Grace and flavour

27 July 2000
Grace and flavour

Tessa Bramley adopts a quizzical expression at the suggestion that she is one of Britain's leading female chefs. "I don't think so," she says. "I wish people wouldn't insist on putting labels on everyone. That's one of the problems with being a female chef - people think you just want to cook puddings and make all your food look pretty."

Her response has the robust undercurrent that typifies the food Bramley has been cooking during her 13-year ownership of the Old Vicarage in Ridgeway, an old stone (and old-money) picture-postcard village on the southern flank of Sheffield.

From her earliest days as a restaurateur, Bramley has always brought new thinking to her cooking. Her first, and very successful, restaurant, Toffs, which she opened in Sheffield in 1980, was a tiny cafeteria where customers looked at all the food on offer on a heated servery and chose with their eyes rather than from a menu.

But that was cooking to a food-cost price, which Bramley found frustrating. When she saw the Old Vicarage up for auction as a private house in 1987, she fell in love with it both as a future family home and as a restaurant where she could cook the new style of British cuisine that was blossoming at the time.

She recalls: "I had polenta on the menu in 1987.I was using Thai spices, star anise, doing thinks like brill with rhubarb, but they were just part of the eclectic way I picked things up and tried them out. You have to be free-thinking if you are going to be a good cook. I thought that at the time we opened the Old Vicarage, and it's still true."

As for Bramley's rules of cooking - there are none, she says. "Food has to taste," she asserts. "However simple, however complicated, it has to be scrumptious. Some dishes need to be ‘with, with and with', some dishes need to be simple. Everything simple is boring; everything complex is boring."

Asked how she gets her inspiration, Bramley pauses. "I know it sounds silly," she eventually replies, "but I get so many ideas walking around the garden." Luckily, the gardens at the Old Vicarage are expansive and include a herb garden containing about 40 herbs, all used on a regular basis by Bramley and her two chef-directors, Andrew Gilbert and Nathan Smith.

"You just have to pluck a handful of herbs and smell them, nibble them and put them in the food vocabulary in your head," Bramley says. "It's like writing a book, only instead of words in your head, you have foods. You just have to put the food-words in your head together in the right order and make them make sense. You can taste food in your head. You should try it out - it really does work."

As an example, she says: "Smell this sweet woodruff. That's a very old English herb that was used to sweeten food when there was no sugar. I smelt it one day and thought, ‘This will go with ice-cream,' and it really does. You have to use your head to think about how things are going to work together before you cook them to try."

Alternative ways of thinking extend to recruiting chefs at the Old Vicarage. Bramley doesn't only taste the food of hopefuls, but watches them during trials. She is looking as much for what potential staff eat as what they cook.

"There is something suspicious about chefs who don't eat," she says. "They're not involved with the food they are cooking. They don't love it, they are just producing it. You have to be greedy to be a good chef, adore what you eat. You have to want to be trying everything you see. I don't mean you have to eat it all, but at least want to taste everything."

English tradition

While Bramley likes to have menu items that reflect modern thinking and is happy to surprise customers with unusual combinations - such as a starter of roast quail marinated in tamarind and pomegranate, and the use of caramelised mango with her main course of roast brill - there is a strong sense of English tradition when it comes to using herbs, such as using sweet cicely in a strawberry soufflé and using lavender when roasting meat.

Adherence to seasonality is not a hard-and-fast rule at the Old Vicarage, but Bramley is bemused by chefs who want to put strawberries on the menu at Christmas just because they are available. She asks: "Why get mange-tout from Guatemala in the autumn when there are such wonderful English root vegetables available as celeriac, beetroot and parsnips?"

The Old Vicarage menu changes every four to six weeks and has always been a fixed-price set dinner of four courses, with the final course being a dessert or a choice of mostly British cheeses. For £43, customers get to choose from starters such as tortellini of goats' cheese with cardamom, lemon and a beetroot dressing, or caramelised figs, mustard seeds and basil with a spinach and hazelnut salad.

On the main-course selection of the current menu there is guinea fowl, which is reared exclusively for the Old Vicarage on a nearby farm, pot-roasted with black and white truffles and an Oriental-flavoured confit of the thighs, or an item as traditional and uncomplicated as Aberdeen beef fillet studded with roast garlic.

Just as the desserts have truly British flavours, as in the baked chocolate pudding with chocolate fudge sauce and custard, so too does the cheese list, with a selection that includes a Stilton from Colston Bassett, the soft ewes' milk cheese, Wigmore, from Berkshire, and a small-dairy Swaledale from North Yorkshire, also made with ewes' milk.

The kitchen brigade's love of food is in part what has persuaded Bramley to hand over cooking control to her long-serving chefs Gilbert and Smith, whom she credits with playing a key role in the Old Vicarage winning a Michelin star last year. She says: "I turned 60 last year and we had this drunken birthday party where one of the chefs said to me, ‘Isn't it about time you bowed out?' Until then, I was on the stove every day till the end of service.

"I said, ‘OK, but if there is any drop in standards, I'm back.' I was wanting to spend more time front of house with the customers. For a while I still wore whites and kept going back into the kitchen to check everything was all right, but then I thought, ‘That's not fair - keep out'."

As well as being given control of the kitchen, Smith and Gilbert have also been made directors of the company formed to run the Old Vicarage. It is, admits Bramley, the final exorcising of a lifelong fear of not being in control of her kitchen. Yet this is no retirement package for Bramley. "I'm still the ideas person for the menu and I still do the training, so everything stays as it should be," she says, "but I'm getting some time to do other things."

This includes occasional television work and completing her fourth book, due to be published in August. Called Casseroles, it is an explanation of how to take a traditional British cooking method and transform it into something lighter and more modern. "Everything seems to be cooked so quickly these days," Bramley says. "There is so much depth in a well-done, slow-cooked casserole. That's the problem with so many kitchens, it's all rush-rush-rush instead of taste-taste-taste."

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