we are here in cannes to speak to gordon back soon. his most recent book is hook line and thinker, which, as you might have guessed, is about fish. welcome. it is nice to be here. i was looking at what some of the critics had to say that you, and was in the something damning. they say you cook not for money, revere nce , they say you cook not for money, reverence, 01’ they say you cook not for money, reverence, or ostentation, but we passionately work. your breast is an earthly paradise and a place of pilgrimage. they do like you, don't bake? that is wonderful. yes. but an award to say about that. i think i know who said that, and he is one of my absolute heroes. i presume you are talking about michelle. an absolute legend in my eyes. let's talk about your background. your name has been described as dickensian. it does sound quite old—fashioned, doesn't dickensian. it does sound quite old —fashioned, doesn't it? dickensian. it does sound quite old—fashioned, doesn't it?|j dickensian. it does sound quite old-fashioned, doesn't it? i am the youngest of five boys. it is disastrous. i have got used to it. you talk about your family, you write about your family and how close you all are. a lot of high achievers. he didn't do particularly well. why cannot write a book? it is a passion for recipes and knowing recipes work. i'm the least achiever academically. i am the least achiever academically out of all of us, ijust wanted to cook and try and cook the best of my ability. when you started, how encouraging were your family? i would say my mother played a massive part. she always used to do a sunday lunch, everyone would sit around the table. it would not vary, vegetables from the garden. a roast of some description, pudding or whatever. i was the one who was always helping her with puddings. that remains now because i have a very sweet tooth. i will never not have a pudding in a restaurant. she is massively influential in how i started. she pushed me into... i left school having an idea that i might be a cricketer, played cricket for kent, an under19 team. i was told at the end of the season, thanks, we will keep an eye on you but you are not what we are looking for. so she thought really quickly and said, you're not academic, you cannot be a vet which is something i wanted to be because i love animals. she said well, you like cooking so she put me on the path of doing market stall, baking cakes and biscuits in the kitchen at home. a tiny kitchen. every thursday, i would put up my table and tarpaulin top and it was called galton blackiston‘s goodies. believe it or not it would sell out by two o'clock every time. then my parents went up to the lake district to stay there in a hotel for quite some time. they spoke to someone up there who was looking for someone to train as a pastry chef. she came running back to me and made me apply. i had never heard of the lake district or windermere. that is the other end of the world to me. we drove up to the lake district. i had an interview and she drilled into me on the way up to make sure you know what you're pastry mix is, your biscuit mix is. lo and behold, he did ask me, can i tell him what shortcrust pastry is? i could. lo and behold, he did ask me, can i tell him what shortcrust pastry is? i could. i'm sure that is why i got the job. i had no college training or anything, just a little thing doing a market stall. she can take a lot of the credit for where i am. how did you learn? do you remember the first dish you cooked? yes, i remember my first upside—down pineapple cake. living where we did, we lived away from the coast and rented this tiny hut, you could only get there by boat. my father still did this until the time he died. he took all the grandchildren. wonderful summer holiday, blazing weather. you would get out there and as a youngster i would spend my time shrimping, crabbing, if you saw the terns diving over the sea, you would try and catch the mackerel. and catching cockles. my first memories of cooking were cockles. cooking the cockles, putting them in vinegar and having them very simply with samphire. the key to everything you have done in all of your book is essentially fresh produce, freshly produced stuff, fish in particular? yes, i lived in the part of the country, right on the coast so it made sense to use produce which is close and obviously we are surrounded by a huge expanse of sea. we use a lot of fish and a lot of local fish. and a lot of seasonal fish. you take great pleasure in lots of different bits in the process, including catching fish and catching mackerel. you are eloquent about the fun you have had catching mackerel. i would not say i am the best fisherman but i do try and have a laugh. i have a rickety old boat which we go out in when the tide and weather are right. we see what we can catch. let us talk about the book in detail, cooking in morston hall in 2002, how did that come about? from a passion to a successful restaurant, writing a book is a very different experience? it all came about, i have done cookery demonstrations everywhere, ever since we opened in 1992. i have always done. i have always done cookery demonstrations. at the hall and further afield so i have built up a collection of recipes. but i think i know they work in a domestic environment. that is important to me because i'm going to do a cookery book, not a chef's bible which sits on the table and is read only by chefs, i want it accessible to the public and customers. so it came from doing cookery demonstrations and knowing i have a certain collection of recipes that work. when you say you had a collection of recipes and you talk about them to other people, what do you mean a collection? do you have notebooks? i do have that. when one does cookery demonstrations, everyone gets a collection of the recipes you are demonstrating on the day so you cherry pick the ones which are really good. that's how it started. but there is also a narrative in the book, the book is actually, all about you, about life at sea, how important that matters. was that difficult for you because the first book took you a while? they have all taken me a while. nothing frustrates me more, i still do it, the picture did not it is so important i take my time and i try and make sure that everything works. i have a massive input in the book. it has all really come from the fact that i am an absolute freak for buying cookery books. i buy everybody‘s cookery books. i look and think, is that good or not so good or whatever? taking my time means that there is less chance of mistakes. in terms of the photographs, they are really important because when you cook and present things, they are presented beautifully and the same has to be true in the book? yes, i think photography in a cookery book in particular helps massively. i am from the school of thought which says i like to look at something and then try and recreate that something with the recipe so i have a guideline. what it is supposed to look like, that helps me. there are couple of lines in your book which i love. i hate wasting food, this recipe grew out of my dislike of putting an enormous pile of trimmings and stalks on the compost heap. is that true? yes, it is a proprietor thing, the chef owner thing. i go into the kitchen there and look at them when they're pulling potatoes or what ever and say, you're not going waste that. making the transition from something which was an interest to a hobby, to owning your own restaurant, how difficult is that? you choose your wife carefully. tracy has to take an awful lot of credit for what i have got up to. in our time together. ijust cook, tracy does everything else really. i am not a business person. i also watched you cook and i wonder how that translates because i get the impression very much that you, like many chefs, cooked by instinct. you have an idea and you try it out. it becomes a recipe, is that right? yes, absolutely. a lot of recipes evolve from something which completely is avant garde almost. i will tell you one example, a sea bass dish which is a lovely wild sea bass. i happened to have fruit salad next to me because i try and do my five a day. i had a bowl of fruit salad with passion fruit. one of the passion fruit pips landed into a hollandaise mix which i was not using for the fish dish. i tasted the hollandaise and thought, oh my goodness, passion fruit hollandaise and believe it or not it really works. that's how i stumble along my road of finding things, quite often by mistake. another thing, cauliflower puree we were doing, this is in the book. someone had taken it too far and let it boil down with some milk so it caramelised. it was a big pan of cauliflower. so we couldn't throw it away. add a bit of butter to it and keep taking it down. we produced this very dark ca ramelised cauliflower which has now going from being cauliflower puree to celeriac puree, parsnip peree, everything caramelised. it works. every day in the kitchen is a discovery. definitely for me. let us talk about your latest book, hook, line and sinker. a lot of people find cooking fish very difficult because if you get it wrong, the margin of error between something which is overdone and awful and underdone, sorry, i didn't want sushi, people think it is tricky? yes, that is why have done the book. i want to allay fears a little bit. if you keep it simple, and you by the freshest produce, a lot of the time your fish recipes should be fine. yes, i agree people do have a fear about cooking fish and it is very easy to overcook. i do not think there is any fish that i can think of that would probably take any more than ten minutes to cook. that is fillet. not a whole fish? no, a fillet. most times it is a quick process. the preparation can take longer but the actual grilling, pan frying, steaming or whatever is a quick process. what is the difference between that and the farmed sea bass? most cases with farmed sea bass they do not allow them to get to this sort of size. they are 12 inches at best. personally, a fish that has had the chance to mature like this one, is far better in flavour than smaller ones. it is a completely different thing to farmed fish. in your books, the thing about fish is do less to it, don't do so much. yes. that comes with experience. as i get older, we only use wild fish as such and i only literally just want the fish to taste of itself, not some very fancy sauce. i have become simpler as i have got older. after you, sir. thank you. that is a door and a half. it is. this is amazing, an amazing view. look at that. crikey. we talked about how you broke into writing, like this recent book, how have your books developed? the first one, was a collection of recipes from my early years at morston hall. the next one is probably my best book to date, a return to real cooking which came about again from a collection of recipes which again i know work well in the home environment. not too fussy, but really good working recipes. the following one was summertime which was a celebration of everything from my neck of the woods which comes out in summer. until this one, which is specialising in fish. if you are going to do a cookery book, test, test those recipes, get friends to test them, they have got to work. i hold to that line no, but this book i sent them out to friends and see, buy the ingredients and make sure they work. any questions, shoot them back to me. that was another thing i noticed about you working in the kitchen, the preparation goes a long way back. in other words, the final bit is quite quick, you do quite a lot of work, hours, beforehand. we do. when the customers pay money, quite a lot of money, then i will want to give them something they would struggle to recreate at home. there is a sense of theatre? yes. what do you think about the british food now compared to when you started? i remember the days when i first started, we had a reputation as a country of boiled cabbage and lumpy mash. we have come a long way since then. i think we are right up there, i really do. you can eat as well in england or great britain as you can in any other of the gastronomic countries of europe and the world. i love travelling. i do not get a lot of time for it, but short bursts, i have cooked in south africa and enjoyed that time. america, i cooked quite a long time as well. europe, i am an absolute francophile, i love everything about france, spain and italy and greece. all of those countries. i have to be totally comfortable with myself knowing how to do the recipe, whether it be from italy or wherever. whether it be making pasta, i need to make sure i have seen that be made so many times it is not just mejumping on a bandwagon. i want to learn how to get that absolutely right. yeah, i have been fortunate enough to go to some very nice places and learn from people who know what they are up to. one of my good friends is atul kochhar, a wonderful indian chef. he has introduced me to spices not one where you would grab the next beer because you cannot taste what you are eating but clever, intelligent spicing and aromatics which absolutely enhance flavours. i have taken a lot from him about how to do that. what about your routine now? i learned you like to get up early and make scrambled eggs because you make the best scrambled eggs. my mother made the best and i took on the mantle when she passed but yes, i am an early riser and i love that hour of quietness in the kitchen on my own before all the chaos starts. i still cook breakfast at morston hall. there will be people watching who say that scrambled eggs are scrambled eggs, how can you be better? i definitely disagree because you have to cook your scrambled eggs slowly with butter and butter only. do not season until the end and you stir it continuously. i used to say a wooden spoon but that is frowned upon nowadays, maybe a spatula, not a whisk. remember it carries on cooking when you take it off the stove, it has to be soft, not bouncy. do you have a sense of mission? you want to give people the best meal they have ever had a really wonderful meal, a great experience, do you want to improve cooking beyond that because you have worked in schools and hospitals as well which suggests a wider mission on a tight budget? i would say both of those things. i am on a mission to carry on this wonderful upward curve we seem to be on at the moment in the kitchen. my eyes get opened all the time by the quality of what goes on and by my team in the kitchen my head chef in particular is an extraordinary guy. but i am very were that actually, we have had morston hall know for 25 years, i am ready to, i do know what i am talking about most of the time but put a little back. whether that means going to schools, i like to support and educate young ones about the quality of food and the quality of what they are eating and everything like that. i want to support that. in hospitals the food is important. food is massively important for recovery. you can use a little bit of cream and butter. many fewer people than you would think ever bother to sit down as a family to eat, it is perhaps only 10%, just over, who eat one or two meals a week because we have stopped doing that. yes, we have. it happened in my time. sunday lunches were quite raucous occasions, you can imagine with five boys. we did on most occasions eat around a table. as you say, we are very busy culture and nation now. we have not got time to sit down, we have food on the run and actually we do need to make time to actually sit around a table, turn the television off, turn the computer or mobile off, or whateverjust for half an hour and make conversation. my kids are terrible to their mother. we sit down every sunday lunch and have a sunday roast and the children will lark around. does she forgive them? no! galton blackiston, thank you very much. a pleasure, thank you. (no audio) ...pushes towards our shores in the next 2a hours. but it is already having an indirect impact. to the west, whilst dragging cold air to the atlantic, to the east warm air is being pushed in our direction. muggy conditions out there at the moment. starting widely the teens. conditions still warmer than it should be at this time of year across the northern scotland. wet and windy here, with gales around the hebrides. windy start in scotland and ireland, with outbreaks of rain becoming more expensive throughout the day, but not as heavy as we start with. south and east, lots morning cloud, fog in the hills, but that will break up later. across scotland, lots of cloud, with the occasional rain. same too in northern ireland. there could be a splash of rain in cumbria by the time we hit mid—afternoon, but much of england and wales will be dry. breeziest west, with nothing untoward at all. but cloudier compared to some eastern areas. where the cloud breaks, temperatures will be above what you see here. maybe as high as 23 celsius in one or two spots. that is where should be at the stage in october. by monday morning, hurricane ophelia is getting closer. no longer a hurricane, but will still be a substantial storm, the core of which likely to affect the republic of ireland. southern and western areas of the uk. ross, we will see winds strengthened through the morning, particularly around irish sea coasts, celtic coast as well. the northern ireland secrecy damaging a destructive winds of 70 or even 80 miles an hour. later during the day, eight cold and the north. further east, a bit of a breeze, but not a bad day. temperatures could reach 23 or 24. monday night into tuesday, the centre of a low pressure system as it is scotland with heavy rain hit throughout the night. strongest of the winds in the south of scotland and northern in bundesliga to choose a morning rush hour. that could have an impact. you can see that low pressure pushing it was throughout tuesday. so the rain eases off and brightens up. this is bbc news. i'm gavin grey. our top stories: harvey weinstein has been ousted by the board that runs the oscars — the academy said he longer merited the respect of his colleagues. distressing details emerge after a canadian couple are released after five years held hostage in afghanistan. it will be important for us to focus on edification and to try to regain some portion of the childhood that oui’ some portion of the childhood that our children have lost. more people have been forced to leave their homes by wildfires in california — at least 38 people are known to have died. and touchdown — as one of the world's most isolated outposts joins the 21st century.

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