Rick Stein Chef Rick Stein talks to
Property Mail about revisiting France, the problem with salads, and why food is a great equaliser.
WRITTEN BY ELLA WALKER Autumnal vegetable soup with basil, garlic and olive oil 30 / PROPERTYMAIL
Rick Stein’s new cookbook and accompanying BBC series are both a love letter to France - that beloved bastion of cheese, bread and wine - and a credit to his 30-year long collaborator and director, David Pritchard. “My early influences and inspiration came from France,” explains the Padstow-based chef and restaurateur, “and my director David sadly died recently. We both shared a love of all things French, and I think he thought it was time to revisit. He could see that France means so much to everybody.” Rick Stein’s Secret France is the result, and the project saw the 72-year-old set off on a culinary trawl of the country’s best dishes, while deſtly tackling some of the more pointed questions around French cuisine and its quality. “We’ve always had a bit of a conversation over the years about the way French food has declined
in people’s estimation,” explains the seafood legend. “[We wanted] to ask, if things have gone wrong, why?” Over the course of making the series, he came to the conclusion that “the sort of things that are going wrong in France are going wrong everywhere”. Blame first world economies, where people (quite rightly) want to be paid good money for cooking in hot kitchens and working anti-social hours. “Te reality is, to create good dishes that are well thought through and well cooked, you’ve got to pay people for it, and there is the rub, because a lot of people don’t expect to have to pay a lot for food,” says Stein, skewering online delivery meal companies and junk food. He argues that people are prepared to pay full-whack for Michelin standard food because fussiness tends to call for money, but “if you want to do simple, plain cooking
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