Feature: Interview - Clare Latimer Talks to Dan Carrier
And it’s goodbye from Clare as she bows out to write her memoirs
IT’S the end of an era – the Review’s very own Kitchen Wizard, Clare Latimer, is hanging up her apron and oven gloves.
The chef – who has written a weekly piece for more than five years – announced last week’s column would be her last, allowing her to concentrate on writing her much-anticipated memoirs. She will continue to run her popular catering firm, Clare’s Kitchen, but will no longer appear on these pages.
As well as providing readers with weekly ideas on what to put on their plates, she has fed and watered the great and the good.
Clare was a regular caterer at Downing Street in the 1990s, while John Major was prime minister – and was named as the possible “other woman” when it emerged Major was having an affair, a salacious piece of hurtful gossip which was thoroughly false. He was, as it later emerged, involved with fellow Tory Edwina Currie – but the rumours meant Clare stopped cooking for Downing Street.
Instead, she concentrated on her highly successful Primrose Hill-based catering business – which led the way for her writing her much-loved cookery column for this paper.
Since setting up her firm – which came about after becoming the in-house cook for a Cornwall yacht club, and finding her food was in such demand that it was worth pursuing as a business – she has seen an explosion in interest in the way people eat. Yet, strangely, things have almost come full circle. “Since I started Clare’s Kitchen in 1974, people are much more health-conscious. People do not tend to drink so much during the day – though they probably make up for it in the evening,” she says.
But as for food and ingredients, things haven’t really changed too much since her first meals. “The point is I have not really changed my style during the whole time, and retro food is fashionable again. I haven’t really changed our menus much – and the ingredients we use are the same, though we do have more chilli, Thai influences and coconut.”
There is a major difference, however: “The food is differently presented,” she says. “Back in the 1970s, it was a case of putting a bit of parsley or a slice of lemon on the side. But that’s not the case any more – presentation is hugely important.”
She pins this on the explosion of food magazines and newspaper columns, as British kitchens became places of adventure instead of working galleys knocking out meat and two veg for hungry workers.
“Food magazines became popular and so food presentation needed to look better,” she recounts. “This was not so important when we started.”
But there has been a trend in recent years that takes us back to where she started – namely, the rise of a list for fresh local produce that hasn’t travelled thousands of miles to reach our plates. In the decadent 1980s there was a taste for exotic food, we are now more aware of the environmental damage this can do – also, local food simply tastes better.
“People want to buy locally sourced produce, which we did as a matter of habit in the 1970s,” she says. “This is again the case now – people are shunning food that has been air freighted half way around the world.”
Published: 21 July, 2011
by DAN CARRIER