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
had a strong personality and a ready wit and he had a natural knack for making the others follow his ideas.
But as he grew older he became more and more involved in The Cricketers. His father came to rely heavily on his cooking skill and his capacity for long hours of hard work. Jamie is very keen to shrug off some of the suggestions that he was some sort of amazing child prodigy in the kitchen. The truth is that he saw cooking at first as just a way of earning some money and helping his dad out at the same time. He liked the work certainly, but insists, ‘I didn’t really become passionate about it until I was about 14 or 15. And I always came second in competitions.’
He never liked that, he admits, as he possesses a fiercely competitive spirit underneath that genial exterior. Jamie smiles, ‘I believe you always have to try to be the best at whatever you do, even if it is scrubbing potatoes.’
Trevor and Sally Oliver were very caring parents but they could be firm, too. And Jamie’s enthusiasm for having long hair was a constant cause of friction. He couldn’t understand why anyone should be allowed to control something so personal as his hair length and they couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t smarten himself up like the other kids.
The bitter conflicts are still clear in Jamie’s memory, ‘My very worst haircut was when I was eight. I had a really cool Ian Brown sort of thing. But then my dad brought two little bruisers in from the tug-of-war team who both had crew-cuts with tramlines and said, “Don’t they look smart?” Two days later, Dad took me to the hairdresser’s, and I had a grade one all over. He’s bald now, though, so I got the last laugh in the end.’
In many ways it was an idyllic childhood, and his early memories are full of tree houses, dens and hilarious fights with soda syphons when the pub was mercifully free of customers. One friend from those days recalls Jamie’s unquenchable enthusiasm for practical jokes. ‘He just loved to throw buckets of water over people. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world to soak another lad to the skin. Once, we hid round a corner, three of us with buckets ready to drench one of our mates. Just as he came round this wall we let fly. Only it wasn’t our friend Dave as we expected, but the village postman. He was quite an old chap and it really took him by surprise. He was wet through and we were so surprised we forgot to scarper. We just stayed there mumbling apologies and in the end he even started to see the funny side. Fortunately, it was quite a warm day and he had almost finished his round so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. But Jamie was really upset. He likes a laugh but he hates to hurt anyone. Underneath that chirpy, easy-going exterior he is actually a very caring bloke. He was horrified that we had soaked the postie, but then he also knew that if his dad found out he would be in real trouble.’
Jamie loved jokes but he was always dead against doing anything that went too far. Some of the older kids in the village developed the sport of relentless door knocking, bringing residents out to their front doors to discover, of course, that their surprise visitor had already vanished. Jamie was happy enough to watch some of Clavering’s more pompous occupants disturbed this way but he was quick to speak up when an elderly lady who was forced to walk with a frame was targeted. A friend recalls that Jamie was horrified that she was bothered. And when the older boys ran off, he presented himself at the door and asked her if she had any jobs she needed doing. He finished up posting a letter for her and she had her faith in human nature at least briefly restored. And Jamie successfully persuaded her would-be tormentors to leave the poor old dear out of their next round of hilarity.
Three of Jamie’s closest friends as a boy were gypsy children, whose parents were brought to the area by the money to be earned potato picking. It was back-breaking casual work but the potato-pickers did not do it out of choice. Even the kids had to join in and Jamie was horrified when he realised how desperate for cash their families were. Jamie is still friendly with some of those gypsy kids today and neither he nor his parents judged them because they lived life on the move with no fixed address. And although they were sharp and streetwise, Jamie quickly realised his young friends did not even begin to share or comprehend his wide experience of food.
‘They were nice kids but they had such a boring diet,’ he said. ‘They had never even seen decent food, let alone eaten it. The pub closed between three and six and we would be there in the back. I can still picture the scene now. I would be making baps of lettuce, ham and mustard, salami, smoked salmon and lemon and their eyes nearly burst out of their heads. We took it all to a clearing in the woods for a feast. These gypsies had never even tasted turkey and pickle before; they used to just about live on jam sandwiches. Imagine giving them smoked salmon! When I opened up the sarnie and squeezed the lemon on the smoked salmon they just went, “Wow!” That look on their faces was my first feeling of “this is really good” about food that I can remember. It was like showing a kid from 1800 what a VW Golf Convertible looks like.’
But the gypsy kids taught Jamie some things as well. When he went into their caravans, he found families even closer than his own. One particular pal had brothers and sisters of just about every age living happily together in restricted space. Jamie’s abiding memory is of them all speaking at once and hugging and laughing with a warmth and openness of spirit that impressed even the son of an undeniably happy family. Everything was put on the table and shared, he recalls. Whether it was food or money or the spoils of some other unknown enterprise. Jamie once saw them dividing the slices of a loaf of bread equally so everyone had just two. That was all they had for tea but there were no complaints and the evening ended in a very voluble game of cards. Jamie says he has never seen a family with so little have so much in terms of love and affection from each other.
As he grew older, Jamie was keen to learn all elements of the catering trade. His father drilled it into him that running a successful pub or restaurant was not easy. Certainly it involved hard work and long hours but it meant keeping an eye on every aspect of the business. There is no point in serving wonderful meals if you’re losing money on every plate, but if you do not deliver top-quality meals, then the only kind of reputation you’re going to build up is a bad one. Trevor Oliver had his finger on the pulse of every different aspect of his business and he knew that one of the keys to success was buying. Jamie learned the vital importance of sourcing good ingredients first-hand from his hard-working father. He always bought good-quality seasonal fruit and vegetables.
There were a large number of Italian-run greenhouses and market gardens in that part of rural Essex and Trevor Oliver was tireless in tracking them down. He always attempted to get ahead of the game and tried to buy up the best produce before it was sent to market. Jamie gradually graduated to occasional delivery man and remembers, ‘I used to talk to the tomato man on my CB radio. I was Beefburger and he was Ellio the Italian Stallion.’
Trevor built up a good relationship with his suppliers. He paid on time but he would not tolerate any sub-standard produce. The growers came to trust him and, as The Cricketers began to thrive, so the market for their fruit and veg was always there.
In those days, it was not considered remotely fashionable to wear a big white hat and make a lot of noise in the kitchen. And as a career option for style-conscious teenagers, it was certainly not to be taken seriously. Jamie found that he was regularly and mercilessly teased by some of his more conventional classmates for wanting to be a chef. Not that unkindly perhaps, but it was pretty obvious that in those days it was not exactly a cool career, or very macho. ‘It was never a manly thing to do, be a chef,’ recalls Jamie, who refused to have his ambitions even slightly diverted. He has never minded greatly what other people say about him. And nowadays he is, of course, wryly amused that he has the last laugh from what was once considered a joke career. ‘But whether you are a carpenter or painter or a mechanic, you can make the job as exciting as you want. I love cooking. And so I have fun doing it. Now people seem to think it is rather cool.’ The jokes were like water off a duck’s back. ‘Everyone got teased about something,’ he says. ‘I knew my real mates were not laughing at me so I just laughed along with it all.’
All-action Jamie had much more important things to do than worry what a few jealous classmates thought. He was far too busy having a good time. As he grew into his teenage years, fun-loving Jamie was always at the centre of any action. Teachers at Newport Free Grammar School certainly found him quite a handful. One schoolmaster, who