YouSaid · the spoken record

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

lines on the record: 46
first: 2009-07-26
most recent: 2009-07-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'd really like a full set of scuba gear so I can properly explore the water around the island. I promise not to shoot any fish while wearing the scuba gear. I might have a go for them once I've taken it off, but if I don't make that part of my survival but as part of my pleasure, is that allowed?”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great yarn, also a beautiful book full of lovely things and very rereadable. Haven't read it for a while, so I'll be looking forward to that.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My last track is something very special it's a friend of mine, Hattie Longfield, singing a song that she wrote herself Hattie was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, has come through it and is now very well. She started to write songs and she'd always played the guitar a bit, but she really moved up another notch. And I believe she wrote this song when there was still some uncertainty as to the outcome, and that something you can feel in the lyrics. And I suppose there's one thing in my life that certainly feels charmed, and of course it can't last forever, but I haven't yet had to deal with major or difficult bereavements or problems, and of course there are tricky times ahead, and this is a very beautiful song that is kind of about the inevitability of uncertainty.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, chocolate bars I'm still a sucker for a toffee crisp or a crunchy I mean I wouldn't go quite so far as to make a chocolate dispensing machine my luxury, but it would be something I'd miss.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not physically, I'm up for it in fact quite a lot of the holidays we choose to go on as a family are aimed at that kind of life, not always in tropical locations, but on the west coast of Scotland, for example, we spend a lot of our holiday time gathering the food that we're going to eat in the evening, whether it's mussels from the shore.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The clash this goes back to my very fleeting attempts to be a little bit of a punk. Again my friend Charlie was just ahead of the curve. He was sneaking out of school to see the clash play live in West London and coming back with these incredible stories about how many punks gobbled on him and how fantastic that was. I never got to see them live, but I listened to them a lot and listened to Charlie's stories and loved the clash, and I've chosen police and thieves.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, there's no policing what they might eat when they go round to their friend's house. I think that would be ridiculous.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They make a lot of pancakes. They have made, in fact, Chloe's made some superb peppermint creams. Oscar's a pancake fiend. Chloe loves making omelets. Freddy likes making strange brews, not strictly edible, but we give him a bit of leeway as long as nothing too precious ends up in the pot we don't mind”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think there's no comparison really between the kind of thing I've experienced just moving house and shifting school from the extraordinary upheavals that Chloe's had to deal with in her life. But it's been an amazing thing for us, for Marie and I and for the whole family. And she has transformed extraordinarily from a rather frightened but fun eight year old girl who spoke very little English into I have to say a young woman she's twelve now and is blossoming and playing the guitar riding her pony and is a joy to have around.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Chloe is living with us. We haven't formally adopted her, but we are her special guardians. She used to live in the Congo and was a very unforeseen sequence of events, but we already knew Chloe, we knew her family, and her adoptive mother died very suddenly, and she came to stay with us for a bit without any real plan as to where we were going to go from there, and it worked well for us and it worked well for her, and four years later she is still with us and is going to be with us for a long time. She's family.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, since we've moved, we've re downshifted a bit. We've got a little less livestock than I had before. We have a little bit of help. We have someone who comes and helps a couple of days a week. But we do a lot of it ourselves. And at the moment, we have a goat in milk, and Maria and Oscar are doing most of the milking, and I get my hand in once in a while. It's great.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I met Marie in a strange and circuitous way. A bunch of friends went on holiday to Monavasier in Greece, and we ran into a couple of French guys in a bar, one of them in particular I stayed in touch with. A year or so later he called me up, said he was in London, could he stay on my floor? And the only other person he knew in London was Marie. She was a student at the time studying in London, and he took me to where she was staying one evening and she was in her little tiny flat studying cigarette in one hand, glass of whiskey on the table, Nick Cave, CD collection. It all felt a little bit intimidating and very French to me. Very French.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this was the first song at our wedding when Marie and I got married. When I first met Marie about the only thing in her CD collection was Nick Cave, and that was a bit of a stumbling block as I hadn't really heard of this Australian. Slowly she made me a convert, and this was a very lovely song to play at the beginning of our wedding The first dance”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, fury as TV chef cooks tufty. The point I made, for example, when we took the young rooks from the trees were these birds were slightly older than your average supermarket chicken. We were taking them at eight to nine weeks, whereas most supermarket chickens are slaughtered at five or six weeks, and these birds had lived free and wild up to that point. So I personally felt that they were food I could eat with a much cleaner conscience than an intensively farmed chicken.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did, yes, several helpings. It was served as a canopy at an alternative christening. And the family who were involved got a lot of stick, I got a lot of stick. But the really interesting thing is people were getting hot under the collar, but they found it very hard to put their finger on what they were getting cross about. Nobody was hurt, nobody was harmed. In fact, one of the fascinating things that happened at the party was one of the very piped up and suddenly said I've just realised this is meat that I can eat with a clean conscience because nothing has died in fact it's the byproduct of a new life so yes I can tuck into this”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, I mean I can't do anything about the fact that I have come from a privileged background and that I'm a Hyana. You know, I'm in the media business and I get well paid for what I do and let's not say any different because that's clearly the case. But I also think it's a little bit patronizing to people who are on a tighter budget to assume that they're not interested in these issues or that they can't afford to care and I've had a whole bunch of mail from people saying I'm a single mum, I'm a student, don't let anyone tell you that we don't care simply because we're on a tight budget. You've got to separate ethical issues from economic issues. You can't simply override the ethics of meat production on the grounds of economics.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's absolutely right. It's not a God given right, it's not an evolutionary assumption that we have to eat meat, but what I think is essential that is if we're going to eat meat, we have to look after the animals who provide us with that meat, and we have to treat them with respect.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I love to dance, as any of my friends will testify with possibly slightly raised eyebrows, and it's anything from air guitar to the who, which is a great favourite, to really getting up for some serious disco. The dance floor filler has been a hard one to choose, but I've gone for Donna Summer, I feel loved.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's right, I drifted into the river cafe and sort of drifted out again, had to make a decision about what to do, and I think I made in some ways a slightly lazy decision, which was to start writing about food. I enjoyed writing, I had quite a few friends who'd got a foot in the door as journalists, and I started bothering them a bit and seeing if I could get some pieces published. And I have to say that all came together fairly quickly, and before I knew it I was a food writer.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it wasn't at the time. I mean, it really was the early days. It was just happening at the River Cafe at that point. But it was an incredibly relaxed kitchen. And that was why I enjoyed it and why I thought I'd fit in and probably why ultimately I didn't, because I was too relaxed for the relaxed kitchen. I was a messy cook and I'd had no formal training and I went into the river cafe cooking like I cooked at home, making a big mess and sometimes forgetting to clean it up. As the restaurant became more acclaimed and the pressure mounted in the kitchen, and I wasn't quite delivering. I was having a lovely time, slightly at their expense”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I had a friend who was waitressing there. I was waiting to go back to Africa, but she said, look, if you're at a loose end, you know, you love cooking, come and get a shift here. Maybe as a waiter, maybe you can get something in the kitchen. And I turned up one morning, and they were short of a chef, and they put me straight on to the lunch service to help put together a few salads. That went just about okay.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, why did I only last for six months? I certainly would have stayed a lot longer. You were sacked, were you? The answer Kirsty is that I was fired. Right, okay. That's why I only lasted for six months.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is David Bowie. I love David Bowie. I think my sister more or less got me interested. So many tracks I love, but top of the list five years.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was travelling around Africa for about eight months with my friend Linden, who was also passionately interested in wildlife. And then we kind of run out of money and time and came back to England, but we were all set to go back. And that's when I went to work at the river cafe, and I never did go back.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say I developed a following, but I wrote a recipe column for the University magazine. One of the early recipes was called Mean Beans, I think, and it was about customizing a tin of baked beans with a little bit of curry powder, chopped bacon, a bit of apple, maybe some raisins and spices not just to make it go further, but to make it more delicious.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was eating better than that, and cooking was quite a big thing. Yeah, for me and for quite a few of my friends, we got quite into cooking and we had, I suppose, what were rather pretentious little dinner parties in each other's houses and colleges and vied with each other to make the food better. It was like a kind of Oxford version of that TV show come dine with me, I think. We used to go around each other's houses and criticise each other's food.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bacon that really smelt like wet dog, nursery puddings of the most appalling kind, but some absolute horrors and the worst of the lot was the school trifle, and I was fairly systematically forced to eat a bowl of it, and it would make me wretch. But I did learn to get an awful lot of trifle onto a spoon and flick it under the table. Quite a”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at me today, I'm looking quite snappy, aren't Again, Eden for me was great. I had a fantastic time, made some lifelong friends. I played the rebel a certain amount of the time, but I still fell in with the system and got a very good education out of it.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think that's right. I know it was tricky for them. It was a genuine dilemma, it wasn't necessarily the obvious thing to do, and I was quite homesick, and that definitely affected my mum. There was a lot of tearfulness at the end of school holidays and half terms and weekends at home, and I know from talking to them more recently that they thought it wasn't working at one point, and then I think just when they might have said, you know, let's get Hugh back home, I fell in with that kind of life, and once you're into it, it's quite good fun, really.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've got some classical music. This is Beethoven, the choral symphony, the last movement. Again, this goes way back, in fact, to my prep school days. It was a great privilege and a sort of necessary comfort, I think, when you were sent away from school to be able to have your own music. And I remember lying in bed at night with my little tape recorder and one of those funny little wires plugged in one ear. You know, they didn't have headphones and all that sort of thing. And I listened to the who and the Beatles, but one day on the way to school I pinched a tape from my parents' car which was called Beethoven's greatest hits and started to listen to that tape over and over again and the one thing I always come back to is that final movement of the ninth symphony the Ode to Joy.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not consciously, but I lived in London for most of my twenties, but I was constantly escaping mainly back to my mum and dad's at weekends, and then I found River Cottage, which really was initially a place I rented, Marie and I rented with another couple as a weekend cottage, and I used to go there to do a bit of writing. And I just found it harder and harder to leave. And I'd started getting involved with television and had done the series of cook on the wild side, and channel four were looking for another project, so I one day thought, well, I wonder if I could just not go back after this weekend. Just stay at River Cottage, and that's how I got into it.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I don't think they stopped being that because they had some of their groovy friends from London to stay quite a lot, and that was all good fun. They were sort of at the sort of Bohemian end. They didn't suddenly start wearing smocks and chewing straw.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not really I was pretty young at the time. I mean, I think if I'd been a couple of years older, it might have been a tricky transition because I might have been a hardened urban urchin by then, but I was delighted to arrive in the country this enormous wooded playground, and I fell in with the kids in the village pretty quickly and had to camp in the woods for a few years and race snails and do unp things like collect birds eggs.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and he went on working in advertising, he was a copywriter and he went freelance. And yes, it was a kind of downshifting. It was a definite choice that they made to get out of the London rat race and live a country life.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My second track is The Who, the Who have been a huge thing in my family for as long as I can remember. One of my dad's best friends from university was Kit Lambert, the manager of the Who, and he got sort of loosely involved in promoting them on some of their tours. So who records and in fact who badges and who paraphernalia were always around at home and for a brief period my mum was secretary of the Who Fan Club and she went by the name of Jane Who? It could have been any of a dozen who tracks, I love the who so much. The one I've chosen is the last track on Quadrafinia. It's Love Rain Ermie.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think they looked quite Hugh Fanny Whittingstall actually. They were not necessarily very elegantly presented. I've always been a bit mucky around the edges when I've been cooking. I went through a stage in, I suppose the late eighties and early nineties of trying to make my food look very pretty and it was always a disaster. So now it's just if the ingredients are right and the recipes going reasonably well, you fling it all on a plate and it tends to look pretty appetite”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Standing on a chair in the kitchen with icing sugar, egg whites, peppermint essence, and some green colouring. In fact, by the age of eight or nine I did most of the puddings for my mum's dinner parties in the early seventies, so you can imagine the kind of thing. It was sort of rum gatto covered in thick layers of cream or lemon mousse, chocolate mousse. And did they look very...”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, pretty much. I mean they all enjoy getting involved to some degree. The problem is somehow we often tend to knock that enthusiasm out of them, but the raw material kids, food, you know, what's not to get involved? What's not to love about that?”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would mention it, yes. No, I think her bread is generally so good, so fantastic that if ever it doesn't come up to her usual high standards, it's clear for us all to see and it can be discussed.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go to the next step. At home it's been a genuine problem, but recently resolved brilliantly as My wife has started making bread. and cheese from our goats, and I just leave all that to her now.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm really ashamed to say that it's true. It's awful. It's not just at home, it's at my friend's house. It's an awful habit. But the problem is you only need a tiny bit of encouragement and then you just...”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, the best garment I've ever owned. It was a fabulous thing, and I wore it day in day out for several weeks, and then, ridiculously on the way back from some party, I left it on a train. If it's out there, if anyone's seen my”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I had very straight hair, and I think it was my attempt to get it to spike that made it curl probably. But then I could just cut it short and go and buy a secondhand shiny suit from a charity shop and a Fred Perry shirt and a pair of loafers and some white socks. and trot up and down the street thinking that I was some sort of a rude boy. So my first song is gangsters by the specials.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On my first track also takes me back to school days, and in fact my friend Charlie, I'm going to name him, if not shame him in the duck incident, but Charlie was my best friend, still is my best friend, and he made quite a convincing punk I didn't, but when the whole scar two tone thing came along, I thought this is something I can do. I can't do bondage trousers and spiky hair with lots of gel in it.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it was actually the whole thing was a little bit dramatic because I don't think we quite knew what we were about to do. But it was certainly one of the more unusual ways that I've earned a meal. And since then I've raised my own ducks and slaughtered them at home along with chickens, sheep, pigs and other animals, and I tend to have known the meat that I eat.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Duck I'm perhaps a little reluctant to agree that that was the first time I pulled it off because I think I'd probably plucked a few carrots from the ground and eaten a few peas from the pod, but in carnivorous terms yes there was an incident. A friend and I used to sneak up under the bridge over the River Thames at Windsor to smoke cigarettes and there was often a little parade of ducks going up and down underneath the bridge and one day we took a couple of half bricks in our overcoat pockets, thinking we'd nab ourselves a duck supper and we agreed our target duck and launched our bricks, and to both our astonishments we made a direct hit. The duck went under and then bobbed up ten yards further downstream stone dead. We knew we had to do the right thing then which was to even if we'd already done perhaps the wrong thing. So we scuttled off the bridge and down the bank and fished it.”
2009-07-26 · Desert Island Discs · Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source