Stein - Rick Steins Coast to Coast

Rick Steins passion for fresh, well-sourced food has taken him from continent to continent, across magnificent shorelines and to the very best produce the coast has to offer. From Fresh grilled cod with shellfish in garlic butter at the tip of St Ives, to Cured red duck breasts with melon, soy and pickled ginger in Sydney Harbour, this collection of over 130 recipes evokes all the pleasure and flavour associated with the coast.

Chapters are organised by region: healthy salads inspired by the Californian ocean, sumptuous starters fit for French cuisine, modern light lunches such as Japanese sashimi and Moroccan tagines, and main courses using fresh fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, poultry and game from the most fertile coastal regions in the world.

There are recipes for classic treats such as Toad-in-the-hole with porcini mushrooms and onion gravy, staple fish masterpieces such as Poached sea trout with sorrel hollandaise, and recipes for tasty favourites from your treasured holiday destinations: Seafood Paella, Goan Curry, Welsh Cawl and Clam Chowder. All this, plus a delicious range of puddings including Hot bread pudding with armagnac sauce, Lemon Possett and Poached pears with mulberries and mascarpone ice cream.

With brand-new recipes and a fresh design, Coast to Coast contains Rick Steins most popular dishes drawn from many years of travelling the culinary globe. Easy to follow and quick to inspire, this cookbook will bring all the flavour of the coast into the comfort of your own home.

Rick Steins passion for using good quality local produce and his talent for creating delicious flavour combinations in his books and restaurants have won him a host of awards, accolades and fans. As well as presenting a number of television series, he has published many best-selling cookery books, including French Odyssey, Mediterranean Escapes, Far Eastern Odyssey and Spain.

Rick is a firm supporter of sustainable farming and fishing techniques, which he strives to maintain in Padstow, Cornwall, where he runs four acclaimed restaurants and a seafood cookery school, as well as a delicatessen and patisserie. In 2003 Rick was awarded an OBE for services to West Country tourism. He divides his time between Padstow and Australia, where he opened a restaurant, Rick Stein at Bannisters, in 2009.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781446415412
Version 1.0

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BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA

BBC Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright Rick Stein 2008

Rick Stein has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Photographs on pages by Noel Murphy

First published by BBC Books in 2008

www.eburypublishing.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781846076145

In 1955, when I was just eight, my father took the whole family, in a pale blue Jaguar Mark VII and a Rover 90, to a hotel called the Carlos V on La Salve beach at Laredo, between Santander and Bilbao, on the north coast of Spain. I dont remember a great deal about the holiday except that everywhere we went the Spanish were full of awe of the mighty Jaguar, which they called the Haguar. I recall too the presence of many Guardia Civil with their curious black three-corned hats, particularly holding back the crowds at the Battle of the Flowers festival in the town, held every August. There was a military prison at the far end of the very long beach and not much else except the hotel. It had different coloured tiles on each floor: red on the ground, yellow on the first, then green, and finally and most intriguingly blue on the top floor, a source of much satisfaction to myself and my sister Henrietta. We both drank Coca-Cola for the first time I think we were only allowed one bottle a day and it came in slightly green-tinted glass bottles, which was completely fabulous to us both. Even more extraordinary was the food, particularly squid, which came in a black ink stew with tomato, olive oil and garlic. I remember that this was the first realisation I had that food abroad was exotically different to what we had at home and I believe that thats when my wanderlust to travel from coast to coast across countries around the world started.

Since then my greatest enthusiasm in life has been finding dishes that change my perception of cooking, that reveal a whole new vista of flavour combinations. I think we all enjoy that. Just like that squid in black ink, I can still remember the first time that I tasted the salty, hot, sweet and sour flavours of Thai cooking the combination of fish sauce, birds eye chillies, palm sugar and lime juice. I just couldnt believe anything would ever taste so good again.

Really good local dishes tell me more about the thoughts, habits and enthusiasms of a foreign country than museum visits or a walk round a famous cathedral. More than that, finding out what dishes people hold dear is, in my opinion, the best way of getting to know them. When I have such conversations, I experience a sort of thrill of recognition. This is a realisation that you have so much in common with people who speak entirely unfamiliar languages and have quite a different history. One of the most enjoyable experiences for me on this subject was meeting the Japanese Ambassador to London, Mr Yoshi Nogami. A few years ago I cooked a gratin of Cornish crab with spinach at a banquet celebrating the investiture of the, then, new Lord Mayor of the City of London, David Brewer. Like me, David comes from Cornwall and wanted something local. He introduced me to Ambassador Nogami, pointing out that while a great admirer of my TV programmes, the Ambassador thought I had one or two lessons to learn about the finer points of sushi and sashimi. Hed seen a programme where I joined a mackerel fishing trip out of Padstow and had filleted and sliced the fish on board and served it on some sushi rice to the slightly astonished group of dads and small boys. He had enjoyed the film, but said that in Japan they never use raw mackerel, its always cured. I was a bit embarrassed, but soon got over it when he said hed already been to Padstow and thoroughly enjoyed the fish soup at my restaurant, but what he really liked was our fish and chips. It turned out that he spent a lot of his free weekends travelling around the British Isles finding places that served the best Lancashire hot pot, steak and kidney pies and, most importantly, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding because, as he pointed out, we dont do roasts in Japan, we dont have the ovens. I went to Japan and learnt how to make good sushi and sashimi, both recipes of which are in the book, but more importantly to me, I discovered how essential good food is in Japanese life and how incredibly respectful they are of seasonality and how they have an almost religious sense of the importance of eating certain foods at certain times of the year. Its not going too far to say that my series of conversations with him made me realise that the appreciation of good food is endlessly subtle and rewarding.