--- Watch the second season of Rick Stein's Cornwall, Mon to Fri at 7.30pm from 11th April on SBS Food (Ch.33) and the at . ---
It’s not surprising that Rick Stein can make an odd fish pie sound great (we’ll loop back to the romantically named but somewhat startling ‘stargazy pie’ in a bit). Or the hard labour of harvesting seaweed. Or an unusual kitchen knife made from car parts. But chilly outdoor dining in the middle of winter? Even that sounds unexpectedly appealing when SBS Food talks to the seafood-loving chef.
Catching up with Stein during a recent visit to Australia, we talked to him about many things – highlights of the new series of Rick Stein’s Cornwall, what’s next on his travel wish list, Cornish pasties, that fish pie. And given the events of the past two years, the effects of the pandemic on his restaurants and staff, too.
“It has been tough, we lost a couple of restaurants in the course of it, but fortunately, there's been enough let-ups in lockdown for us to sort of trade-in between them. And people have been really keen to get out,” he says, and supporting local businesses. “Everybody's been very, very good about spending money. [And] also in the UK, sitting out in really cold weather. In coats and scarves and hot water bottles, eating outside. It would be really good if that carried on really, it was actually really quite convivial fun!”
The COVID-19 pandemic made filming the new season of Rick Stein’s Cornwall tricky too, but with a few breaks in filming, and regular PCR tests, they got it done, filming from May to September last year and capturing the beautiful beaches and green fields at their warm-weather best. (A tip for those inspired to travel there one day – Stein says June and Sept to early October are especially good times to visit; July and August can be busy, he says, and September generally has better weather than August, too).
Like the first season, the show sees Stein travel around Cornwall, eating, cooking, meeting locals and delving into history. “I wanted to amalgamate some nice cooking with art, literature, history, characters in Cornwall, and music as well.” He meets local chefs, farmers, food producers, and historians; has a pint with Cornish actor Ed Rowe, one of the stars of Bait, a film about the impact of tourism on a Cornish fishing village (streaming now ); goes fishing and foraging, and meets a man who makes knives from the springs of old trucks.
Local cheese is on the menu in Rick Stein's Cornwall. Source: Rick Stein's Cornwall
Rick Stein sits down for a bite to eat with professional forager Matt Vernon. Source: Rick Stein's Cornwall
“They're just beautiful… I've got one that I use all the time and he's worked out how to fit them in the hand very easily. It is wonderful work.”
Even for Stein, whose heart was claimed by Cornwall a long time ago, there were surprises.
“I don't know if you've heard of a Cornish speciality, which nobody really likes very much, called the Stargazey pie. And the idea of that is a fish pie with sardines or mackerel with their heads poking through the pastry, looking to the heavens and stargazing. But I did actually come up with a , I sort of took loads of the original recipes and just slightly altered it. It was actually really quite nice. And I've had them before and they've not been nice. So that was unexpected!
“And one of the things we were keen to do in the second series is to look into the lives of ordinary Cornish people …so we went to stock car racing on a Sunday, and filmed banger racing and stock car racing. You get all these families all turning up, whole families mend these cars that get banged up in the races. I'm sitting as a spectator saying, 'this is much better than cricket!' I just really really enjoyed it.
Rick Stein's stargazey pie. Source: Rick Stein's Cornwall
“And history-wise, not a lot of people know about the concerns of Barbary pirates. The south coast of Cornwall was raided during the Elizabethan times by pirates from North Africa. And we were raided not for gold or goods, they were raided for people that were taken off into slavery in places like Morocco, Morocco and Algeria and Tunisia. It's quite serious… and this is a bit of history that I never knew [much about].”
The series also sees Stein delve into the history of the Cornish pasty. Although in one sense it’s just a meat and veg pie, there’s really no ‘just’ about the Cornish pasty. It’s the most famous food to come out of Cornwall, and it’s literally a delicious bit of history. “It’s even been granted protected status which means a pasty can’t be called Cornish unless it’s been made in Cornwall. And boy do we make a lot of them - 120 million pasties each year earning 300 million quid for the county,” Stein says in the show. Along with local historian Ben Sumpter, Stein discovers that although many know the pasty as a miner’s favourite, this half-moon shaped pie was first popular with the gentry, and made with game meat such as venison. But the growing popularity of the potato meant the pasty became a meat and veg combination that fuelled the working class.
“The point in the pasty was it was a revolutionary meal because it was lots of protein and carbohydrate in something you could hold or put in a cotton sack and it was really sustaining and that's the point. I mean, because it's really very vigorous, manual labour being a miner, you had to have something to keep you going,” Stein says, when we talk to him about his dive into pasty history.
Rick shares his homemade pasties with head gardener John Harris in the Tresillian House garden. Source: Rick Stein's Cornwall
Sumpter makes an even more fascinating point in the show about the classic crimped edge of a pasty.
“Round all the side we have the rope or the crimping and the story goes that the miners would actually eat the filling and leave the crimping. And the logic with that is that, actually, in mines in Cornwall you had some very dangerous and poisonous materials… Arsenic for one and let’s not forget uranium. And if you have particularly dirty hands you can hold the rope, hold it by the crimp, and discard it. However, as with every myth, it’s not necessarily true. The only proper way to eat a pasty in Cornwall was end to end, or as they’d say ‘East to West’.”
Stein adds a few more pastry ‘rules’ in the show – never think about putting carrots in your pasty, and don’t eat them on a plate. “Eat them out of a paper bag. It’s the right thing to do.”
(Those who get inspired can find Stein’s recipe from the show – “Controversially I make my pasties using flaky pastry”, he says – .)
Less traditional is a dish made with ‘sea spaghetti’ after Stein joins a local group of seaweed harvesters. “I loved doing the seaweed hunting. They are such dedicated people, you have to gather the seaweed at extreme low spring tides, and it's really quite really hard manual labour but they were so into it. They're all in their 20s and very, very keen on that sort of healthy aspect of seaweeds and knew their seaweeds backwards,” Stein explains.
“There's a type of seaweed called sea spaghetti which looks a bit like spaghetti only it's green. So, I had this Italian dish of pan-fried fillets of fish with tomato, garlic, chilli, parsley, olive oil. And I incorporated the sea spaghetti in with a pasta, I think it was like three-quarters spaghetti and one quarter sea spaghetti. It really worked well because it's quite al dente anyway, and as sort of green strands in among the pasta, it looked pretty good. And it tasted good as well.” (Get Stein’s recipe for fish with sea and land spaghetti ).
Rick joins a group of seaweek collectors. Source: Rick Stein's Cornwall
Clearly, Stein still loves to travel, whether it’s around Cornwall, his regular visits to Australia where he has two restaurants, or around the world. The events of the past two years have made him appreciate how lucky he’s been to travel so much over the years, he says.
“I don't know whether we'll go back to easy and relatively cheap travel, but certainly the last couple of years when we couldn't go anywhere, it's made me realise how lucky I've been. Also, I think a lot of other people have done it, and certainly, I've noticed that here [in Australia], is that, it's been really good that people generally have travelled within where they can travel and really enjoyed it and really learned more about where they live.”
So where would he like to go next?
“I feel a bit embarrassed that I've never been to South America. I think that would be really high up on my list. … And I've got to go to Darwin. I found myself landing in Darwin on the way out here, but that's as close as I've got. I came on a Qantas flight that goes via Darwin, and it's just so beautiful around there. I mean, it's nice to have seen it, but I'm keen to get out there and spend some time.”
In the meantime, there might be more Cornwall exploring on the cards – there’s already been interest in another series, he says, after a great response to series 2 in the UK.
“Because it was out in January [in the UK], which is a pretty grim time and also because COVID is still around, I think people have looked at it as being a sort of quite antidote to the blues really. And of course, Cornwall does look beautiful and lovely beaches and sunny and blue and green. So it sort of takes people out of themselves and a little sort of midwinter depression.”
With Australia now heading into the colder months, a gallivant around sunny Cornwall, to inspire us to investigate our own backyards, might be just what we need, too. Perhaps fuelled by a homemade Cornish pasty!
