Humble Pie. Gordon Ramsay

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       CHAPTER THREE GETTING STARTED

      GROWING UP, THERE wasn’t a lot of money for food. But we never went hungry. Mum was a good, simple cook: ham hock soup, bread and butter pudding, and fish fingers, homemade chips and beans. We had one of those ancient chip pans with a mesh basket inside it, and oil that got changed about once a decade. I loved it that the chips were all different sizes. She used to do liver for Dad – that was the only thing I refused to eat – and tripe in milk and onions; the smell of it used to linger around the house for days and days. Steak was a rarity: sausages and chops were all we could afford. We were poor, and there was no getting away from it. Lunch was dinner, and dinner was tea, and the idea of having a starter, main course and pudding was unimaginable. Did people really do that? If we were shopping in the Barras, and we decided to have a fish supper, we children all had to share. There was no way we would each be allowed to order for ourselves. Later on, when Mum had a job in a little tea shop in Stratford, she’d bring home stuff that hadn’t been sold. We regarded these as the most unbelievable treats: steak-and-kidney pies and chocolate éclairs.

      We were permanently on free school dinners. That was terrible. It used to make me cringe. In our first few years, of course, none of the other kids quite cottoned on to what those vouchers were about. But higher up the school it became fucking embarrassing. They’d tease you, try to kick the shit out of you. On the last Friday of every month, the staff made a point of calling out your name to give you the next month’s tickets. That was hell. It was pretty much confirmation that you were one of the poorest kids in the class. If they’d tattooed this information on your forehead, it couldn’t have been any clearer. So yes, I did associate plentiful food with good times, with status. But I’d be lying if I said I was interested in cooking. As a boy, it was just another chore. My career came about pretty much by mistake.

      I latched on to the idea of catering college because my options were limited, to say the least. I didn’t know if the football would work out. I looked at the Navy and at the Police, but I didn’t have enough O levels to join either of them. As for the Marines, my little brother, Ronnie, was joining the Army, and I couldn’t face the idea of competing with him. So I ended up enrolling on a foundation year in catering at a local college, sponsored by the Rotarians. It was an accident, a complete accident. Did I dream of being a Michelin-starred chef? Did I fuck! The very first thing I learned to do? A bechamel sauce. You got your onion, and you studded it with cloves. Then you got your bay leaves. Then you melted your butter and added some flour to it to make a roux. And no, I don’t bloody make it that way any more. I remember coming home and showing Diane how to chop an onion really finely. I had my own wallet of knives, a kind that came with plastic banana-yellow handles. At Royal Hospital Road, we wouldn’t even use those to clean the shit off a non-stick pan, let alone chop with them. But we were so proud of them – and of our chef’s whites. I treated my knives and my whites with exactly the same love and reverence as I used to my football boots. I sent a picture of me in my big, white chef’s hat up to Mum in Glasgow. I think she still has it. I was so fucking proud.

      Meanwhile, I had a couple of weekend jobs. The first was in a curry house in Stratford – washing up. The kitchen there wasn’t the cleanest place in the world, and they worked me into the ground. Then, in Banbury, Diane got me a job working in the hotel where she was a waitress. Again, I was only washing up, but that was when I first got the idea of becoming a chef. I was in the kitchen, listening to all the noise, and I was fascinated. I couldn’t believe the way people were shouting at each other. I was working like a fucking donkey, but the time used to fly by. I was enraptured.

      After a year, one of my tutors suggested to me that I start working full-time, and attend college only on a day-release basis. I’d made good progress. That said, I was by no means the best kid in the class. In college, you can spot the students from the council estate, the ones who are basically middle-class, and the ones whose parents are so in love with their daughters that they send them to cookery school. God knows why. There are three tiers, and you can spot them a mile off. I was in the first group. I didn’t get distinctions, and I wasn’t Student of the Year. But I did keep my head down, and I did work my bollocks off. I pushed myself beyond belief. I was happy to learn the basics. I didn’t find it demeaning at all.

      So I started work as a commis at the place where I’d been washing up: the Roxburgh House Hotel. The dining room was pink – pink walls, pink linen – all the waiters were French and Italian and all the cooks were English. My first chef was this twenty-stone, bald guy called Andy Rogers. He was an absolute shire horse. The kind of guy who would tell you off without ever explaining why. Dear God, the kind of food that he encouraged us to turn out. I shudder to think of it. The cooking was shocking, the menus hilarious. Take the roast potatoes. They started off in the deep fat fryer and then they were sprinkled with Bisto granules before they went in the oven, to make sure they were nice and brown. Extraordinary. The foie gras was all tinned.

      We used to serve mushrooms stuffed with Camembert. One of the dishes was called a scallop of veal cordon bleu. It was basically a piece of battered veal wrapped around a ball of grated Gruyère in ham. I knew it was all atrocious, even then. I was getting all this information at college, and I would come back and try to apply it. I’d say: ‘You know there’s a short cut. To make fish stock you should only cook it for twenty minutes, otherwise it will get cloudy, and then you should let it rest before you pass it through a sieve, or it will go cloudy again.’ For this, I would get roundly bollocked by the chef. He didn’t give a fuck for college.

      I stayed for about six months, and then I got a job at a really good place called the Wickham Arms, in a small village in Oxfordshire. The owners were Paul and Jackie, and the idea was that I would live above the shop, which was a beautiful thatched cottage. Unfortunately, things went pear-shaped there pretty early on. Jackie was in her thirties, I must have been about nineteen, Paul was away a lot; perhaps you can imagine what was going to happen.

      Paul was mad about golf, and he loved his real ale. So he’d be off down to Cornwall, in search of these wonderful kegs. I had a serious girlfriend at the time, I’d met her at the college but she was going off to university. So that didn’t stop me. Basically, I was in charge of the kitchen, and a 60-seat dining room, and I wasn’t even properly qualified yet. I was making dishes like jugged hare and venison casserole and doing these amazing pâtés, and just reading endless numbers of cookery books. Locally, everyone loved the food, and it became a kind of hot spot. But I guess that went to my head: I was on my own, completely free, no one checking up on me. I was all over the fucking shop.

      One day, while Paul was off on one of his trips, Jackie rang down to the kitchen. ‘Can I have something to eat?’ she said.

      ‘What would you like?’

      ‘Just bring me a simple salad, thanks.’

      So I got together a salad with a little poached salmon and took it up.

      ‘Jackie, your dinner is ready.’

      And she opened the door – stark bollock naked. I put the tray down, and went straight into her bedroom.

      For the next six months, I led a kind of double life. There was Jackie, my teacher, and Helen, my pupil. You know what it’s like when you’re young. It’s awkward and clumsy. Sometimes, at least before I met Jackie, I used to feel that sex was like sharpening a pencil. You stick it in there, and grind it around. But Jackie was teaching me all these things, and it was amazing. The trouble was that Helen got some of the fringe benefits, which meant СКАЧАТЬ