Self-taught chef Raymond Blanc had humble beginnings in rural France. He left those shores bound for England in 1972 aged 23 to work as a waiter, and now boasts 20 brasseries across the UK, two Michelin stars at his Oxfordshire , numerous cookbooks and the Raymond Blanc cookery school. There is also numerous television shows including his latest, (starting Thursday January 12 on SBS), in which he helps grow a bountiful kitchen garden at the historic , and creates stunning dishes from seasonal produce. But there's more to this 67-year-old chef and bon vivant than meets the eye.
He will get down and dirty in the garden
Raymond Blanc grew up in the village of Saone, in a rugged, wooded part of France, full of mountains, rivers and lakes. His family didn't have a lot of money, but food was the centre of family life, and they had a huge garden which provided produce all year round.
From his father Maurice, Blanc inherited a love of gardens and home-grown fruit, vegetables and herbs, and from his mother Anne-Marie, a love and understanding of cooking and preserving food. For his 10th birthday, when other boys his age would have wanted toys, his parents gave him a colander and a foraging map. What he collected, his mother taught him to cook.
He his father scooped up a handful of earth and asked him to taste it. “You didn’t discuss with Papa,” Blanc told iNews. So he tasted the soil. “I’ve never, never tasted something like that,” he says. “It was so astringent, acid, bitter, dry, thousands of flavours. It was quite gritty, horrible.” Years later Blanc dared to ask his father why he’d told him to taste the earth. “It was at that stage that I learnt that my papa had a sense of humour because he told me: ‘Oh, that was a joke.’”
His mother, who is fondly known as Maman Blanc, is 94 and gave Blanc some of his most cherished recipes. "My mother is the woman who has had the most influence on my life," Blanc told the .
He has returned to his gardening roots in Royal Gardens On A Plate, reviving the royal kitchen garden that was given up more than 150 years aog, in Victorian times. "Of course I relished the idea of a French Republican laying a new garden of 250-strong varieties over a former royal plot," he says cheekily, in the introduction to the book, Kew on a Plate with Raymond Blanc, which accompanies the show.
He once worked as a nurse on a leukeamia ward and dreamed of being a ballet dancer
Blanc started out as a junior nurse on a leukaemia ward, and spent time working in a clothes factory, before becoming a cleaner, then a glass-washer, in an 18th century hotel.
“I was the best cleaner — I’d scrub four-metre mirrors with vinegar and paper until they shone,” he told the . “Then I became the best glass washer. Then I became a waiter. I had a red jacket with silver epaulettes. I loved being part of a team — that’s where I learnt discipline and hard work.”
His career changed direction in one moment. “I did a beeeg mistake,” he said. “I saw the chef as a colleague, but he was not a colleague — he was a monster with a bad temper. One day I told him his sauces were too salty or needed a bit more richness; just suggestions. And he thumped me with a frying pan. I broke my jaw, lost a tooth, and then I lost my job. He told me to find a job in England, that I was exiled."
He jokes: "A frying pan changed my life."
One of his childhood dreams was to be Napoleon, but he his biggest regret in life is not becoming a ballet dancer.
Blanc had two stress-induced strokes when he was 42 and was paralysed for three months, but these days is learning to delegate more and relax. "It was always live to work," Blanc told. "Now it's more work to live."
His partner, a Russian doctor, keeps him on his toes
Raymond Blanc and his partner Natalia Traxel enjoy a night out. Source: Getty Images Europe
Blanc boasts that fom the time he was a little boy, he has always had a way with women. "I could have got anything I wanted by asking women to look after me, or writing them a poem, which I was always very good at," he .
Traxel, who is also an expert figure skater, chess player and hot yoga enthusiast, works as a nutritionist at the Raymond Blanc Cookery School. Blanc calls her "incredible". The couple have had an off-on relationship over the years, and she knows how to keep Blanc's ego in check.
“I turned down Silvio Berlusconi three times when I lived next door to him in Bermuda,” she told . “When you mention the name Berlusconi anywhere in the world everyone knows who he is but when you mention Raymond Blanc nobody knows him. I remind Raymond of this – when he gets too big for his shoes.”
He is the inspiration for a cartoon character called Henri le Worm
One of Blanc's two adult sons, Olivier, has called , based loosely on the chef.
Henri is brought to life in an app, and his adventures encourage children, aged four to eight, to grow their own fruit and vegetables, and to eat healthily.
Olivier was initially unsure how his father would react to being turned into a pot-bellied worm.
Raymond Blanc and son Olivier launched the childrens app 'Henri Le Worm' in 2013. Source: WireImage/Getty Images
"He was very good," Olivier told the . "I had no idea what his reaction would be as the male ego can be a very fragile thing!
"But as soon as I’d explained about Henri, he was 100 per cent behind him."
Blanc is a firm believer that we should eat more vegetables and less meat. "I always have cooked a lot of vegetables," he tells the . "I always made the vegetable as important as the meat. You cannot go on to eat meat twice a day. We're not made to do that." With the , Blanc hopes to inspire people to grow their own vegetables. "I would love to encourage people to grow food organically. I also wanted to demystify the whole process, pass on knowledge but not in a way to put people off. People want to know where their food comes from."
Eating the seasons
Royal Gardens On A Plate
Raymond Blanc samples some garlic in the show Royal Gardens on a Plate. Source: Supplied/Kew on a Plate
He's an award-winning chef, but he has his guilty pleasures
At home he doesn't cook and is happy with a serving of smoked salmon and a glass of sauvingnon blanc. When he fancies something a little more substantial, Traxel will whip him up a meal, he tells . “She cooks for me. When we have friends round, of course I cook; they might be disappointed if not.”
In 2008 Blanc was awarded an honorary OBE for his services to culinary excellence (he is one of only three Frenchmen to receive the honour), and in 2013 he received the Ordre National de la Legion d'Honneur, the highest decoration in France.
He has also trained some of the best chefs in the business - including Marco Pierre White, Heston Blumenthal, and Michael Caines.
But he admits to ordering take-away "more than you think", and his guilty pleasure is dark chocolate KitKats.
Sometimes, though, those simple pleasures come fresh out of the garden. Blanc recalls a trip to the South of France, when he took his 92-year-old mother and his sister for lunch at a restaurant you had to reach by boat. "When we got there we discovered it was in the middle of a nudist colony," he writes in Kew on a Plate with Raymond Blanc (, hb, $55). "My mum didn't seem to mind the view though, so we sat down to a lunch of bouillabaisse, which was just divine." Blanc recalls that the fish was delicious, but it was the potatoes which blew him away, with their melting texture and rich flavour. "I had never tasted anything like them," he says. "Of course I had to know immediately what variety of potato this was. You can imagine how people thought I was crazy: on holiday in the sunshine in the middle of a nudist camp and getting excited about a potato!"
Potatoes are just one of the crops that Blanc grew and cooked with over the course of a year in England's Kew Gardens for Royal Gardens on a Plate. "I wanted to create a 250-strong variety garden. Lots of varieties," he tells the . But he's not about to give up his day job to toil in the garden every day - not when there's delicious food to be made with it in the kitchen. "We cook simple recipes that we hope to inspire viewers with."
