My parents have always grown vegetables, especially my father, whose dad was a professional gardener. Sadly, I don’t have my family’s skills. I can grow the odd basil or parsley plant but even then, I grow them from seedlings rather than from seed. Instead, I took more of a shine to cooking them.
As a child I would watch my father eat tomatoes, lettuce and cucumbers with such passion it would make me want to eat them too. My mother did all the cooking when we were little, but my dad would always make the salad dressing and take great interest in what was in the salad. I picked this up from a young age and eventually took over salad duties – he even let me make the salad dressing. I’d caught Delia Smith on the telly tossing a salad with vinaigrette, explaining passionately how important it was to mix the salad with the dressing, and I felt inspired. I became hooked on eating and experimenting with salad. A seed had been planted.
I will never forget the moment I walked into The River Café in 1989. Rose Gray was sitting at the bar and Ruthie Rogers, her co-founder, was behind the coffee machine dressed in chef whites. Rose turned to me and said, ‘so do you think you are a good cook then?’ I was a bit taken aback by her direct approach but answered confidently. A week later on the trial shift, I made a salad of artichoke hearts with green beans, rocket, olive tapenade and Parmesan shavings. Sounds simple but it was delicious – and way ahead of the times back then.
My first month at The River Café was so exciting. There were so many young, interesting people working at the restaurant and the weather was fantastic, so the doors were always open, even in the evenings, and the front-of-house staff wore whatever they wanted. At the end of busy shifts we would sit by the river with cold beers and discuss what was going to be on the menu next. I loved it and couldn’t wait until the next day.
As time passed and the restaurant got busier and busier, so did the menu and the prep. Rose and Ruthie would come back from a weekend in Italy with a bag of seeds or a sack of greens that they had bought that morning in a market. Vegetables were very much the star of the show at The River Café. A simple plate of baked borlotti beans on bruschetta with a delicious olive oil was entirely ‘less-is-more’ but, importantly, confident. Our plates only got better as more Italian produce started coming into New Covent Garden market.
Today we are spoilt for choice with an abundance of wonderful produce at our fingertips, but we should still treat it with the respect it deserves. I’ve tried to convey that through my cooking. Italian food at its core is very much vegetable-based, and the Italians have perfected the art of getting a huge amount of flavour out of just a handful of good-quality ingredients. A simple pasta dish with some fried courgettes or a salad of grilled vegetables is a feast in itself.
As ever, always try to buy vegetables that are in season, as they will be at their best in flavour and price. So, the next time you are shopping and you see a good-looking courgette or handsome tomato, pop it in your basket and cook one of my recipes.
Find more of Theo Randall’s recipes at telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink.
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