LULR’s 15 minutes with cook, food writer and TV presenter Valentine Warner began with a chat about Monster Munch and ended on the subject of green tomatoes. Here, he tells LULR about his new book and why good food should always have roots.
Your new book, The Good Table, seems to be as much about where our food comes from as it is cooking with it. Would you agree?
I think it is. So much of food is memory. I want to, by cooking something, be reminded of that dusty, dry French square, the shade of plane trees and the buzz of mopeds in the background. I like to remember, and I think that’s what food does So much happens to a plate of food before it’s ever assembled and put in front of you, and that story is very important to me.
So for you it’s about the nostalgia of food as well and the story behind it?
Yeah, and all the people as well, like the cooks or the person who told you a very interesting story at that time – it all happens around the table. The table is this important workhorse, on which you do all this stuff on. It’s a very important piece of furniture, it’s the centre of the home because it supplies you with the thing that keeps you alive and shows other people that you love them. It doesn’t even have to be a table; it can be a telephone directory you used to chop a tomato on, or a rock in Africa that you were gutting something on. It’s this important idea. I feel sad that certainly in this country the table is becoming less and less important.
Do you have a favourite recipe in the book?
I love simple things, like the potato gnocchi with wild garlic. Gnocchi is very easy to make and wild garlic is incredibly easy to find – once you can small it you’re standing on it. That’s something you can put together really quickly. The toast section is also great – so much of my life is spent on toast and there are so many good things you can put on it.
What is it about home-grown food that’s important to you?
It’s important because I see an increasing lack of variety unless you go to a restaurant. The collective national fridge is full of peppers, week in week out, regardless of what month it is. And maybe you’ll still get a pepper that tastes delicious in December, or you want to eat a strawberry in January, that’s fine – I’m not here to tell you not to – but there is a logic to food. The fact is that mother nature intends you to eat the things that grow here because the weather is like it is. Geography tells you what to eat and what mood you’re in tells you what to eat, so isn’t it the more you know about your food the more you know about what’s available and then the more options you have? Then inevitably you’ll end up being far kinder to your wallet.
I think the other thing is that if you go to buy apples in a lot of the supermarkets they’re big and round and juicy, but that doesn’t mean that they’re good apples. Supermarkets are here to stay and I’m not here to fight them, but if you ignore apples simply because that particular variety always had a scab on it, then that’s an amazing taste that you’re never going to eat, and as a result it’s probably an apple that will disappear from this country. In the same way that all the old pubs that used to have a skittles hall have become pubs that are painting that ghastly taupe colour. I’m not here to wag my finger at anyone, but I just don’t want these things to disappear purely because life should apparently become more convenient for us and more uniform.
Are you a big advocate of trying to grow your own?
I am. I live in London but at the moment don’t grow my own. I go to my friends’ houses and nick their vegetables instead.
When you’re busy working in the city, where would you go to find a bit of peace and quiet?
I can’t do more than three weeks in London without feeling absolutely bonkers. I’m a great believer in the spirits of the hills and the woods. And there is a lot of food out there as well. If you can go to the country and come home with a mackerel in your hand and a horseradish that you found on the way home – well, there’s dinner, and you feel like you’ll always be ok if you know how to find these things. I don’t want to be at the mercy of a microwave!
Can you ever feel that way in the city?
Yes, absolutely. I’ve lived in parts of the city that are not uniform. Around Portobello Road, for example, where there are very strong Afro Caribbean and Moroccan communities. It’s very easy to dip into those places. Instead of going to restaurant for lunch you can go eat in the Moroccan cabin on Goldbourne Road and have a plate of lentils for £2.50. That’s what it’s about for me. I love to go and have complicated food every now and again in some terribly grand restaurant, but on the whole, I’m very much a cook rather than a chef and the food that I care about is food with roots. Great if it has a nice colour, but if it doesn’t that’s not the point. It’s about the taste.
What’s you’re favourite seasonal snack now we’re coming into autumn?
I think autumn’s brilliant because you’ve got quite a lot of what summer has to offer left, but then you’ve also got the game coming in, and the mushrooms, and the root vegetables, which I love, and cabbage, which is one of my favourite things in the world.
Valentine Warner’s new book The Good Table is out now (Michael Beazley/£25)
