Simon Hopkinson is a master at work
SIMON HOPKINSON has been in thrall to food and eating and cooking since early childhood; his mother, a teacher, cooked everyday, providing good wholesome food from scratch. “She’d always have something on the go,” says Hopkinson, “maybe a rabbit glazing in the bottom of the Aga.” But, rather more curiously, at a time when the only professional cooks were male while the domestic kitchen was solely the woman’s preserve, his dentist father would swap drill for skillet at the weekend to indulge his passion with young Simon beside him from the off.
“Dad had an interest in the slightly more esoteric stuff. He would get some really nice steaks, get out his copper pan, the quarter bottle of Martell brandy, cream, Worcester sauce and make Steak Diane. I suppose that was the dentist, he was very meticulous. He’d call me in because I was already interested at that stage. Every two weeks or so, we’d go to the butcher’s for ‘Lamb’s Fry’, sheep testicles. He skinned them, cut them in half and fried them in dripping from the pot. They were delicious and I didn’t even know what they were. We were among the first to go abroad on holidays, in the early 60s. I remember very exciting holidays to the Costa Brava. It’s where I tasted my first paella and the last thing my Dad bought before he came home was a paella pan. There was a fantastic market in Bury where we lived where you could get mussels, scallops, hake and he’d do moules meunieres. He loved Indian food and cooking curries. He’d go into Manchester to buy his spices and come back with all these paper bags full of spices bought loose from sacks and put them in old jars, meticulously labelling each one.”
