Working at the Workshop
After a decade of teaching and hosting food and wine workshops alongside Delia Smith, now she has passed me the reins and left me to fly solo with her blessing. Over these 10 years I've learnt a great deal from her and from the thousands of people I’ve met who cook her recipes and love and rely on them. It’s been an inspiring and exciting time and I am lucky to have had such a great mentor. She has taught me to do everything I can to make sure that my recipes work and to continually search for ways to help home cooks. I am fully ready and excited at the prospect of doing the workshops next year but there will always be a bit of Delia in everything that I do.
Each workshop starts at least a month before the day. First I talk with the chefs about the menu that we'll serve at the workshop. We choose the recipes first of all for great taste, (flavour always comes first). But each recipe has to meet many criteria after that. I have to be able to demonstrate them in the time I have, for our guests to be able to re-create them at home. They have to be recipes that I haven’t demonstrated at workshops here before, and we have to be able to scale the recipes up from 2 or 4 to 100 to serve them for lunch. The chefs at Canary Catering are experts at this. They have been working with Delia’s recipes for home cooks so they know exactly how to successfully scale small quantities up to large. Often the dishes are a mixture of mine and the chef’s recipes and ideas; it’s a wonderfully creative process. Martin, the pastry chef and I like to play with variations on a theme so we can give our guests as many tasters as possible. For this workshop it’s Delia’s Christmas pudding crackers, cranberry and mandarin jelly, mandarin curd in filo and orange brandy ice cream.
We prepare for a full day before each workshop; testing the dishes in the huge ovens at Canary Catering to see if there are variations in temperatures that need changing for the day. The chefs then do the bulk of the preparations leaving only the final parts of the dishes that need to be done at the very end to the next day. This is carefully planned by Chris, the head of catering, Lance the head chef, or Craig the sous chef. During the day they will co-ordinate with the front of house team to work through the timing for the day so that we know everything that needs to happen before it does. We check all the bookings for special dietary requirements to make sure that whatever a guest does or doesn’t eat, they get an equally special meal. The timing will change throughout the day if my demonstration runs over time, I get very excited and we all want to give the guests as many tips as we can to take away with them.
One of the last things I do the day before is to meet with the events manager and re-check the recipes. I will have tested, written and edited them two weeks before. Emma, the events manager, goes through them and sends me back notes the week before, on the prep day we take a final chance to notice any improvements I can make as I prepare the ingredients and the “ones I prepared earlier”. Emma marks the changes in red, then goes to print 100 copies to put in folders with pencils ready for the guests the next day. At this stage the video and sound team are in to set up their cameras, speakers and big screens to make sure that every one watching can see and hear perfectly.
The day of the workshop starts for our guests at 9.15 when they arrive for fresh coffee and warm pastries made fresh by Martin and his team. My demonstration starts at 9.45 but I always start at 5.30 on the day it seems that each year I am getting slower and need to start earlier (think I’m getting old). Today I need to have turkey at three different stages of preparation. This year, I’m trying out a slow cooked turkey breast and a suet pudding made with the leg meat and caramelised onions. However much time I have to prepare, it never seems like enough and I am breathless when it’s time to begin.
At 9.45 Caroline the compare introduces Graham Donaldson, a fantastic Scottish wine expert and Simon Atkinson, known as Ice, a Liverpudlain barman. They are both entertaining and knowledgeable and have been part of the workshops from the start 10 years ago. Next Caroline introduces Paul Kelly, the legendary turkey farmer who holds world records for carving and plucking, Paul does his little turkey gobble by way of greeting. They do a charming job of looking like the three wise men on bar stools. By this stage I’m so nervous that I bounce around then Caroline introduces me and off I go.
I have the demonstration planned so that I can appear casual, this means lining up my ingredients in the order that I’m going to cook them in, keeping boards, knives and plastic gloves at the ready so that if I need to prepare something raw, I can do it then clear it away easily. It also means cooking things in the right order so that Graham can talk about the wines that go with the food that I demonstrate. He does this in the middle of the demonstration because he will talk about the wines that they eat for lunch when everyone has a glass of it in their hand and is about to eat the dish. I also have to make sure before I begin that I won’t have to turn my back and look for anything at any stage.
So, I move from red mullet with oranges, lemons, SunBlush tomatoes and sautéed spinach to open lasagne printed with parsley, roast sweet potato, garlic, chestnuts and porcini sauce to mandarin curd with filo pastry, grapefruit, ice cream and cranberry jelly. Next is scallops baked in their shells with vermouth cream, but we prepared all of the scallops the day before and I forgot to keep a couple of raw ones so I have to do a pretend demonstration with a picture that we printed from the internet. It works more as a comedy sketch than a demonstration, but it works. Ice helps me throughout; he’s become more confident in the kitchen over the last decade and, “my barman” helping me out has become part of the show.
Graham talks about the wine and food combinations in general and wines to serve with my dishes, ribbing me along the way for combining ingredients that make him have to work hard to find a wine to match. We have a break and our guests have a taste of the dishes and then I show my main dish that we’ll be serving for lunch, Paul Kelly’s beautiful Bronze Essex turkey with suet pudding & mushy peas.
Next Paul comes on with his marvellous mixture of anecdotes and expertise. Even though I’ve watched him do this for many years, I still learn something every time I watch him demonstrate. I’ve eaten his birds for ten years now on Christmas day and I just love them. The taste and texture are simply sublime.
Next Ice does his high speed demonstration, throwing bottles in the air, catching bits of ice in his shaker. His demonstration is like a glamorous little movie. He talks about James Bond’s shaken not stirred Martini and explains that this would ruin the drink because the ice would dilute the alcohol; he talks about how the cocktails were invented and how many cocktail names are combinations of their ingredients. Then it’s time for the guests to taste the cocktails, have a little shop for books, aprons and other mementos to be signed. Before lunch Graham holds a wine tasting tutorial when the guests will taste and talk about three of his favourite wines. This is before they even start the next three different wines that Graham has chosen to match the food at lunchtime. Graham is a wonderful teacher who really loves his subject, his mantra is, “I’ll give you tips, but you should drink the wine that you like best” This fits perfectly into mine which is “the best way to serve food is the way that you like it best.”
The staff are very organised at serving large numbers, the lunch service is very smooth. We serve 100 people 3 courses in good time, with perfectly cooked food, the combination of my, Craig and Martins food and our joint planning means that everything gets cooked at the right time to be ready just before serving.
Delia arrives in the middle of lunchtime and people begin to get their books signed, I set up a chair nearby and we chat and sign for a good hour so that everyone who wants one will get a signature or a photo before they leave.
Then we get our microphones back on and sit up at the front of the class, the five of us in a line to answer questions about food, wine, turkeys, football and cocktails. We end the day with a standing ovation for Delia, she makes a lovely speech about the team of Graham, Ice, and I and endorses the workshops that will make a new start next year without her. We’ve all learnt so much from Delia and we’ll make sure we use it to make the future workshops wonderful.