Jeremy Lee on the 30 year cookbook, 100 years of Quo Vadis and Scottish fare

Jeremy Lee: 30 Years in the Making

Chef Jeremy Lee has spent four decades in professional kitchens and almost as long writing his first cookbook. In this episode, recorded at Quo Vadis in the Soho institution's 100th year, he joins host Samuel Goldsmith to talk about Cooking, the book that lay fallow for 30 years, and Kitchening, the seasonal follow-up he wrote in a single January locked away in a Dorset farmhouse.

Jeremy takes us from a childhood in the northeast of Scotland (a mother who pored over Elizabeth David, a father who made the butcher push a whole sirloin through the mincer) to an apprenticeship in the barren British food landscape of the late '70s, when the aubergine was still exciting and a privately educated kid in a kitchen was an anathema. He explains why "kitchening" is a genuine Old English word, why seasonal cooking is not a trend, and why restaurant food got lighter, smaller and better. Along the way: medlars versus Pink Lady apples, the case for domesticating British rabbit, a beef à la mode so over-set you could have played football with it in front of Terence Conran, and receiving an MBE from Princess Anne on what turned out to be a final outing with his sister.

In this episode:

• Why Cooking took 30 years, and Kitchening took one month

• Good bread, good butter, good eggs: the only advice a new cook needs

• What Alastair Little, Rowley Leigh and Simon Hopkinson changed forever

• Quince gluts, mast years, and why the seasons teach you to expect nothing

• Quick-fire round: one cuisine forever, the worst waste of money, and the fictional character he'd have dinner with

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