James Martin: Getting a taste for France

6:50am Saturday 6th September 2008

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ON a campsite overlooking a beach in Brittany, James Martin is blow-torching a bag of charcoal.

When the coals are white-hot, he slaps a couple of fresh veal steaks on the barbecue, and sprinkles them with rosemary and garlic, all the while talking to the camera with the ease of a seasoned TV chef.

The fun-loving Yorkshireman is part way through filming his latest TV show, James Martin's Brittany for UKTV and he's clearly in his element.

With friend and fellow chef Lawrence Keogh in tow, James has spent the morning carefully selecting ingredients at a market in the French seaside town of St Malo.

A wedge of comte cheese here, a fluffy cauliflower there, a fresh pat of salty butter and some scallops, which are now wrapped in foil and waiting to be barbecued in a hazelnut, butter, lemon juice and herb sauce.

When the dishes are ready - the scallops, veal in rosemary and garlic and cauliflower cheese - James and Lawrence tuck in, happy noises showing they're pleased with their handy work.

They made the meal look so simple to cook - and even had time for some bawdy banter - but the result is incredible.

After a few tasty mouthfuls of tender veal and comte cauliflower cheese, I join James in his shiny silver airstream caravan for a chat.

While other celebrity chefs have travelled the world in search of culinary delights, the Saturday Kitchen presenter has never filmed a show outside Britain - and he's clearly excited.

"I always get Leicester or Watford," jokes James, 36.

"Don't get me wrong, I love British food, but I started thinking when am I ever going to do get the opportunity to do stuff abroad?

"On Saturday Kitchen, you link into Rick Stein and he's in Goa and the Hairy Bikers are in Morocco and you come back and I'm in the Oval in Kennington Road!"

But James Martin's Brittany isn't just any cooking show filmed overseas. A keen motoring enthusiast, James insisted on doing a road trip across the French region, pulling the caravan with his Porsche 4x4.

He then compiled a list of chef friends - including Lawrence and the Hairy Bikers - to come out and cook with him each episode.

"I didn't want to go out on my own, cos it's quite intensive and it's nice to have other chefs to bounce off you," he says.

"They've all loved it, but they're a bit shocked when they come over here and think they're staying in a fancy five-star hotel. 'No mate, you've got this table in the caravan and it folds down into a bed!'

"I wanted it to be real and for them to experience what it's like, you know, in the morning when the shower doesn't work."

James' caravan is plush - there's at least one plasma screen, suedette cushions and a well-stocked fridge - but there's not a great deal of room for him, let alone the burly bikers.

"That was interesting," James says with a laugh.

"We all slept in here - three sardines in a tin they called it."

James has had a lifelong love affair with France and French food - since he joined his dad on wine-tasting trips to Bordeaux when he was just five.

Besides running a farm in North Yorkshire and being the catering manager for Castle Howard, James' father was once the only English member of the committee responsible for classifying wines from St Emilion.

Every summer, the young James would join his dad on his travels to France in a big lorry to collect wine, giving James a chance to "get out of the house and give my mother a rest".

They stayed in chateaux where James learnt to cook with the 'grandmothers' of the grand houses.

"That was my first experience with food," he says.

"I learnt the true art of great cooking from these women like how you make magret de canard, by going to the market, getting a live [duck], cracking its neck in the back of the car and plucking it when you get home."

Then, when he was 14, James was dropped off at a restaurant in the Brittany town of Pornic for six weeks on work experience.

"Pornic was just magic," he remembers.

"When you're surrounded by passionate people being passionate about food, no matter what age, you can't help it, it just rubs off on you."

The most ambitious recipe in his new show was inspired by one of these formative childhood experiences.

"I was working in a chateau with this old boy and girl," James explains. "I was in the kitchen with the old girl, doing cote de boeuf, the massive rump steaks.

"I just remember looking out the window and the old boy was putting a pile of these vine prunings in the yard, petrol over the top, then he lit a fag and the whole lot went up.

"As it starts to die down, he gets the metal gate off the fence, drags it over to the fire, places it on top and the old dear came out with this tray and whacked the steaks on the gate.

"We sat round as the embers died down and when they were cool, the old boy upends the gate, brushes it off with a yard brush and puts it back!"

James will repeat the feat after we talk, cooking over vine prunings in a wheelbarrow, as the sun sets on the beach behind his caravan.

The key to his show is its spontaneity - nothing is planned in advance.

"We make it up entirely as we go along - if it burns it burns," says James.

"We've had some great locations and met some amazing people, like the old dear with the mangled hands at the market.

"She's sat there with her woolly hat on and she's got a little table out in front of her with two onions, three bunches of herbs, a bunch of celery tops and a lettuce, and she's selling them.

"It was the most magical thing I'd ever seen - you can't stage that. We just walked up to her, bought the lot off the table and that's what we cooked."

Back home in Britain, James prides himself on growing his own vegetables at his pad in Winchester, and he rails against the lack of good farmers' markets.

"They've become a gimmick. That's the problem with places like Borough Market now, it's becoming a tourist destination and no one's buying the stuff. Whereas in France it's taken for granted because you have it every day of the week."

Since filming finished in Brittany, he has been working hard on two new books - one recipes and one about his life 'through cars' - as well as slating up more TV shows.

But he's also been fighting fires in Winchester where his deli Cadogan & James was recently rated 'unsatisfactory' for hygiene, in an investigation by the local council.

James has rectified the situation, but admits it felt like "a kick in the balls".

"That was unfortunate, because I'd been away a bit, I left my eye off the ball. The sad thing was the first we knew about it was when the local paper phoned me up. But you resolve the problems and you move on," he says.

With Christmas round the corner, he's upbeat about the store's future: "Delis run at a loss during the summer and then in the winter you pick it all up again."

Brittany has left James with a new-found passion for camping - he's just bought a motorhome at the suggestion of his Jamiroquai pal JK - and for now, his mind is on getting back on the road to do another UKTV show.

"I'd like to go to Scotland, because it's beautiful, but we'll wait and see."