Rowley Leigh: A Life Through Food

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2018

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rowley Leigh, to many the "godfather" of modern British cooking tells his story to Dan Saladino. Along the way he cooks the perfect omelette and shares the secrets of great pasta.

After dropping out of university at the end of the 1960s, Rowley Leigh says he was a young and lost soul. Desperate for cash he applied for a job cooking burgers and immediately fell in love with restaurants and kitchens.

It took him to Le Gavroche and an apprenticeship under the Roux brothers. Armed with that classical training and a curiosity for British ingredients and flavours he helped launch the British food renaissance of the 1980s. In Kensington Place he created one of the most talked about dining rooms in British restaurant history.

He is also a writer and so he takes Dan Saladino through some of the recipe highlights of his two decades worth of columns at The Financial Times.

Expect the perfect omelette, some great spaghetti and one of the simplest vegetable dishes you could probably add to your own repertoire.

Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
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0:19.8	and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.
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0:39.9	This is the BBC.
0:49.4	Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program. Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure. We hope you enjoy it. Like everybody else.
1:05.0	else.
1:07.0	I have a favorite pen.
1:09.0	Welcome to the life through food of chef and writer Rowley a program in nine acts that could
1:16.6	also be entitled how cooking can improve your life. The pan is what, six, seven inches, no more, with nice rounded edges.
1:28.0	Act 1, Roly's Home Kitchen and an omelet. This cook, Lammer Poulard, I know what her name, I think.
1:36.0	People used to travel for miles to taste her omelets and everybody wondered what the recipe was
1:40.0	and how she made them.
1:42.0	And eventually this journalist in Perix bench
1:44.4	to winkle the recipe out of her.
1:47.0	And she said, sir, I take three eggs and beat them and then I put them in a
2:01.4	pan with some sizzling butter and turn them about.
	...

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