River Cottage 2009 Hugh in the hot seat

Date Published:

23/06/2009

As another great series of River Cottage draws to a close, 4Food caught up with Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall to discuss slugs, Landshare and how he really feels about the other Channel 4 chefs

What were your favourite bits from this series of River Cottage?

Fishing with Mark Hix; our little fishing competition and then the actual cook-offs on the beach in Lyme were great. To go fishing and then use up all that fish and then hand it straight out to the hungry public on the beach was a really nice thing to do.

Do you think the issue you raise in the show about sustainable fishing will get bigger over the next year or so?

Absolutely. The movie - The End Of The Line, that's just come out really hammers home how vital it is that we are sensible about the way we harvest the sea, because it's pretty much out of control. The bureaucracy exists in Europe to control fishing and it's just being abused and mismanaged. We pay these people a ridiculous amount of money to sit round tables in Brussels and they've made some catastrophically poor decisions. They have to start making some tough decisions or we're not going to have any fish left.

Is sustainable fish something you're going to pursue?

Yes, absolutely. It's partly about practising what we preach, making sure we use sustainable fish in the show and at the cookery school and in the new restaurant in Bath; that we walk the walk, talk the talk. You can't turn everything into a campaign, but we can continually keep people aware that this is an issue.

When you were a child, did you imagine that you'd live the River Cottage way?

I moved to the country with my Mum and Dad when I was nearly seven years old from London to Gloucestershire and so I had a country boyhood from that point on. My Dad got very into growing vegetables and I used to just disappear on my bike up the lanes with my friends from the village - it's a life that I loved from an early age. Then I had 10 exciting years in London in my twenties, but I knew I would always want to head back to the country, particularly when the time came to raise a family.

Do your family have the same kind of lifestyle as you?

Yes, very similar, although from the year dot for them - Oscar was one when we moved fulltime to Dorset but I'd already been spending a lot of time at River Cottage at that point.

This was one of the few times we've seen Oscar starring side by side with you on the show. Was he excited by that?

He was very relaxed about it. He's sort of sneaked in here and there before but this was the first time we've cooked together. It just felt natural, like how we are at home all the time. I didn't want to overdo it but since we are in the kitchen a lot together doing things it's just so easy to make that happen in the show. To do the goat thing without Oscar wouldn't really have made sense, since he's been very good about taking some responsibility for them. He really looks after them well. He milks them, not every day, but at least two or three times a week, and he can do it completely on his own.

So would you kill those goats or are they pets?

They're not pets - I hesitate to use the word 'pet', but they're productive milk goats, dairy goats, so we won't be eating them.

It feels like you've kept your family out of limelight until now. Was that a conscious decision?

Yes. It's certainly not my intention to draw the family into River Cottage in a really overt or conspicuous way. Marie has a completely different career she works very hard at and she's not particularly one for the limelight anyway. It feels natural at the moment to do the odd thing with the kids, whether it's gathering prawns on the beach or the goat stuff with Oscar. That's the overriding principle for me - if it's something that we do at home anyway and it feels part of the River Cottage story then it's something I'll consider.

What's with the slugs? How did you feel after you'd eaten them?

I think that my lovely team who I fed the slugs to didn't big them up quite enough, frankly. By the time we'd de-slimed them, tenderised them, worked out that they were slightly bitter and removed the guts we were left with a leathery kind of pasta shape which was quite good at taking on a sauce. The satay sauce that we served them with was delicious.

When I said, at the end, these were lovely recipes - just leave out the slugs that was true. It's still a mystery to me why snails are generally so good, a little bit sweet and fleshy, and slugs that really just look like a snail without a shell are so bad. I couldn't take several hundred years' worth of historical evidence for that, I had to find out for myself. But I wouldn't go rushing for the slugs, - I think my chickens enjoy them slightly more than I do.

What made you change from being a chef at River Café to start the River Cottage life?

Well, I had that country boyhood and I was always going to try and find a way to get back to that. Actually I got fired from the River Café. I was a messy cook and, I have to admit, I never really had the professional discipline to cut it in a restaurant kitchen. And at that point I had to decide - 'Is serious restaurant cheffing what you want to do because, frankly, if you can't hack it at the most relaxed restaurant kitchen in the whole of London what are you going to do?' - and I decided that I didn't fancy going to work for some crazed, egomaniacal, meat cleaver-wielding, staring eyed, espresso-fuelled, fag-smoking chef in pursuit of this third Michelin star - mentioning no names; Gordon! Frankly I was scared - it was too much like hard work. So what I did want to do was write about food and find out about food so I became a food journalist.

Find out what Hugh really thinks about Gordon, Jamie and Heston