I’m the proud owner of three battered cookery books which I count as amongst my most precious possessions. One of them is signed by the author. They’re cookery books, but they are also beautifully written statements of intent. In their own way, they started a revolution. Their author was unlike anyone who had ever gone before, and I’d contend that no-one since has ever been quite like him.
And that author is? The great Keith Floyd.
Let me take you back to April 1986. Aged 19, I had just started a new job at Devon Life magazine, based in Exeter where I then lived. I was an Advertising Sales Executive, earning the princely sum of £5,000 per year. My job was to sell adverts in our glossy magazine, chase copy and occasionally design adverts. Quite soon, it was realised that I was rather good at talking restauranteurs into buying space and I became responsible for “Wine and Dine.”
Dorset seemed to have nodded off shortly after the Tolpuddle Martyrs left for Australia and never woken up.
The further west you went in the West Country, the quieter and sleepier it got. Somerset and Avon had Bristol, from whence came Bristol Illustrated, the fun and funky magazine in our group. Dorset seemed to have nodded off shortly after the Tolpuddle Martyrs left for Australia and never woken up. Cornwall was all about tourism, surfing and fishing. This left Devon, a place I loved and still do.
In the mid-80s, it was home to three award-winning and ground-breaking restaurants. The Carved Angel in Dartmouth was run by Joyce Molyneux, one of the first women to win a Michelin star. Sonia Stevenson cooked at The Horn of Plenty at Gulworthy in West Devon, on the Devon and Cornwall border. Gidleigh Park in Chagford, on the edge of Dartmoor National Park was a byword for luxury and cutting-edge cuisine.
Padstow, Cornwall
Over the border, Rick Stein was making a name for himself at the Seafood Restaurant in Padstow. I had plenty of restaurants and pubs to ring and even got to write reviews of some of them. However, the name on everyone’s lips in 1986 was Keith Floyd, the talented cook who was taking TV by storm.
Our regional TV station was TSW. It gave us all the local news and weather, plus Gus Honeybun, a large rabbit who would deliver the requisite number of bunny hops to anyone who wrote in asking for a birthday dedication. Truly, they were simpler times. Big news in the office, however, was not Gus and his bunny hops, but a new programme starring one of our region’s most talented cooks. A Somerset boy who’d run a number of bistros and restaurants in Bristol, Floyd burst on to the scene with, “Floyd on Fish”, all set in the West Country. Nowadays, it’s hard to get across just what a revelation the programme was. An enthusiastic, arm waving cook who addressed the cameraman by name and ordered him about, who abused his producer and who was clearly passionate about fresh fish was not something the British public were used to seeing.
In the Devon Life office, we were ecstatic. We claimed Floyd as one of our own. Each week, we’d discuss the programme in minute detail. Floyd was generous to other West Country cooks. One segment featured Sonia Stevenson at the Horn of Plenty, another Rick Stein in his kitchen (“Rick, dear boy.”)
I bought Floyd on Fish which quickly became one of my very favourite books. It still is. Great illustrations, simple instructions and most of all, an assumption right from the start that the reader wants to learn and to use fresh ingredients. When Floyd came to the Barnfield Theatre next door to the office on his tour, I was there in the audience drinking it in. He was brilliant.
Floyd on France was just as good. A typical recipe reads: “Cookery writers and chefs of yesterday terrified the living daylights out of people with their old wives’ tales about egg liaison sauces. Ignore all this and follow me.” I did.
When Floyd bought the Malsters’ Arms in Tuckenhay, it fell to me to ring him up once a month to encourage him to advertise in our pages. He was always very friendly, as was Rick Stein who became another customer. In 1990, I bought A Feast of Floyd which I would read from cover to cover, regularly. These books stood out for me, not only because of the brilliant recipes and reassuring tone, but because of the beautiful, lyrical writing in between. Even now, I can close my eyes and recall whole phrases. “Low tide at Cancale and the beach stretches far to the Brittany horizon. The sun has resigned, washed out by the early evening grey.” Any one of Floyd’s books weaves the recipes together with mellifluous descriptive prose.
Time went on. I left Devon Life and went to run a restaurant. I left Devon in 1993 and my books travelled up to Essex. We moved to Suffolk in 2006 and they took up residence in the book shelves in the dining room. Floyd’s recipe for fish paella was the basis on which we started our Spanish catering company. We turned to his cook books on a regular basis, but life took over, and I rarely managed to watch him on TV.
When he died in 2009, he was about to watch a documentary, “Keith Meets Keith” made by Keith Allen. I never did get round to watching it, but last week, I did.
It was painful viewing. That energetic, bombastic, irreverent cook had become a tired, washed out man in poor health, but still with flashes of the old brilliance. The saddest part for me was the slow descent into alcohol-fuelled anger at dinner, when his long-estranged daughter whispered, “Please, Dad, don’t.” Anyone who has loved an addict will recognise that vain hope that perhaps, just perhaps, this time it will be different. Sadly, it rarely is.
I almost wished I hadn’t seen it, but just the same, today, while I watched him visit Vietnam for “Far Flung Floyd”, I saw again that reverence for food and its preparation, that deep respect for those who cook it and the love of the new and the unfamiliar. In his three volumes of autobiography, there are clues to his mercurial lifestyle and personality. His Uncle Ken, who no-one could ever tame, his aunt who killed herself after concealing great unhappiness, his own deep-down loneliness and depression. It was all there, for anyone to see if they dug deep enough, but the great majority of his output was joyful, irreverent and life-changing.
I know a number of great cooks who say that Floyd was the one who started them off. His legacy (terrible word) lives on. For me, my treasured books are returned to again and again, full of the beautiful prose and fail-safe recipes of one of the greatest cooks and showmen who ever lived.
God bless him.