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FOOD | AND | DRINK
Not pretending: a story with food
Chef, author and food presenter Valentine Warner has published a new book called The Consolation of Food. It’s not really a recipe book, more of a poignantly authentic self-portait, says Melissa Blease, who grills Valentine about painting, food, gin, the Arctic, creating space in his brain and, most of all, not pretending
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Photograph by Dan Sneddon
’ve always been a somewhat frivolous, happy-go-lucky, inquisitive kind of soul,” says Valentine Warner. “Then suddenly life can absolutely wallop you; odd feelings come up, you feel divided, you feel a kind of anger, and moments of sadness that are quite surprising.” The result of such a walloping, for Valentine, is his new book The Consolation of Food: Stories about Life and Death, Seasoned with Recipes... described by Valentine himself as “a bonkers book of stories about the less than perfect human
48 TheBATHMagazine
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april 2020
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issue 211
condition... but with food”. The leitmotif of The Consolation... may come as a surprise to those of us who are familiar with VW’s back catalogue. While none of his six previous books, several of them self-illustrated, could be described as mere recipe books, none of them have offered such a candid insight into Warner’s true temperament either. But how much about him did/do we already know? Valentine’s mainstream TV show appearances (What to Eat Now, Coast to Coast, Great British Chefs, etc) attest to the
ruminative, exacting side of his personality, qualities further endorsed by his reputation for being one of the most rigorous judges on the panel for the illustrious BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards. But Valentine Warner Eats Scandinavia or Wild Table: Canada reveal a more untamed side to his nature and a skittish sense of enthusiasm that, perhaps, a less prime-time-specific format encourages. Gin is usually somewhere at the forefront of Valentine’s mind, too; he co-founded the Moorland Spirit Company distillery, producers of Hepple Gin, in the Northumberland moorlands in 2013. And here’s the really wild (in the true sense of the word) Val-angle: his Holmen Lofoten Kitchen On The Edge Of The World, which he co-founded with visionary entrepreneur Ingunn Rasmussen, is one of the most magical, almost ethereal food-related travel destination communities imaginable, set on the last inhabited island in Norway’s rugged Lofoten archipelago inside the Arctic Circle. So, with all that already going on, why this book – and why now? “I started to write another cookbook while I was going through turbulent times in my personal life, but as I moved along, it became almost a kind of brain dump that I wouldn’t quite call a memoir,” he says. “I tend to carry everything around in my head, and walk around having some kind of argument with myself about whatever situation I’m in on any given day. Writing the book created a space in my brain, because I logged all those thoughts. “Also, right now, with social media and everything, everybody, to a certain degree, seems to be pretending. I wanted to write a book that wasn’t pretending anything. So, here are my disasters, here are my sadnesses, here I am as I actually am: a divorced dad, with children living in a foreign country; a son who lost his father and maybe still hasn’t grieved for him yet. I’ve included all sorts of things, from my worries for nature to the kind of personal cock-ups, frankly, which are hopefully funny enough to share.” Was the writing process cathartic, or even therapeutic? “It was a difficult process in some ways, but only in the sense that I’m somebody who likes being on my feet, with a series of things to do during the day that keep me going, physically,” he says. “I find sitting still very hard, so my writing time was interrupted by lots of trips to the fridge. And because I do quite a lot of different things at any given time, what was meant to
