Jago Rackham

I think I come from another traditional route, that of the mother or grandmother, the person cooking at home, evolving and thinking and if they like cooking and their cooking is not simply an addition to the drudgery of childcare and cleaning — expressing themselves. For me it is the greater tradition, and much older than that of the restaurant or the chef, who are relative interlopers in the history of eating.
The question of freedom, in this context, the home context, is for me deeply rooted in England and English food, or the perceived lack of it. I used to feel like there was no grandmother looking over my shoulder, and so few rules or traditions that I could do anything. This isn’t true, there is a grand but quiet tradition in England, but it is not enforced in the way it is in India or Italy or China, it is not respected, and this lack of respect has allowed me to express myself through a cuisine which is sui generis.

You cannot live without eating. And I think we are social animals, and so doing something we need to do in a situation we are inclined towards is as close to nature as culture can be. Also, we are vulnerable when eating, and eating together is vulnerable, and in vulnerability there is great tenderness, and therefore care.

Faye’s an old friend and we bonded over our love of food. The first time she came to dinner we served a suckling pig and she chewed the ears. In that I saw a peer in greed! The drawings were done at my kitchen table while I fed Faye, the first time I made her shepherd’s pie, which I’d never made before — the recipe was from Jane Grigson’s English Food. Every few drawings she’d ask to stop and I’d make her go on… I think that’s as close to the project in spirit as any adornment could be. I am incredibly grateful.

I haven’t actually read her book, though I love Rochelle Canteen. But she will have influenced me via her partnership with Fergus [Henderson], some of whose recipes I have crabbed and pulled at in my own way. St John was opened in the year of my birth, and its approach to English food, I saw it called Anglo-French bourgeois cooking, has imprinted itself on my approach… Anyway, as someone who is in a very rich creative partnership — with Lowena Hearn — I know that nothing is really one’s own, so her influence would come thence and is not diminished by the conduit.

Oh, literally sharing it? Yes. At first I thought you meant sharing online. Which I don’t mind either, though I get bored with it being so much work now, I used to find it very pleasurable. But yes, sit and eat together and in so doing recharge yourselves and remember why egality and love is important and not simply, what, theoretic?

I think you worry about washing up, use much less butter… But I’d hope the experience wasn’t akin to a restaurant, I want it to remind one of a grandma but a grandma who’s a lush and lots of fun. Restaurants are theatres, but most importantly they are businesses — a restaurant cook must consider profit above all else (and within that they will think of many good things, many arts and kindnesses) but if they cannot make money the whole exercise is, at best, self-indulgent, at worst ruinous.

Oooh that’s nice. I remember going to my grandfather’s house in Sussex and sitting under a tree for lunch in summer — the unnecessary move from inside to outside just for pleasure… I would have been five or so. But no, not really anything in particular, just Lowena’s influence and witchiness and love of ritual, which is also soothing and kind. I feel like we invented many of our own rituals over the long years of our union.

Well, I’ve only been in a professional kitchen a handful of times, and always as an interloper. So, it’s less stepping outside of than not knowing… the naivety is part taste — I rarely like the refined, part ability — I cannot make the refined, and it is rarely fun to make something refined when you have friends for dinner. A chef isn’t present at the table, a chef is working. A host is not working, though they do labour.

Thank you.

As you say, I care about ritual, and ritual relies on image, on the visual. Adornment and beauty speak of so much and are so enhancing, they are integral to hosting.

We eat with everything. And unless you’re very hungry, that everything matters.

London is a peerless city, as is New York, as is probably Tokyo or Sao Paulo or Delhi or Shanghai, I just don’t know them… an endlessly pumping organ, a mess of people. London exists outside of England, though there are some English bits, like St James, and is its own place, transnational, unkempt.
Its food reflects this. There is, of course, a good culture of restaurants, and some very fine cooking, but what is more exciting than that is the depth and breadth of ingredients, the many influences you can take by chatting to people in shops, by curiosity and mimicry. My earliest food memory, I was in London before my parents left for Devon, is a Sri Lankan green banana curry eaten in our garden in Lewisham. And it all flows from there.

Yes.

Well, a little experience helped — I know how the pass works, I know the importance of communication. But more than that it was an understanding of the position I hold and the position the chefs hold. I am a guest, but one who is somewhat honoured. I do not know the terrain or the rules and I make that clear, but I am also clear about what I do know and what my preferences are, and why I am there… And then it’s almost always quite fun, and I learn so much, and have my hand held a bit. I’m very upfront about what I can do and what I can’t.
I was cooking at the Plimsoll with Joshua Swinney, the head chef there, who is such a kind man, and brilliant, and suddenly it was service and I panicked but he calmed me down. I always think about his calm and patience when I’m in a kitchen and that helps a lot. Also, he kept picking string out of the pork I was serving, which was kind, but sort of gentrified the food.

Well, first, foremost, and all other qualifiers of magnitude is Lowena, my partner. Her eye, her aesthetic nous, is where it all began. But yes, Flemish painting… music — Michael Nyman, sort of ways toward the dramatic. The brashness of my collaborator Joana Kohen. I feel more and more that my interest in food is leaning toward an interest in theatre and spectacle.

Growing up we ate very well but were not overly concerned with food being local — you sort of live in it, so it’s more exciting when things are from elsewhere. It was going back to Devon after living in London for a few years that I got excited by the area’s food, by the expression of the landscape, and the ways I can use this to create a faux tradition for myself, to find some sort of groundedness which I don’t really have.

I think there are toils in rural life too, and a great deal of isolation and boredom. If you are a ‘professional’ you often spend a great deal of time driving away from your village into a town or city, if you are poor you’re trapped by a badly organised and often expensive transport system. And so on, so I think the communal is as necessary in the country as the city.
But yes, I absolutely think that communal dining offers an escape — eating with friends should offer a small utopia, from which one can emerge refreshed.

No, but I will give a piece of advice: never cook anything you’ve not cooked before for a dinner party.