The Real Deal
Here's a hugely enjoyable piece from The Times which recounts the great excitement in the Moran household when Jamie Oliver turned up one morning to cook a special breakfast for Caitlin Moran and her star struck children.
Now I don't want to burst anyone's bubble because I really like Jamie Oliver, but the truth is that my dear old mum was making these 'cheese toasties' years ago - they are really just American-style, grilled cheese sandwiches done in a frying pan so that they're crispy on the outside and meltingly gooey and tasty on the inside.
I add a little bit of mustard to my grilled cheese sandwiches these days, otherwise they're just like the ones my mum used to make, which I'm sure she learned from the years she spent in Canada where there was no food rationing in the 1950s, unlike in Scotland in the aftermath of the Second World War.
So it just goes to prove that there's nothing new under the sun although I'm sure Jamie Oliver would be happy to admit that himself because unlike some of his contemporaries, I think the Naked Chef is the real deal.
What makes the perfect breakfast? Take Britain’s top columnist, Caitlin Moran, add the nation’s favourite chef cum campaigner, Jamie Oliver – and serve with the best cheese toasties in the world
I’ve ordered a Jamie Oliver home delivery. Not a Jamie Oliver takeaway – there is no “Bish Bash Bosh Three Cheeses” 16in pizza on its way to me. So far, takeaways are one of the very few food things that the £240 million Jamie Oliver empire does not stretch to – possibly because it has enough to be getting on with, with its 51 restaurants worldwide, 8,000 employees, range of Jamie Oliver ingredients and kitchenware, books sold in 120 countries, and 22 TV series which have, time and again, reset the way we talk and think about food. (Young men who slide down banisters can cook! School dinners must not actively conspire to kill our children! Dinner can be ready in but 15 minutes and/or for under £1.50 per portion!)
So no. A Jamie Oliver takeaway is not what’s happening to me. Instead, I’m getting the actual Jamie Oliver delivered to my house, to cook breakfast. At 8am. The Jamie Oliver. He has a new book – Jamie’s Comfort Food – and due to a slightly surreal series of phone calls, he’s coming here.
The sensation that this causes in my social group is quite intense. My female friends publicly fret that, in my position, they would worry that Oliver will judge their kitchenware, and find it wanting – “What if he thinks your wok is s***?” one asks. “Or he judges your knives? You don’t even have a microplaner. Have you got any Le Creuset? Maybe real chefs think it’s naff. Oh God – hide it. It’s too risky. Oh, Christ! What if your fridge smells? What if Jamie Oliver is repelled by your fridge-smell?”
In private – away from their husbands – the women reveal that, actually, they don’t give a toss about the state of my kitchen at all. “Jamie Oliver is f***ing smoking,” they say. “It’s OK if we accidentally pop round while he’s there, yeah? I’m gonna Milf his £240-million, good-with-a-blender ass.”
My children, meanwhile, mount an instant, impassioned campaign to have the day off school in order to meet him.
“I don’t care if it’s a legal requirement to attend school!” Nancy says, hysterically. “It’s Jamie Oliver. In our house. I love Jamie Oliver. You know that. I can’t believe you’re going to banish me from meeting the man who got me into rabbit ragu!” she wails – a sentence that almost certainly wins the “Most Appallingly North London Thing Said That Day” title.
It’s difficult for me to argue with her – because I know she genuinely does love Jamie Oliver. As a smaller child, she so wholeheartedly bought into Oliver’s canny scheme at his restaurants to get kids to eat their vegetables – a badge awarded by a waitress when they clear their raw root-vegetable slaw – that she eventually had a box full of them. The first “posh” restaurant she went to was Jamie’s Fifteen Cornwall, where she ploughed through the adventurous tasting menu – duck liver! Spider crab! Fried zucchini flowers! – with freewheeling glee.
Most emotionally, the first time she and my sister ate Jamie’s Chocolate Brownie with Amaretto Ice Cream (sadly not on the menu any more) at the Jamie’s Italian branch in Brighton, they both burst into tears, because they loved it so much. I’m not even making that up – although, to be fair, it had been a long day that had involved both losing half a burger to an aggressive seagull on Brighton pier and a semi-nervous breakdown in the changing rooms at Gap, over a pair of imperially camel-toe-ish shorts (my sister – not my daughter. My daughter does not have a camel toe. She has not been gifted the Moran Camel Toe DNA).
As a result of all this, at 7.45am on Jamie Oliver Day, my house contains: a Times video crew, a Times photography crew, a stylist, Jamie’s PR, my brother, a fridge that I spent nearly two hours bleaching last night, a brand new wok, my children – covered in suspiciously felt-tipped-looking measles spots and coughing dramatically – and my friend Anya, who’s “just popped … round … to borrow … a thing”, and is wearing a very short leopard-print dress from Whistles. It’s chaos.
In the event, when Oliver arrives, no one notices – the front door is open, and he just slips in, quietly, on his own. I’m upstairs backcombing my hair, and by the time I come down he’s leaning on a sideboard, telling my brother that he likes my kitchen (“Red. A risky colour to pull off, mate. But it looks great”) and sipping on a coffee.
“Could you assess the rest of our kitchen?” I ask him. “I want to see how many Jamie Points I get.”
“Well, you obviously like your cooking,” he says, admiring my big pans. “Big pans!”
I feel proud of my big pans. I show him my loaded drawer full of spices and he nods approvingly, adding: “But we’ve got to get you off those little piddly jars, darlin’. You can get half a kilo of loose spices for the same money, from the right shops.”
Flattered, I agree wholeheartedly with him – completely ignoring the practical matter of storing more than 127kg of spices and herbs in a kitchen that’s already dealing with an explosive drawer-full-of-mismatched-Tupperware-lids situation.
Jamie notes one condiment with particular approval.
“Geeta’s Premium Mango Chutney!” he says. “I don’t know who Geeta is, but she’s a good old girl. That’s the one we have in our house – because it’s got no onions in. Jools doesn’t like onions.”
This is quite the bombshell to drop – that the wife of arguably the most famous chef in Britain doesn’t like onions.
“But onions are like … atoms,” I boggle. “They’re in everything. How can she not like onions?”
“She just doesn’t,” Jamie says, with a very relaxed shrug. “It’s been 20 years now – I’m not going to argue. Sometimes I’ll pop them under a roast, and make a sauce out of them, and she’ll have a bit of that, but … Nah.”
“Have you never been tempted to hide onions in her food?” I ask. “My sister Weena said she didn’t like onions – so we once spent a whole caravan holiday in Wales cutting tiny onion slivers with a razor blade, and then pushing them into tubes of macaroni, using tweezers. Just to f*** her over.”
Jamie says that he has not ever tried to f*** over his wife by hiding slivers of onion in her macaroni, then gets called into the next room, for a quick confab about the photoshoot.
I go upstairs to get my tape recorder, and bump into Anya, who is dawdling in my bedroom. I tell her about the onions thing.
“I’d eat Jamie Oliver’s onions. Whole,” she says, lasciviously – at which point I tell her it really is time for her to go home.
By the time I see Anya out and return to Oliver, he’s sitting on the landing with my kids, next to a basket of dirty washing, talking animatedly to them about their favourite YouTube stars. The kids talk over him; he talks over them. They’re having a rare old time.
I have no idea what they’re all on about.
“Pixiwoo?” he asks. “You girls into Pixiwoo? When the Pixiwoo girls went to film in Covent Garden, 2,000 people turned up to watch them. They’re amazing. And do you know what’s weird about most of these British YouTube stars? They all seem to come from Norwich. It’s like a little Silicon Valley up there.”
It’s not one of those “a grown-up wishes to be seen having a ‘great’ conversation with some children” conversations. First, Oliver has children the same age as mine – “I’ve got four kids, love. I’ve got kids of every age. You name an age, I’ve got one of them” – and knows exactly how to chat with them.
And second, this is all right up Oliver’s street. One of his big passions is for tech, and new ways of broadcasting – his YouTube channel, Food Tube, already has more than one million subscribers, and was partly set up to encourage young people to start cooking, and share their own recipes. He’s borderline evangelical about the democratisation of communication.
“There’s a guy called DJ BBQ who we’ve got on Food Tube, and his last piece knocked me off the No 1 slot. Was I annoyed? Nah – I was thrilled,” he beams. “That’s the point. Get everyone cooking. Thinking it’s for them. Do you girls cook? What do you cook? Are you handy in the kitchen, ladies?”
Nancy and Lizzie, thrilled, start running him through everything they can do in the kitchen. Their eyes sparkle with Jamie Adoration. It all reminds me of that episode of The Simpsons when Lisa gets a new, charismatic supply teacher, played by Dustin Hoffman, and blossoms in his presence.
For my kids – raised on Jamie Oliver cookbooks, Jamie Oliver restaurants and Jamie Oliver school dinners – it’s a bit like meeting a young, vibey Walt Disney. They live in Jamie Oliver’s world. And now he’s on their landing, asking to look at what apps they have on their phones.
I cannot lie. In the next three hours – Oliver shoots way over his allotted slot, eager to continue talking – he charms the tits off every single person in the house. I can’t work out at which point I love him most – talking to my children, ranting about feminism (“Female taxpayers are being given a rotten deal. They deserve to know their kids at school are being fed well”), being able to identify immediately who made a specific loaf of bread brought by the photography team as a prop (“Balthazar! That’s from Balthazar! Am I right?”*) or frying cheese in a pan, but it’s an unbroken series of very strong moves.
Jamie Oliver is, as his career would attest, a warm, sweet, relentless force of nature. It’s like being waterboarded by the inside of a chocolate fondant – and I mean that in the best way possible. He’s been up since 4am – “At the gym by 6” – and has come here to do a photoshoot, interview and video before cooking us breakfast, and yet exudes the air of a mate who’s just popped round for the hell of it.
On the other hand, it’s not merely great company that Oliver provides. For – pretty much whatever the conversation turns to – he chips in with something that belies the fact that this is a man who has spent 10 of his 15 years of fame trying to do that most unfashionable of things: just be good. Fairtrade; the obesity crisis; British farmers in crisis; rehabilitating young offenders; supporting working women; sustainable fishing; sugar tax; humane livestock handling; believing that the working classes deserve a joy in food that the middle classes take for granted. Jamie Oliver is the rock-star chef turned political agitator and philanthropist.
“If I’m used properly, I’m a brilliant, brilliant weapon, and I can really scare the s*** out of companies and governments,” he says, at one point, after spending ten minutes lucidly and passionately explaining how he’s been trying to lobby Hillary Clinton about a proposed US/Europe trade agreement that will reduce Europe’s world-leading standards on animal welfare, hormone use and insecticide testing to the much lower standards of the US, “undoing decades of work”, he despairs.
“And the thing is, it’s not as dramatic as a few caps being popped in someone’s ass, or Brazil getting thrashed 7-1 by Germany – so how do you even compete? It’s one of the things I’m spending a lot of time thinking about – how to talk about it, how to present it to people. The angle. You need an angle. I’ll find the angle, eventually,” he says, reflectively. “I’ll get it.”
Two minutes later, and he’s talking about one of the biggest financial decisions made within the Jamie’s Italian restaurant chain: truffles.
“We sell truffle tagliolini at cost,” he says. “We don’t put the margin on it we should. No one with a brain does that. But I wanted to … democratise truffles.”
He beams.
“Because in France, everyone knows what truffles taste like. In a year, for us, that equates to, what – 50,000 portions of truffle tagliatelle around the country? And all people who’ve never tried it before. I like that.”
Jamie Oliver – political agitator and Truffle Socialist? “Yeah. Kind of. Yeah.”
He’s beaming. It clearly and genuinely makes him happy to have people come to his restaurants and try truffles for the first time. He is, basically, a Marxist feeder.
“Right!” he says, as if to confirm this. “Time to make all you guys breakfast! Everyone likes cheese toasties for breakfast, yeah?”
The house replies, “YEAH!” enthusiastically.
“The thing is,” Oliver says, looking momentarily serious, “this is the best cheese toastie in the world. Really. You’ll never be able to go back to normal cheese toasties after this. I have warned you.”
He rolls up his sleeves, and starts slicing bread.
“Is it OK to slice the bread straight onto the table?” he asks. “It looks like the kind of table that wants to be sliced on.”
And he saws, gently, into the woodwork.
__________
When Jamie Oliver first became famous, it was 1999, he was 24, and it was one of those rare, lightning-flash “BOOMS!” – an instant arrival into the popular conscience.
He was a very beautiful boy – all angelic golden curls, huge blue eyes and a lisp – being marketed, knowingly, as “the Naked Chef”.
“No way – it’s not me, it’s the food!” he would say, in the opening credits to every episode, lying coquettishly on a sofa.
At the time, Oliver didn’t want to do TV:
“[I thought TV] was a bit s***, really,” he says, later, after he’s made the cheese toasties, sitting on a tiny chair in my daughter’s bedroom. “But I thought, if I do do it, it’ll be like this.”
He wrote down his pitch on a piece of A4 paper – “It only took about this much space [he indicates 3in with his hands]. I want to be in my flat; I want it cut to music; I want to be wearing the clothes I wear at home, and cook for the people I cook for at home. It doesn’t look unconventional now, but at the time, it was.”
The fame that followed The Naked Chef was the petrol-like kind: explosive, propulsive, hot.
“Looking back, it was probably a near One Direction-y experience,” Oliver muses. “The first three years were bonkers. Classic. Bra-y, knicker-y stuff turning up in your bedroom, screaming. Australia, New Zealand – halfway around the world. Completely ballistic. You’d leave the stage and there would be hundreds – hundreds – of girls screaming at you.”
By the time Oliver got to Australia, his fame had got so out of hand that the original venue booked for his cookery demonstration was too small. Despite being the Sydney Opera House.
Absolutely inevitably, Oliver often found it difficult to cope.
“Twenty-eight gigs, back to back, with jet lag. No dancers, no band. Three thousand people every night. Every other theatre was filled with proper productions. And me? I was just me on my jacks, cooking five dishes.”
Although “confident” now, at the time, Oliver felt “very, very human”. There were “meltdowns” – “Lying in bed in Australia, with your mind playing tricks. You know? Like, ‘Do you feel s***? I think you feel ill. Do you feel ill? I think you feel ill.’ Winding myself up. Throwing up before gigs.”
Things came to a head at the peerlessly un-rock’n’roll locale of the Birmingham Good Food Live Show, where Oliver played to 40,000 people over five days.
“I just burst into tears in the end,” Oliver recalls, ruefully. “Probably s*** myself. And Brian Turner – Do you remember Brian Turner? From Ready Steady Cook? – he just sat me down and gave me a hug, put a towel round my neck and gave me a talking-to. I never forgot that. Such a sweet guy. You never forget that. Because some of the ones you love – they don’t end up so nice.”
For this was the other side-effect of fame that Oliver was about to encounter – that, when you’re hot, you often burn those nearby who have thin skin. Marco Pierre White – a childhood hero of Oliver’s – launched into a public attack on Oliver, despite the pair having met at a dinner party and chatted enthusiastically for hours.
“It was two pages in the Daily Mail, just slagging off everything I’d ever done. I was like, ‘Wow.’ ”
This attack from Pierre White – “I don’t hate him, but he’s quite a powerful, slightly Mafia-don-type character. I think I fairly subtly mentioned [after that] that he was a psychological bully … and then: that was war” – helped crystallise Oliver’s thoughts on what he was going to do next, with all this fame, this excess of heat and excitement around him.
Having long been aware of the bad side of his industry – “the quite aggressive, quite sexist method of training: French regimental cooking. Training by fear” – Oliver was determined to base the next stage of his career on what he knew: “Old-fashioned family-style training. More intuitive restaurants.”
Having started cooking at his dad’s pub in Essex, and then gone on to train under the gentle Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers at the legendary River Café, this was what Oliver was determined to do: start a chain of restaurants where the staff were “not trained by fear, [and that] takes a bit longer. But the staff that are trained by fear? Brilliant as they are, they can’t write menus, can’t think, they can’t respond by the day, the season. And my chefs can.”
The showcase for Oliver’s belief in doing things differently, both more humanely and more creatively, was Jamie’s Fifteen: his high-end London restaurant where the aim was to recruit and train staff with troubled backgrounds – former offenders, young people with no qualifications. Although there was initial scepticism that Oliver was doing it merely as a PR stunt, there are now branches of Fifteen in Cornwall and Amsterdam, and all the profits from the restaurants still go back into the apprenticing scheme. Really, there are easier ways to get good PR than setting up a whole business dedicated to teaching ex-criminals how to make choux pastry. You could just adopt an orphaned cat.
Given how inarguably righteous the whole Fifteen project is, I don’t tell Jamie what my kids do there, to while away the time between courses: watch the chefs in the open kitchen, and guess what crimes they once committed.
“I think he broke into a shop,” Nancy will say. “That one killed a lady,” Lizzie adds, confidently.
“Lizzie!” I reply. “There aren’t any murderers here. These are just people who’ve had a tough start in life.”
“I wouldn’t mind my dinner being made by a murderer,” Lizzie says, thoughtfully, chewing on her grissini. “I’m not vegetarian.”
I ask Oliver if, given his demonstrable belief in trying to help people and improve their lives, he would describe himself as a socialist.
“My friend Jason Flemyng – you know, the actor – had to explain what a socialist was the other day. He went into a massive tirade, shouting, ‘You’re a complete socialist!’ and started listing all the reasons why. And other than finding him hilarious, I think I am … Raising the bar, having aspirations to raise the bar for everyone, is a really beautiful thing.”
Would he ever run for parliament?
“I don’t see myself, no. If I ever did, it would be because the choices we have [with the available candidates] are so bad.”
Has he found any politicians to be particularly helpful – for instance, during the School Dinners campaign? “No,” he says, flatly. “I can’t say I’ve got best friends with anyone in government or the mayor’s office – people who grab stuff and run with it. No.”
Is there anyone he would like to work with on a campaign?
“David Beckham,” he says, instantly. “There’s kids who love him who would never think of cooking, who, if they saw David doing it, would suddenly be in. Beckham. His power is extraordinary.”
You were criticised for doing a book and TV series on budget food when you are so rich. Obviously, I am aware there is absolutely no logic in that criticism – if you follow that logic through, you would end up arguing that only blind surgeons can operate on the blind – but it’s a question I have to ask you, because: duh.
“Yeah – Jamie’s a rich bastard. It’s an easy one,” he says. “Thing is, if I didn’t apply any economical rules, I certainly wouldn’t be able to run any of the restaurants. They would be bankrupt. So you should trust me more than anyone.”
The reason Oliver’s here today – sawing into my table and mesmerising my children – is to talk about his latest project: a book and TV series called Jamie’s Comfort Food, a departure for him in style.
“The other books – 15-Minute Meals, Save with Jamie – they’re rattling on speed. The idea was to do exciting food that doesn’t take much time. But this is the antithesis. It was really quite an emotional book to write … nostalgia, memories, youth. Food being a sort of medicine … I just sort of go on and on about what I love and why. It’s my geeky book.”
Despite being dyslexic – “I was in the special-needs class at school,” he reminds me, cheerfully – he hunts out “handwritten cookbooks. They’re my weak spot. Ones from the 16th, 17th century – ones that represent a 30-mile-radius area for the lord of the manor’s cooks. I collect them.”
Astonishingly, Comfort Food was only written because the project Oliver next intended to work on – a book and TV series on vegetarian food – was rejected by Channel 4. It seems incredible that any channel would turn down a Jamie Oliver project, given what a powerhouse of sales he is: 2012’s 30-Minute Meals became the fastest-selling non-fiction book ever published in Britain. He’s not exactly the Swedish Chef from The Muppets.
Although Oliver himself was surprised – “The public, more than ever, really want to eat more veg” – his final reply belies someone with a fortune of £240 million and one million subscribers on Food Tube. “It’s fair enough,” he shrugs. “Channels have got their own thing to worry about. And you know what, if I did 130 five-minute veg videos over the course of a year [and put them on Food Tube], that’s probably what I’ll do. I was gutted,” he adds, “but I’ve done most of the hard work, and it’ll happen at some point. The book’s on top of a cupboard somewhere. Waiting.”
Back to Comfort Food – all about family and memory. What are the Oliver family eating rituals? Do you all eat together?
Oliver sighs.
“The two younger ones, we sort out separately, because it’s chaos, and then the older ones eat with us, but it’s forced quite a lot, and there’s normally some different timings going on. Poppy and Daisy had their time of no greens, but that only lasted six weeks – they’re pretty good now.”
Resolutely not re-addressing the issue of Oliver’s wife not eating onions – HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE? – I ask him if he ever eats at his own restaurants.
“Oh, yeah!” he says, brightly. “Probably twice a month, with the family. Last thing I had there? Prawn linguine. But, you know, there’s tourists, there’s signatures and ‘Could you do this?’ and ‘Could you do that?’ It’s lovely, and I’ve got no problem with it, but …”
After 15 years of being famous, when was the last time you went out and weren’t recognised? For the only time in our morning together, Oliver is lost for words. He rakes his memory.
“Um … er … definitely not recognised? Definitely? Sorry … I’m being a bit slow … there was – God, where did I go – can’t remember, but I definitely remember thinking, ‘That’s nice – they really don’t have a clue.’”
And when was the last time you were star-struck?
“Monday. Stephen Hawking. I was humbled. It was at Jimmy Carr’s house. Canada Day. His partner’s Canadian. He threw a party.”
And when was the last time you were drunk?
“Monday.”
And the last time you danced?
“Monday. It really was quite the party.”
__________
Way over his allotted slot, Jamie finally leaves at 11am, having made what really is the greatest cheese toastie of all time. “Do you see that look on her face?” he says, at one point, gesturing to Nancy. “You see! Memory, nostalgia – she’s going to remember this cheese toastie for ever.”
Yes, I want to say – because Jamie f***ing Oliver came and made it in her kitchen while she bunked off school with Felt-Tip Measles and the world’s least convincing cough – but it seems impolite to point out to Oliver that he is a bigger deal than his toastie, however delicious it is – and it is – so I refrain.
After standing on the front doorstep, waving goodbye to Jamie frantically – “Bye, Jamie! Bye! Bye! Thank you for coming! Bye!” – the kids ring my husband, who is in Birmingham, to tell him about their amazing morning.
“Jamie made a toastie with a crown on it, and he took his picture with us, and asked us what we like to eat, and he sat on Lizzie’s bed, and he’s so lovely,” they Beatlemania down the phone.
When they finish the call, they fall into a maudlin state.
“I miss him!” Nancy wails. “I miss him!”
“Don’t worry, darling – Daddy will be back for tea,” I say.
“No. Not Daddy. Jamie,” she says. “I miss Jamie.”
Jamie’s Comfort Food begins on Channel 4 on September 1
