Gabriel Gate

I cannot tell you how excited I was to meet Gabriel Gate and talk to him. Before we talked, I imagined the conversation would be about cooking, food and being a chef, and it was, but we also talked about life and the things that are important. When I told people that I was going to talk to Gabriel, the universal reaction was, "Ah Gabriel Gate, what a lovely man." Everyone has heard of Gabriel. They know him as a chef with an international reputation as a cookery author, a television presenter and a cookery teacher, and they also know him as a gentleman who is genuinely interested in others and in the goodness he can share through food. I first met Gabriel at the celebration evening for the Australian team returning from the Bocuse d'Or competition that took place in Lyon this January. Gabriel is on the Bocuse d'Or committee and is a fierce and proud advocate for the industry and the hospitality industry needs more people like him. We sat down to chat for the podcast at Via Verona in Kew. Gabriel gave me a copy of his book, So French, So Sweet, and I think I will always be on dessert duty at any gathering from now on. We chatted in French for a while, which I of course loved, before getting straight to the heart of things. Listen to the podcast here.

Bonjour Gabriel, thank you for meeting me today.

It's a pleasure. It's nice to speak about life.

About life. That's right. Food is life in so many ways. We often say that, but I think it's true.

The role of a chef and home cook is to nourish the family. That's the role of a home cook. You cook for the family and the family members are in charge of eating. That works for kids too. That's the role of parents. The role of parents is not to spoon feed kids. It is to cook for them nourishing, balanced food. After that, it is the other person that takes a decision to eat it.

For the chef, there's a dimension of the chef that needs to do something enticing because the client is paying and it needs to be something a bit more special. Sometimes it can be very creative. Sometimes it can be very classic. That's the choice of the chef. Sometimes it's the choice of the clients to choose a place to go, but at the end of the day we nourish. I worked with a chef once who said, we don't want our clients to feel sick when they leave the restaurant. And that can happen, that the food was too rich that there were too many courses in a set menu, too many courses each individually that don't work together. That's really the responsibility of the chef to serve food that is balanced within a menu.

I'm glad that you talked about that idea of nourishing, because I was thinking about how nowadays there's so much focus on fancy food, MasterChef and some of these top restaurants where people are spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on food. We talked about this a little bit when I first spoke to you, but I was thinking about the gap between that sort of food security gap between people who can't afford that or don't have the knowledge about how to use simple ingredients to cook nutritional food. How do we work within that?

Well the reality is that years ago, parents taught their kids to become independent by teaching them the art of cooking family food. That's where it starts. You have got to have parents that share what they know, even if they don't know a lot, they need to share that with their kids. The role of parents is to give independence to their kids as early as possible in their life. If you can't cook and you are 40, you're not independent. By the time you are a teenager, you should be able to be able to cook pasta and make a salad dressing and make a salad for yourself. You make a number of sandwiches, steam vegetables, make an omelette, a fried egg, a number of preparations because at the end it's like a puzzle and there's lots of pieces in the puzzle. The more pieces you have, the bigger the puzzle, the better the chef you are. But you want to instil the love of cooking early. Because if you have not done any cooking with your parents until you leave, it's going to be much harder for you to embrace cooking. Some do, but some people will find all kind of excuses not to cook.

When did that start, do you think? I wonder whether this idea of fast food or ready-made meals, because our lives have become so busy, especially in cities, or we think our lives are so busy, that there are generations who have lost that art or maybe their parents did try and teach them to cook or give them that idea of food, but they've now grown up and don't have that themselves, so people have lost that interest in cooking.

People are time poor. Yes, that's the excuse that people give because they're doing something else. But I mean, if we all spent as much time cooking as we do on our phone.

That's so true.

I have a technique to teach cooking where I tell people, you have got to learn to cook new dishes regularly. I suggest to my students or to people I talk to, to cook a new dish every month; something that appeals to you, something that you might have a little knowledge about or something you say, oh, I would like to learn to make, let's make it a coq au vin. Chicken casserole cooked in red wine, a winter dish. You get a recipe, you allow plenty of time the first time and you follow the recipe the first time. This is the recipe you are learning this month. And you practice, you cook the dish and you practice the dish three or four times within the next month in order for you to master it. Lots of people cook new dishes and they say, oh no, that was not nice. It was overcooked. It was under cooked. My family didn't like it. There's all kind of excuses and they never do it again. No. You need to commit yourself to dishes and you cook them several times, so you master them.That becomes a dish in your repertoire. If you do that, one dish a month is not a lot. It is 12 new dishes a year. After 10 years, it's 120 dishes, you've got to look at it like that. If you start when you are 18, 19, 20 to do that, by the time you are 30, you could know how to cook 100 different dishes. If you know how to cook 120 dishes, you know how to cook 300 dishes. Because that risotto that you learned how to make with mushroom and peas becomes a risotto with chicken and asparagus without any effort. So basically you learn to become fluent, but practicing particular types of cooking using different ingredients, different techniques, different seasoning.

I think that's a really lovely way to look at it. I wonder sometimes though, if I'm just following a recipe and it's a new recipe for coq au vin or whatever it is and then I master that, but I'm a bit tied into that recipe because I haven't really understood how the raw ingredients work, how do I know what I've done wrong if it doesn't work out. I feel like chefs have that knowledge of really understanding raw ingredients and then they can go exponentially onwards in their repertoire. Whereas home cooks don't have that.

Well, I think you underestimate that you are cooking at least once a day. 50,000 meals or plus in your life. So there's plenty of room for practice. Plenty of room. Now that dish that you suggested, let's make it a risotto to make it simpler. The first time I can tell you mostly it's not going to be wonderful. You might overcook it or undercook it, you might get it right. Which is wonderful, very encouraging. You will get it right if you have got a bit more experience. So each time you cook, your memory will keep some information about what you have done. This is what the chefs are, you're not a chef. The chef will cook it 20 times in the same evening. You are cooking it once. That's why I suggest that next week you do that risotto again. And this time you say, I'm going to cook it for a few more minutes and my family didn't like, or they would've liked more mushrooms, so I'm adding more mushrooms. So youve adapted to your family taste and to your taste. The third time you refine it, and say we put too much parmesan in it, it was lovely, but it was too rich. We don't need to put in so much butter. I will put in more peas. So you adapt it to your family. And it's all about memory. That's why I ask people to do the same this several times, so it is in your head. As a young cook, you are all over the place. That's why as a young cook, you might not start with that risotto, it's too overwhelming, you have no idea. You start with that salad dressing. You start with the omelette. We start with the fried egg on toast. You start with noodles and three ingredients over it with bit of sauce. Just so you become familiar with the time of cooking noodles or pasta or things like that. You have got to learn something that is at your level. And when you have 10 years of cooking, that's already lots of meals. Especially later in your life. Many people have families or a partner. So suddenly you're not just cooking for yourself, you might be cooking for other people. So it is lots of experience.

Just listening to you, I was thinking, you made a decision to become a chef, but I feel as though when, whenever I'm in France, the families that I know, my friends in France, they all love food. And they all talk about food all the time. And there are ways of doing things. As a New Zealander living in France for a year, I had to always sit back and watch everyone. When the new asparagus came into season, they didn't get a knife and fork and cut it up. They would get the plate, tip it up on a top of a fork, make a vinaigrette down the bottom of the plate and they'd dip each spear in and eat it that way. I feel as though French people have this innate knowledge and love of food and seasonality. Is that still the same?

It is changing a bit because of the Americanisation in France, which is enormous, fast food and all of that, maybe we should not call it American, but it certainly started there. There's certainly a different kind of attitude. It in my mind, by looking at what I've seen in Australia all those years, and often in Anglo-Saxon countries, those countries are very good at making fussy eaters out of children. As young parents, you cook for them, as I said, and you put the food on their plates or in the middle of the table. You don't force them to eat, but you don't ask them, darling, what you want me to cook? You decide you are responsible at that time when they're very little for their health. French kids are not as, or they were not. I think many are not still, but it's changing a bit because we give too much choice to kids too early in terms of food. You guide them. You help them to take the responsibility of that. You have to instil in them the joys of eating a wide variety of food. There's no doubt that little kids, generally speaking, are not that fond of vegetables and things like that. But you introduce the same vegetables in different form. For example, my son didn't like cooked carrots, so we would grate carrots, or we would chop them into a bolognaise sauce and he loved them that way.It was just something that he had to accept. You don't force it. But little by little. The reality is that most adults, not all, love most foods. In terms of health, the experts will tell you that the quicker you learn to love vegetables, the healthier you are going to be for longer.

We mentioned Coq au vin before, and there are two parts to my question. You grew up in the Loire Valley and I read that your mother and your grandmother were great cooks.

My grandmother was a very, very good cook.

The two parts are, how do you make a decision to go from being a French person who loves food and is a good cook to actually deciding to become a chef, but secondly, why are French dishes coq au vin, boeuf bourguignon, and onion soup such perennial favourites? They are two quite separate questions, but my mind is obviously racing ahead and sparking in all directions!

Well, to answer the first one. We grew all our own vegetables. My father was a good gardener. I came from the rural section of France and most people had vegetable gardens. But they didn't just grow three bunches of carrots, they grew 20 kilos, 30 kilos, 40 kilos of carrots, 50 kilos of potatoes, enough for the family of eight. We didn't buy vegetables. Sometimes we bought some fruits like oranges and bananas. We grew all the vegetables. We had chickens. So that was a good beginning. My grandmother was a professional cook in a private family during her youth. She was a good family cook. She was a bit more than a good family cook, a good bourgeois cook, you could say. She knew how to make classics. She knew if someone brought us a hare or, a wild rabbit what to do without following a recipe. My parents instilled in us the joy of eating good food, the joy of sitting at the table and sharing a meal. And I became a cook. My grandmother also had handicapped legs, so we helped her to carry some of the food. She could not carry a big pot of water; we did that for her. We helped her and we contributed to the preparation of the food. Like most families, kids help not getting some parsley, peeling the potatoes, shelling the peas. Thats how it starts, you ask your kids to shell the peas and you have fun together. You have a chat with them when you do that, and I thought cooking was fun. I didn't really become a cook because I love cooking. Although I did, but I became a cook because I love eating. I think that's the most important thing, to love eating good food. Then you say, I enjoy eating good food, so I've got to learn to do it. And as you learn to cook, you love it more.

Of course, when you are a young chef, I can tell you it's hard work. Its like being a linguist. It's only when you are fluent that you say, oh gosh, that was worth it. I know I had to learn that vocab, and with cooking, it's the same. I've got to repeat the same movement. So that is it.

Now, in terms of your second question about French cuisine, there's always been an evolution as far as French food is concerned. But it started very much as regional food because there was no transport. Each region had many specialties. Coq au vin was mainly in Burgundy, because there is wine, because the climate is good for chicken, not too hot, it's not too cold. There's plenty of water, there's green grass and things like that. You got to Marseille, its Bouillabaisse, the fish soup. You go to Alsace, it's the cabbage dishes with charcuterie. You go to Brittany, it is seafood. This is how those classics started several hundred years ago. Sometimes in families, sometimes in the kitchen of the noble people, the kings, the chefs were the best of the time. When the kings disappeared, all those top chefs opened restaurants. There was a moment where there were no fine restaurants in France, we are talking 300 years ago. There were places you stopped to eat if you were traveling and you had a bowl of soup or things like that.But it was not refined. It only became refined at a certain stage where people were becoming more sophisticated. Then top chefs trained younger chefs and so on.

I did a PhD in medieval French literature, which does not help the world at all, but one of the things I discovered in my reading, which had nothing to do with my thesis topic but I was a bit fascinated by the fact that the noble people ate cold. Because by the time they'd done all the fancy sparrow inside a pigeon inside a swan and then carried it all the way to the dining room, it was cold. But the peasants or the serving people ate hot food because it was all simmering over the stove while they worked. They had all the delicious stews and the vegetables.

Yes. It was a one pot dinner. They had a fireplace and there was always one pot with some liquid and some vegetables, a piece of pork, some beans. It was not a six course meal, but it was nutritious.

You've brought along these beautiful cookbooks, a dessert book and, Anyone can cook; a children's story and cookbook. How many books have you written?

24. My first book was published in 1981. So that is 42 years ago. I was freelancing, working on, new recipes and it was very positive way of spending the time between jobs. When you freelance, you don't work all the time. You get interesting jobs. They last for a while or so, and I decided that if I wrote cookbooks, it would help me to become a better chef, to do some research. It's like being a student. If the book is successful, then you get some income later on. If not, you still have learned something.

You've put out all these cookbooks, and youve obviously been on television, which I missed out on because I was in New Zealand when you were doing that. But everyone knows your name. As you said, you became a chef because you love to eat. But I feel as though, from what you've been talking about today, you have a genuine interest in helping other people and sharing your knowledge and nourishing people through information as much as food. You have become a real advocate for the industry and for food. Is that your focus now? Is it this the sharing of knowledge and encouraging others?

I think that we have all had mentors, we have all had people in our life we admire and we say, ah, that person is positive or that person is dedicated or passionate and things like that. There's a time in your life when you are a young chef. You work hard to get somewhere. You know, like a young teacher who might want to be head of the department, or write a book or, do a PhD. So you do that and then suddenly you have a family. Not everybody, but that was my case. So you trying to juggle family and work and lifestyle and then the kids grow and then you start to get ahead with your family life, with your financial life. And there's a moment where you say, well, I'm not chasing money any more. I am not chasing fame or whatever you chase. So when you then have the opportunity to share what you know with other people, it's good. It's a good feeling.