Rick Stein’s Oddity
John Merrick on the strange allure and bumbling anti-charisma of Rick Stein. Illustration by Alex Brenchley.
Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! In today’s essay, John Merrick shares a tender reflection on the baffling charm of Rick Stein.
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Rick Stein’s Oddity
John Merrick on the strange allure and bumbling anti-charisma of Rick Stein. Illustration by Alex Brenchley.
Last year, my partner and I had our first child. It was a difficult birth, and things did not get easier in the first few months. I’m not sure exactly how much sleep I got, but it wasn’t much. ‘A father,’ Joyce writes in Ulysses, ‘is a necessary evil’, a line I’ve long adored, and now I was one: an experience far stranger and more intense than I ever imagined.
Beyond the blinding, terrifying immediacy of having to care for this brand-new thing, so fragile and small, much of that period is now a blur to me. But one of the few more-or-less-clear memories I have is of watching endless hours of Rick Stein – particularly his early BBC shows like Fruits of the Sea (1997) and Seafood Odyssey (1999) – at unholy times of the night while trying to calm our screaming, colicky daughter. I’ve watched a lot of Stein over the years, but I hadn’t seen those series since they’d first aired. When the intro started, with the crash of waves against shore and the monotonous drone of the shipping forecast soundtracking shots of Chalky, Rick’s Jack Russell, tearing across dun-coloured Cornish beaches, I experienced the most powerful flood of childhood memory, of grey weekend evenings in the front room of my grandparents’ two-up two-down in Crewe. Whole worlds were contained in that thirty-second sequence. If I were feeling pretentious, I might even say it was Proustian.
Shoehorning in a reference to Proust (and, indeed, to Joyce) is something Rick himself would be proud of. There’s an episode of Rick Stein’s French Odyssey (2005) in which he takes a barge along the Garonne from Bordeaux to Toulouse before sailing down the Canal du Midi to the Mediterranean, where, while cooking madeleines, he scolds his crew for not having read the famous French novelist. ‘I find this very difficult to believe,’ he says, while cracking eggs into a bowl, ‘but none of the crew had read À la recherche du temps perdu. Quite amazing, really!’
In the end, Stein’s madeleines look a little flat, but he serves them with big dollop of ice cream and honey-poached peaches as the camera lingers on a scraped-clean plate: ‘The film crew may not know about Proust,’ he says, as cutlery clatters against china, ‘but they do know what they like.’
Twenty years later, I can think of few moments that better encapsulate the infuriating but somehow compelling aura of Stein, 78, who has been a regular fixture on British cooking shows for the past forty years. Although he’s had a series out as recently as last year (Rick Stein’s Food Stories), these days he’s almost a figure out of time: the definition of pale, male, and stale, and one of the few remaining stalwarts of old-school British food broadcasting – as distinct from both Nadiya Hussain or Jamie Oliver as you could imagine.
I’ve been recounting the Proust scene for years whenever I talk about Stein’s work. The slightly superior knowingness, the clumsy literary reference, are just so him (for a time, I even got in the habit of counting the quotes from novels forced into his shows – Graham Greene, John Betjeman, J B Priestley; all a bit naff and anachronistic). But perhaps it’s his quotation of Rudyard Kipling in Rick Stein’s India (2013), the most Steinian of his shows, that best conveys the essence of Rick.
‘Kipling, in his poem to Bombay,’ Stein tells us, ‘talks of the people here who traffic most up and down but cling to the city’s hem as a child to their mother’s gown.’ It’s as if he’s spawned directly from the pages of Kim, striding forth among the natives like a low-level colonial functionary, with his public-school accent and crumpled button-down, seemingly completely unaware of just how patronising he is to the people he meets and about the food they make. The working class of India, he tells us in one episode, are ‘so poor and yet so happy’, and barely a second of screen time is wasted before he tells us that curry – ‘the most interesting thing about India … first, second and last’ – is a generic term, used mainly by Brits, for something with myriad names in the subcontinent.
It’s not just the Indian series that is filled with such clangers. In Seafood Odyssey, Stein contemplates what makes chefs like him tick. He describes himself as a ‘magpie’, ‘going all over the world and taking ideas from everywhere else, which is what the British have done forever, and bringing them back’ – one of the better euphemisms for the horrors of empire that I have heard.
In another episode, filmed in Cambodia (as part of 2009’s Rick Stein’s Far Eastern Odyssey), Stein ruminates on the country’s violent history. ‘They’re such a civilised people,’ he says, ‘so sophisticated, the food is so special. They’re so nice, so beautiful. How could something like the Khmer Rouge and that terrible time in the seventies have happened?’ His guide reminds him that it’s probably got a lot to do with the clandestine American bombing campaign of the otherwise neutral country during the Vietnam War, a grotesque act of state terror that killed countless thousands of Cambodians. But no, surely the women are too beautiful for that sort of thing?
Why I should turn to Stein for comfort, then, is something of a mystery. He displays the kind of unthinking sexism and, if not overt racism, then at least the kind of unconsciously biased elitist condescension you might expect of a man of his age, race, and class. It’s hardly the kind of thing you’d expect to grip a lefty 30-something. Nor is his onscreen presence particularly winning: a bulging, bibulous figure, red in the face and sweating through a salmon Oxford, wending his way through various kitchens and eateries around the world, scratching down recipes in his black notebook before, with grinding inevitability, turning to camera and telling the viewers that if he were to make a cassoulet, say, or a Keralan fish curry, he’d have added X rather than Y. Even when he’s there to learn about the world’s authentic cuisine he seems to know better himself – a near-perfect neo-colonial trope.
If Stein is anything then, he is very English, almost definitionally so. Stein was born in 1947 in Chipping Norton, in rural Oxfordshire, the epitome of Middle England. His was a slightly bohemian family of middle-class gentility. His mother, Dorothy, came from a family of successful telephone manufacturers, while his father, Eric (of Anglo-German heritage), managed a distillery in London, as well as running the family’s 150-acre farm.
As Stein writes in his surprisingly tender memoir Under a Mackerel Sky, his father ‘relished the company of artists, composers and writers’, and disdained the usual country set typical of a family of their class. But it was another side of his father which would dominate much of Stein’s early years: as well as being ‘a magnetic presence, very attractive to women, and very difficult to live up to’, Eric had bipolar disorder. In 1965, when Stein was 17, his father jumped off the cliffs at Trevose Head, near the family’s holiday home.
Today, Stein is synonymous with that same small stretch of north Cornish coast where his father killed himself. He has lived and worked in Padstow, just a few miles around the headland from Trevose, since he graduated from New College, Oxford, with a third-class degree in English Literature in the early 1970s. He’d arrived at Oxford after several years spent travelling in Australia and America, which, he has said, he conceived at the time as a rugged Hemingway-style adventure; later, he realised that, really, he had been running from ‘the memory of [his] father and the cliff’.
His first venture in the former fishing village was a nightclub, which after being shut down by the police due to its rowdy clientele he converted into a bistro, The Seafood Restaurant, in 1975. It was the restaurant’s success that led to his first brush with fame when, a decade later, Keith Floyd, the enfant terrible of British cooking, filmed a short section with Stein on a trawler off the harbour at Padstow.
Stein’s first screen appearance was not particularly auspicious: he’s nervous, with none of the boisterous enthusiasm of his later shows. But Floyd’s director, David Pritchard, saw something in Stein, and worked with him on his first BBC series, Taste of the Sea, in 1995. The pair would go on to make more than a dozen series together until Pritchard’s death in 2019.
The shows he has made in the years since Pritchard’s death are different from the peak Pritchard–Stein years. The Stein we get in them is softer, more professional. There’s less of the prickly interactions, fewer rough edges. There has also been a seemingly self-conscious attempt to chase modern food trends. In an episode of his most recent series, Rick Stein’s Food Stories, he visits Mr Falafel, a small Palestinian food stall at the back of Shepherd’s Bush Market. In another, in Belfast, he has Filipino kamayan, a communal Sunday lunch. (A friend texted me after watching the first few episodes: ‘Rick’s gone woke!’). It shouldn’t work, but, like most of his work, a bumbling anti-charm somehow wins through.
At their best, however, Stein’s shows still abound with his obvious passion not only for eating and drinking, but also for what food can represent – adventure and travel, sure, but also home, comfort, and family. His work is openly nostalgic. Indeed, in his memoir, he baldly states: ‘I love nostalgia.’ That book’s best passages play on the theme: listening to Buddy Holly and Howlin’ Wolf with friends while at boarding school (‘The power of rock and roll liberated me from the restrictions of being a middle-class Englishman’); his first forays into the limelight, playing bass in a school band; Sunday roasts at home with his family. If there is one thing that can compete with music for evoking the textures of youth, Stein tells us, it’s food.
Perhaps this is why, on becoming a father, I felt compelled to return to his shows. And, as I’ve been rewatching them over the past year, I’ve come to realise just how woven they are into my early life in far more complex ways than I had previously recognised.
At least part of this hinges on the fact that Stein reminds me so much of my own father, something that struck me only recently. Just three years separate the two men and there’s a marked physical resemblance, too: thick grey eyebrows perched above deep-set eyes, bellies grown distended from a lifetime’s eating and drinking that droop slightly over their belts, the pastel shirts they both favour. But far more separates my father, a working-class Northerner who has been unsuccessful in all his ventures, from the Home Counties-raised, privately educated celebrity chef.
My father now lives in a care home due to his increasingly severe dementia. I find it hard to see him – it’s too difficult to even think about him much of the time. Anyway, I don’t have many good memories of him. He wasn’t around enough for that. Too often in the pub when he could have been with his family.
Most of the good memories I do have, though, are from family holidays in Cornwall. All of them involve food. Although he never cooked for himself (very much a man of his generation), my father loved to eat. He was at his happiest on the beach in Polperro, cracking into briny mussels plucked fresh from the rocks around the harbour, or eating freshly grilled sardines drizzled with lemon.
In so many of Stein’s enthusiasms I can see my father. His love of fresh fish and simple country fare, his joy at offal and rich meaty stews – and beer, of course. There was one particular scene in Stein’s latest series, shot in Morecambe Bay, where he hunts for the perfect potted shrimp, that took me headlong back to my father, sitting in the dusty backroom of some country pub with a tub of thick, buttery shrimps and a pint of Landlord (‘one of the best beers in Britain’, per Stein).
This is what food, at its best, can do. Comfort food, writes Bee Wilson, is not just the stodgy, sugary dishes we usually think of, but ‘the deeply personal flavours and textures you turn to when life has punched you in the gut’. I couldn’t agree more, and though I can’t ask my father what he thinks, I’m sure Rick would sign off on it too.
A few days after I submitted the penultimate draft of this essay, my father died. He was 79.
That weekend, my mum came to see me in London, bringing with her an old hardback of Rick Stein’s Taste of the Sea that she’d found while tidying up. When she arrived, and the cups of tea had been made, she gave me the book – a bit dented on the corners and food-splattered, but otherwise as new. Inside, on the first page, I found a note, dated June 1996:
Credits
John Merrick is a writer and editor from Crewe who is now based in London. His work has been published by the Guardian, the New Statesman, The Baffler, and elsewhere.
Alex Brenchley is an artist and cartoonist based in London. His work has been used by the BBC, NHS, Universal Records, and the British Museum. The New Statesman featured his ‘This England’ cartoons in every issue between 2017 and 2023, and the Wellcome Collection published his webcomic ‘Life After Cancer’ last year. More of his work can be seen on his website.
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This me laugh at the beginning… and tear up at the end. Please write more like this. It was a perfect blend of food, understanding and comfort.
What a really wonderful piece. So very touching and so spot on about Rick who I've known since the very beginning. I actually burst into tears at the end. Very best wishes to John and family. Lindsey Bareham