Award winning writer, broadcaster, food campaigner and restaurant owner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall talks about food, why making his wife’s packed lunch is so important and reveals he was a picky eater as a child. Guess what his favourite food was when he was growing up?
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is the most quintessentially British of the celebrity chefs. Forget Jamie Oliver’s ‘Cor blimey gov’ patter and Gordon Ramsay’s effin’ earthiness. Whether there’s a chill winter wind, an Autumn abundance, a summer glut or a Spring full of promise, you need a dollop of Hugh.
He’s not only good with food, he’s positively audacious with the bits of it most of us never reach – offal, hedgerow finds, squirrel kebabs… As Hugh puts it: “To some I’m ‘that weirdo who eats anything’.”
But don’t let that put you off. His latest book, River Cottage Every Day is full of more down to earth delights configured around such basics as ‘Making breakfast’, ‘Thrifty meat’ and – our personal favourite – ‘Weekday lunch (box)’.
In praise of the lunchbox
Here at Make it and Mend it we see lunchboxes as a encapsulating all that’s right – and wrong – with the way we all engage with food. At its best, the lunch box presents the perfect opportunity to use up leftovers, rustle up something scrummy in a bap or wrap, or slurp up thick, homemade soup from a wide-lipped vacuum flask.
But so often lunchboxes contain nothing more exciting than chocolate, ‘cheese strings’ and a packet of crisps. Adult lunches on the go are even worse than those found in school satchels, often focussed on a 20 minute queue at the local deli for something that’s limp, or expensive, or possibly both.
Even if your designer ciabatta and flapjack are to die for, wouldn’t it be so much nicer (and cheaper) if you’d made them the night before at home?
In the book, Hugh writes about packed lunches from the heart and from experience: “three hungry kids and two working parents”. He also knows that not every youngster wants to take the lid of their Tupperware and find squirrel ragout tartlets with a Stilton jus (don’t worry, I made that combo up).
Little Hugh – Birds Eye and ketchup
As a child he was a packet food fan. “If it didn’t come out of a Birds Eye packet and get fried up and served with ketchup, I wasn’t really that interested.” So his lunchbox suggestions are imaginative but suited to both the conservative and adventurous eater – we particularly like the pasty recipes.
Pasties were one of the original packed lunches, enjoyed by Cornish tin miners, whose wives baked meat in one end and jam in a separate pocket at the other. The thick crust meant that workers with mucky hands could pick them up without getting dirt all over the food. (Anne)
In the book, it’s adults that Hugh’s really trying to win back to the packed lunch. “The fact is that for most of us these days, during the week at least, lunch is an irrelevance. Not so much because we don’t eat it – we still generally manage to shovel some kind of calorific concoction into our mouths between the hours of noon and 2pm.
“No, the problem is that we scarcely notice what’s we’re eating. We devour our food on autopilot, barely savouring the taste and texture, as our brains continue to tick over the day’s workload.”
Why the packed lunch works
For Hugh the packed lunch works on many levels – it ensures you get to eat something you like (possibly made by someone you love), it’s thrifty, it gives you more lunch time as you don’t have to queue (and you can spend some of that time finding somewhere nice to eat it).
“I feel passionately about lunchboxes because I make one several times a week for my wife, who goes out to work and of course, I feel passionately about her.”
We also believe that it’s the love contained in a lunchbox that is its secret ingredient, whether that’s making up lunch for a partner, or a child, or for yourself. And everybody needs a little loving.
» Read our article – In praise of packed lunch
» Some of your great packed lunch suggestions
River Cottage Every Day by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is published by Bloomsbury
