We’ve all copied a recipe from a book that, over time, has become our own and it appears, celebrity chef Rick Stein is no exception. In fact, he admitted on Mark Wogan’s Spooning podcast, he derived a large part of his cooking style from revered TV cook Keith Floyd.
“He once said to me, slightly irritated, you stole all my ideas, right? And at the time, I said ‘no,’ but what I should have said was ‘yes I did’.’”
Rick added that Keith Floyd’s infectiously “bloke-ish” presentation – which generally involved a generous glass of wine – was hugely influential for him.
It was watching Floyd, he says, that made him realise that you could be a TV chef without being “a Delia Smith or a Mary Berry.”
Rick is by no means the only TV chef that has paid tribute to Floyd’s pioneering style. After the Berkshire-born TV chef’s death in 2009, Antony Worrall Thompson said of him: “I think all of us modern TV chefs owe a living to him. He kind of spawned us all.”
Rick was certainly more inspired by Keith Floyd than sixties TV legend Fanny Craddock, who he dismisses as “a terrible cook.”
He describes his own style as more “rock and roll.” He says that the problem with earlier TV chefs – what he describes as the “good housekeeping type,” is their strict adherence to the rules.
That previous wave of TV cooks would “stick to the recipes, make sure your ingredients are all the right quantities and all that,” he says, while by contrast his generation were”cooking from the seat of our pants”.
Rick adds that another great inspiration to him, in his early days, was Graham Kerr, whose now largely-forgotten Galloping Gourmet show was a fixture on British TV in the late sixties and early 1970s.
“I worked on a show once in Australia,” Rick says. “He was a great guy.”
The freewheeling TV personalities of yesteryear were allowed a good deal more leeway than the stars of today’s cookery shows, and Rick has expressed great sympathy for disgraced Masterchef host Gregg Wallace.
The 78-year-old broadcaster said he felt what had happened to Wallace was “unfortunate”.
He also confessed that it would “affect me terribly” if he found himself in a similar situation, adding that he doesn’t have “any skeletons in a cupboard”. Rick stressed, though, that Wallace is “just a different personality to me”.
Rick told the Telegraph: “I think partly he hadn’t really taken on that you can’t say certain things now. It’s not so much that he was a nasty person.
“I’m lucky that I’ve got sons who will instantly tell me, ‘Listen, you can’t say this’. And if you don’t pick up on that, the fact that things change, well that’s not very clever.
“Sometimes you think, ‘I can’t believe this’, and then you think, ‘Well, that’s the way it is’. There’s no point in getting all stroppy about it.
“I feel a bit sorry for him really. But I don’t like sleaziness so I’m not saying that (about all of Wallace’s behaviour). But he just didn’t realise that the wind had changed.”
