Kerstin Rodgers - Supper Club - Recipes and notes from the underground restaurant

When I left school, however, I decided to become a photographer, not a cook. Becoming a chef didn’t seem within the realm of possibilities. TV schedules were not full of cookery game shows as they are now. I loved the Galloping Gourmet and Fanny Cradock, but that was about it. My mum had a boxed set of Elizabeth David books, but there were no photos and I wouldn’t cook something unless it had a photo with it. She also had Robert Carrier cooking cards. These were in a cardboard box, like a file, and each one had a photograph of the dish.

My parents had sophisticated tastes in food. They had a house in France, a wrecked stone cottage with twelfth-century walls that were three-feet thick and a fireplace you could sit in. It was outside a small town named Condom, 100km south of Bordeaux in the Aquitaine region. Every school holiday it took us two days to drive there from London. The route to Condom was devised around recommendations in a red, plastic-bound volume, Le Guide des Relais Routiers de France. It was our job as kids in the back seat to spot the Routier logo. Usually they were proper restaurants, cheap, with a set menu and a parking lot full of lorries. Sometimes, however, you would go into a private house listed in the guide and eat in a woman’s kitchen, just one table covered with a chequered oilcloth. The woman would be wearing her flowery apron and cooking in front of you, turning around from her gas stove to plonk platters down on the table. Once for hors d’oeuvres we were given a dish of long red radishes with their green tops still on, a basket of fresh baguette with a sourdough tang, a small hunk of unsalted butter and a pile of salt. We all looked at it, including my parents, not quite knowing what we were supposed to do with this array of ingredients. The son of the woman, noticing our hesitation, laughed and showed us what to do: he cut a little cross in the end of the radish, smeared on a scrape of butter, then dipped it in salt, crunching the radish with torn-off chunks of bread. So simple, just fresh produce, but so delicious.

Wine was always included and everybody, even children, had a little carafe of rough red table wine. This impressed us kids enormously, we felt so grown-up.

In those days I ate meat. My favourite meal, when we were allowed to order à la carte, was steak and chips. One night near Rouen, we stopped at a hotel-restaurant. We kids, as usual, ordered steak frites. There were strange mutterings from the proprietor; there seemed to be a problem. But then no, it was fine, steak frites it was.

When the steak arrived, I bit into it.

‘What do you think?’ asked my dad.

‘It’s yummy. Sort of sweet.’

‘But you like it?’ he asked, in a rare display of interest in my opinion.

‘Yeah, it’s great,’ I enthused.

At the end of the meal my dad told us that it was horse meat.

So I’ve been brought up to eat well, to eat adventurously. My parents loved to travel even before they had kids; my dad, in an attempt to woo my mum, suggested that they go on a cheap tour of Europe. They hitched everywhere. Their budget was the equivalent of 50p a day. When they arrived in Cologne, my mum perused the menu at a restaurant and chose the cheapest thing. The menu being in German, she had no idea what she would be getting.

The waiter, with a silver-domed platter held high, weaved his way through the crowded restaurant. He placed the heavy silver dish on their table and, with a dramatic flourish, lifted off the lid. There, squatting angrily on the platter, an apple between its teeth, was an entire pig’s head. That was what my mother had ordered.

She gasped.

‘I’m not eating that!’ she exclaimed.

The whole restaurant, having followed the progress of the waiter, burst into laughter.

When things had calmed down, my dad whispered:

‘Don’t worry. I’ll eat it.’

As he commenced tucking in, a smile playing around his lips, my mother breathed out heavily:

‘I think you should know that I’m pregnant.’

It turns out that I was conceived in Minori, Italy, earlier in the trip. My dad, unperturbed, gestured with his fork towards the pig’s head and said:

‘I suppose we are going to have to marry you, then.’

So, as I was growing up, my family travelled through France, Italy and Spain every summer, stopping at Relais Routiers and family-run restaurants en route. Every winter we went skiing, eating fondue, raclette and drinking glühwein in Austria and Switzerland.

Once, my father insisted on taking us to a very expensive and reputable restaurant in Spain, near Malaga. We drove through winding mountain roads for hours to get there. My father ordered the best Rioja wine and taught us to savour its aroma from specially designed glasses. The speciality of the house was the seafood platter, which the waiter displayed in its raw state: it was dominated by a two-foot long sprawling langoustine, its eyes waggling around on stalks. My mum and we kids recoiled. Moments later, the whole platter returned: everything was split in half like a Damien Hirst sculpture and steaming! We refused to eat anything at all. It didn’t help that we were all sunburnt and tired. My dad was very angry.

My father will eat anything. It’s probably a reaction to war-time rationing. He’ll suck the bone marrow out of bones…not just from his plate, from yours too. He was intolerant of any fussiness at the table; we were pushed to eat frog’s legs and snails.

The snail incident was traumatic; we stayed in a farmhouse in France that belonged to family friends. The back room was dedicated to keeping snails, mostly kept in buckets; their digestive systems were ‘cleaned’ by being fed on bread for three days. Some of the snails escaped, they were everywhere, shiny trails on the chalky walls and stone floor. We went to a nearby restaurant that served snails stuffed with garlic, butter and parsley. My dad exhorted us to try.

‘Go on, just one.’

We three kids spent the next couple of days in bed with terrible diarrhoea. Our bedroom was upstairs in this farmhouse, thankfully far from the snail room, but there was no inside toilet. We spent two days shitting in a communal bucket as we were too ill to make it to the outside toilet. I never tried snails again.

On this same trip, same farmhouse, my dad woke us early.

‘We are going mushroom hunting,’ he whispered.

Sleepy-eyed, we stepped out into the dark and walked what seemed like forever, down the poplar-lined French country roads to the forest. On this holiday, my dad read us a chapter every night, with all the voices, from The Lord of the Rings, by the huge fireplace. The forest, when we arrived, seemed to me to be populated by elves, trolls and hobbits. After hours of searching, dawn came, and all we had found were three orange chanterelle mushrooms and a few ceps. We carried them back to the farmhouse, where they were fried in butter and garlic. Nothing has tasted better since, although we found the texture of the ceps a little slimy. I still love to forage for mushrooms in the autumn.

In London, special occasions were marked with dinner at Robert Carrier’s restaurant in Islington. I remember my first meal there: every course was tiny and perfectly arranged on the plate. Sights that are now common in haute cuisine, like French beans all lined up in a neat pile, exactly the same size, were objects of wonder back then. You felt you wouldn’t get enough to eat, but of course you did.