathetic lusting after waitresses. For some, perhaps. For me, it had more to do with gluttony, and frustration at all the dreadful, overpriced meals I have been served locally, combined with a blind arrogance and naive belief that it can’t be that difficult.
I was determined that we would find a way of making the kind of authentic food my mother served at those farm lunches available to a wider audience without charging the prices that, too frequently, make real food the preserve of the wealthy and childless. With a strong vision but no experience, I set about designing the building, fighting with planners, raising the cash and starting construction. But who was going to cook the food?
Chefs and their staff make up an international network, with tribal allegiances accessible only to those on the inside. Every time I met an insider, I would collar them, describe my vision and ask if they knew of a chef who might help turn it into reality.
The cook
One day the phone rang and there was Jane from Sunderland, via a string of prestigious restaurants and a Pacific atoll. After 15 years of poncy food and high-pressure urban cooking, she had slowed life down and got back to basics on a remote atoll 550km north of Samoa, where she baked bread in a stone oven, and had her son, David, along the way. Swearing that she would not go back to London, and looking for a chance to apply her skills to the best ingredients with the minimum of pretension (something all southerners are suspected of), she threw herself into making the Field Kitchen a reality. As I remember it, there was no interview; it was obvious from the outset that Jane was the perfect choice, and we just got on with talking about how we were going to make it work.
Jane has a degree in agronomy but had spent much of her time at university cooking for friends. Her break came in Cornwall, working for George Perry-Smith at the Riverside in Helford, which led to a job at the Carved Angel in Dartmouth during its heyday under Joyce Molyneux – who Jane still cites as her main influence. This was followed by a spell at the River Café in London, which gave Jane an understanding of cooking very simply with respect for top-quality ingredients. Seven years spent cooking her way around the South Pacific challenged culinary preconceptions and taught Jane to improvise with greens such as the slippery cabbage she encountered on the Solomon Islands, making anything we can throw at her seem tame in comparison.
While we were finishing building the Field Kitchen, Jane established a canteen for our staff at one end of our packing shed, then a few months later, working with the head of our local primary school, took on the contract for supplying its school dinners. Initially I was fearful that such everyday feeding of the troops would be at best boring and at worst demeaning but, true to her proclamations in favour of gutsy over poncy, Jane rose to the challenge, making these children and staff some of the best fed in the land. The Field Kitchen was opened by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in May 2005 and was instantly a success with customers, if not necessarily with my accountant.
The restaurant
First-timers at the Field Kitchen can’t believe the quality and generosity, given the prices, which reflect our determination to make real food accessible and affordable to all. Indeed, we did lose money for the first two years while we fine-tuned our service but it looks as if we may have made a small profit in 2007. The secret, as with our box scheme, has been to banish choice, keep things simple, cut out fussy service and make the most of what is seasonally available from the farm. With Jane’s experience at the River Café and other high-end establishments, I was expecting a battle to get her interested in the humble, indigenous vegetables in our fields. I was so wrong; from the start, the ingredients around her were her inspiration, as they had been to my mother, and the menu quickly developed to reflect that week’s harvest, with new vegetables appearing on it as the season progresses.
The food is brought from Jane’s kitchen to the communal, refectory-style tables in bountiful quantities for guests to serve themselves and share with whoever is next to them. Occasionally there is some initial anxiety but the informal and communal atmosphere has a remarkably civilising influence, which eventually works its spell even on those cursed with a gluttonous resistance to sharing.
Getting excited about vegetables
Cooking with raw, unprocessed, seasonal ingredients requires time, commitment, and a range of skills lost to many of the current generation of cooks. I am a firm believer that the more you know about how, where and by whom your vegetables are grown, the greater will be your confidence, enthusiasm and willingness to spend time in the kitchen acquiring those skills. I hope that a walk around our fields, followed by Jane’s cooking, will inspire at least some of our visitors to cook, and to make more of fresh produce. The dishes we have included in this book are our favourites from the Field Kitchen and, in most cases, make best use of local ingredients. In each chapter, Jane’s recipes are preceded by information on how the vegetable is grown, when it is in season, what are the key indicators of quality, and how best to store and prepare it. Interspersed throughout the book you will find occasional rants on a diverse range of food and farming topics, which are broadly based on some of the newsletters that accompany the veg boxes each week along with a recipe from Jane.
