Jamie Oliver: King of the Kitchen - The biography of the man who revolutionised the way Britain eats. Stafford Hildred
Jamie Oliver: King of the Kitchen - The biography of the man who revolutionised the way Britain eats
and far from any major towns or cities, it was hard to get good fish. It was only delivered on a Tuesday and a Thursday and at The Cricketers they made a big feature of this. Jamie says, ‘I remember my dad shaking his head one day because a woman had complained about the fish. It was as fresh as you like. Even I knew that and I was eight years old. Dad said, “Son, we have to educate some of these people. They are just too used to the frozen stuff.”’
Nowadays, that education seems to be more or less complete and The Cricketers sells fresh fish every day of the week and their customers love it.
The skilled chefs employed at The Cricketers always made their own pasta and even though the theme in the kitchens was traditional English food, everything was done properly under Trevor’s stern control. The steak and kidney pie was made with the help of a half-decent bottle of red wine. The Cricketers has been extremely popular for years now. It took a long time and many hours of careful budgeting to build the business and, at the beginning, money was often very tight.
But Jamie and his sister never wanted for anything and, as the business grew more prosperous, they were always taught to be discreet about the family finances. Some of Jamie’s young friends’ families were very hard up and, even as a youngster, Jamie knew how to be thoughtfully tactful. His father taught him that the really successful restaurant is not about money but about providing an excellent meal and an enjoyable experience to its customers.
Jamie’s mother Sally runs the business side and she is also a very good cook. Sally had a huge influence on Jamie during his formative years and some of his earliest food memories are of her mouth-watering desserts. Sally taught her son to use local ingredients wherever possible and she spent hours with him in the garden or in local hedgerows picking fruit. Years later, Jamie said, ‘I know it’s not rocket science, but blackberries from the bush are never like shop-bought ones in punnets. They always taste so much fresher.’
Jamie loved going with his mum to collect strawberries and raspberries for fruit to make jams and summer puddings and he regularly made himself sick by stuffing more of the succulent fruit into his mouth than their basket.
There is a great catering tradition in the Oliver family and all the relations enjoy nothing more than meeting up over delicious family meals. Two of Jamie’s uncles are cooks, as well as his parents, and all members of the family have a great interest in eating out. They were a very close family and food was at their heart. Jamie loves that traditional Sunday roast family feeling of closeness that was such an integral part of his growing up and tries to incorporate it in his recipes. Nowadays, he says, ‘I’m not changing the world but you have nice times round the table, you know.’ The importance of a family eating together and sharing their thoughts of the day over a well-prepared and leisurely-eaten meal is something which Jamie enjoys and believes in.
Not surprisingly, the catering business interested Jamie from as far back as he can remember. He loved the cheery hustle and bustle of the kitchens and constant throughput of fresh produce being swiftly prepared into tasty-looking meals.
Cooking was something that has been in his blood from a very early age and that caused plenty of disasters. He recalls cheerily, ‘As a kid, I would put things in Mum’s Aga and I would leave them in to cook overnight. When I came back in the morning, they would be like volcanic dust, like you had just cremated your grandmother.’
Sadly for the sake of posterity, Jamie cannot recall in detail the historic first meal that he cooked, though at the same time he can’t remember a time when he was not keen on catering. ‘I was very, very young when I started taking an interest in the kitchen,’ he says. ‘I started cooking regularly when I was about eight as a weekend thing. But when I was really young, my mum taught me how to make an omelette and I found I was good at it. That was a lovely feeling of satisfaction of actually creating something out of something else. I was fascinated by making proper omelettes and for a couple of years that is all I did. Then later, I used to make small pizzas, awful bits of dough, terrible tomatoes and horrible cheese. I used to cook them for my friends when I was about seven or eight. I remember thinking they were excellent but they were horrible! Then I made trifle and it sort of went on from there, really.’
Boyhood friends recall that The Cricketers was an unofficial meeting place for the gang. There was always a glass of lemonade and something delicious to eat.
‘We seemed to be starving most of the time,’ said one early pal, ‘so it was natural for us to congregate where we might get something to eat. Jamie’s dad didn’t like us getting in the way of the customers but if the pub was closed or quiet we used to get in and I don’t think we ever came away without something to eat and drink. It just seemed like such a fun place to be. And the food was always fantastic. Jamie was always trying out new tastes on us. I remember when he brought us some courgettes he was absolutely bursting with enthusiasm for this weird new vegetable that tasted a bit strange to us lot. Only Jamie could get worked up about courgettes. But he also gave us prawns and chicken legs and all sorts of things that we never saw at home. We always seemed to be hungry, so Jamie was always very popular.’
From a very early age, Jamie was desperately keen to join in the camaraderie of the kitchen. To the wide-eyed young boy, the chefs looked like the most glamorous figures in the world. They rushed around shouting out orders and putting together fantastic spreads, usually while having highly animated and unrepeatably rude conversations at very high volume. Jamie did not quite follow the joke, but he joined in the laughter when his father tried memorably to persuade one chef to moderate the language as he asked him with a grin, ‘Why do you have to cook at the top of your voice?’
As an angelic-looking little blond-haired lad, he also got a great deal of attention from the customers. He looked as if butter would not melt in his mouth, but Jamie’s parents were already finding out that their energetic young son was a real handful.
Jamie was just seven years old when he almost drowned in the bath while fearlessly performing a daredevil stunt. ‘My parents had just bought a large corner bath so I decided to try it out,’ he recalls. ‘I went flying along the landing into the bathroom and jumped straight in, but I knocked myself out cold. Mum was getting dressed in her bedroom and she had heard the noise and came to see what was going on. With only half her clothes on, she rushed me downstairs, past all the surprised customers in the restaurant and out to the car. Then she drove me 50 miles to hospital in Cambridge in a complete panic. The doctors said I was concussed yet otherwise none the worse for wear. But I could easily have drowned.’
Even this hair-raising emergency was not enough to persuade Jamie to curb his adventurous, all-action attitude to life. ‘I was a bit wild and I think the first accident might have knocked some of the sense out of me because it happened again,’ said Jamie. ‘Soon after the bath accident, I thought I would try flying because I was the proud owner of a pair of Superman pyjamas. I went hurtling down the stairs and knocked myself out again. This time, however, Mum didn’t waste time taking me to hospital but to the local GP. By the time we arrived at the surgery, I had come round and was sent home after a check-up.’ Jamie says dryly now that he definitely would not want to look after a child like him.
‘When I was younger, I used to dream I could fly. I can recall quite clearly that when I was about five I dreamt of hovering above the sofa. In my vivid imagination, I felt I could float wherever I wanted to go. That led me into all sorts of painful crash landings until I finally realised how hard the ground was!’
Jamie loved living in a busy pub full of people constantly coming and going, and he desperately wanted to join in and become a part of it. His dad and his workers seemed like the most enjoyable gang in the world and he simply could not wait to join it. And even more than that, he wanted to get some pocket money. Cash had a way of burning a hole in Jamie’s pocket that has hardly changed with time. There was always a new toy car or comic that he wanted, so he always seemed to be short of money. Jamie’s father had a very simple and old-fashioned attitude to handing out money. You first have to do some work to earn it. He did not believe in simply handing out cash, even to his children. He believed that handing out endless cash to kids was the wrong way to behave. It taught them nothing about the value of money and it was a certain way to spoil the child. Trevor Oliver is the epitome of