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CHRISTOPHER TROTTER


Home is where the stomach is


Christopher Trotter is a chef on a mission to get us all eating locally grown, seasonal food


WORDS PETER RANSCOMBE IMAGES ANGUS BLACKBURN H


e may have started his career in the kitchens of the Savoy hotel in London, but Christopher Trotter’s passion for food and drink was ignited many years earlier in the family kitchen in St Andrews.


While his father taught theology at the town’s university, Trotter’s mother cared for her four children, teaching her son how to make everyday staples such as bread and yoghurt. ‘She was a great cook,’ remembers Trotter. ‘Food was an important


part of family life. In those days, the early 1970s, you didn’t cook with seasonal ingredients because you thought it was a good thing to do – you did it because that’s what everybody did. I remember the first avocado pear that came into the house, which my brother brought back from Israel. It was very exciting.’ After his career had taken him to restaurants in France and Switzer-


land, Trotter returned to the UK to cook at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Warwickshire. Yet it wasn’t until he took over at the Portsonachan Hotel on the banks of Loch Awe that the quality of the ingredients avail- able in Scotland really struck him. ‘Being born here, you just take it for granted,’ he explains. ‘But this


is the best food in the world. The quality is partly due to our long, slow growing season, and partly due to our farming skills, which go back a long, long way, giving an understanding of the soil. We have fantastic game, fantastic shellfish. You name it, we’ve got it.’ Returning to Fife some 25 years ago cemented Trotter’s desire to work


with Scottish food, through his bespoke tours and through the cookery classes he runs, teaching groups of cooks in their own kitchens. ‘I still get excited when foods come into season,’ he enthuses. ‘I won’t


eat asparagus or strawberries or other fruit and vegetables outwith the Scottish season. There’s nothing worse than Peruvian asparagus – I’m sure it tastes great in Peru, but there’s not much point in flying it thou- sands of miles to bring it over here when we have this wonderful six-week season of asparagus in our own country. ‘You look forward to that, enjoy it at that point and then move on to


something else – because there’s always something else. ‘I never eat Spanish strawberries either, because they’re tasteless and


they have the texture of turnip. We have wonderful strawberries in Scot- land, in the season. That’s what keeps food so wonderfully fresh for me; we don’t have the same thing day in, day out.’


Image: The chef with one of his cookbooks, The Whole Cow. WWW.SCOTTISHFIELD.CO.UK 129


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