TELEVISION: Comfort food

Richard Till tells Grant Smithies why good simple food is so important in life and death.

It was worth it to fly to Christchurch on a cold blustery day to end up here, in a steamy Waltham kitchen that smells of warm onions and butter, grilling TV cook Richard Till about how to make decent French onion soup. Mine has always been crap, you see. It tastes all right, but the texture is always wrong. The onions refuse to dissolve into that sweet, rich, reddish-brown gloop I love so dearly.

"It's all in the way you cut them," says Till as he plonks an onion on the kitchen table and hacks away at it.

"If you cut them across like this, you'll get onion rings that won't fall apart like you want them to. But if you cut the onion lengthwise, like this, it'll break down properly, because of the way the cells line up inside each piece. A bit of salt, slow heat, a slosh of wine, some good beef stock. Lovely."

And it is. Till brings me over a steaming bowl an hour later that would make a French peasant feel right at home, along with some suitably rustic hunks of buttery toast. As I eat it, I get the feeling that always goes with good tucker: a feeling of being both physically sustained and emotionally nurtured, an amorphous sense of well-being that comes when your tastebuds are happy, the company is good and your belly is full.

"French onion soup is something I often order in restaurants," Till says. "Partially because I love it, and partially in the hope that it won't be as good as the one I make at home. Most of the time, I'm pleasantly disappointed."

And I was pleasantly delighted by Till's cooking show Kiwi Kitchen when it screened earlier this year. Here at last was a New Zealand TV cook who was opinionated, unpretentious and made food I could relate to. Food that I grew up on, in fact, which means that some plonker in an ad agency probably calls it "iconic".

Each week Till roared around the country talking to ordinary people in their kitchens, and they spun a few yarns while they strapped together some nosh.

He went to Stewart Island to cook muttonbird, to Haast to make whitebait fritters, and to Central Otago for a Sunday roast. An ex-All Black stuffed him an eggplant, a poet made him a casserole and an undertaker smoked him a trout. At the end of each show Till cooked his own versions of these things in the very kitchen I'm now sitting.

I loved it. It made me feel nostalgic in the best possible way, so I'm overjoyed that a second, longer series starts next Saturday on TV One.

"The idea of the show is just to celebrate New Zealand food and ordinary people who cook," Till says through a mouthful of toast. "Ninety percent of our food is cooked in homes, for families. It's not cooked in restaurant by chefs, it's cooked by mum or dad or nana and the family sits down and eats it. Chefs get a disproportionate amount of attention on television and it's time people spoke up for our mothers and the food they raised us on."

One thing I love about Till's show is that this man seems impervious to culinary fashion. If something tastes good, he'll cook it, and he won't turn his back on feta and sun-dried tomatoes or even powdered soup mix and dehydrated mashed potatoes just because a cabal of smug gourmands has decided these ingredients are common as muck.

"Good food should be accessible. I'd hate to make a show where people had to dash around trying to find flayed sassafras leaves or whatever, muttering `That f---ing Richard Till!' My principle on this show is, if you can't buy it at a Pak'NSave, we won't cook it."

Till is hugely likeable. On telly he comes across as warm, witty and excited by life as well as by tucker. In person, that affability is even more pronounced.

He sits in his kitchen, the hub of a house he shares with three gluten-free children and a vegetarian wife, and a steady stream of jokes and wry philosophical musings pour out of him. Behind me, dazzling floor-to-ceiling curtains made from vintage New Zealand tea-towels. Between us, a huge fruit cake that we cut chunks off as we talk.

Till is as tall as a ladder, and handsome in a rumpled sort of way, with thick grey hair and intense blue eyes. He looks more like a builder than a cook, and he is: he spent many years building and painting theatre sets, and now works as a technical director and theatre designer at the University of Canterbury. He's a welder, too. That enormous tubular barbecue contraption in the back yard, next to the vege garden, with the chooks pecking around the base of it? He made that himself.

Now 48, Till grew up in Christchurch and Dunedin. His father is pianist Maurice Till and, as a boy, he sometimes went out on tour with him.

"You'd fetch up in some country town where the women would be dressed to the nines and these very scrubbed farmers would be squeezed into their funeral suits, sitting grimly through music they didn't really like but they knew was good for them. It was culture as a dose of salts, like cod liver oil. But I loved going out to those small country communities and I love doing it again now with this show."

Till developed an interest in food by watching his mother making everyday meals and "filling the tins". One of his earliest food-related memories is of jumping the back fence on the Otago Peninsula to collect field mushrooms to have on toast before school. In his early 20s, Till supplemented his set-building wages with night shifts as a waiter and later taught himself to cook by reading Julia Child's cookbooks and American Gourmet magazine.

He opened his own restaurant, Espresso 124, in 1988, then set up the Worcester St Dining Room in 1996. "At that point I realised that I loved the process of setting up restaurants more than running them, so I sold it again a year later."

Along the way, he also did some comedy cooking shows in arts festivals and did the backstage catering for visiting music tours, mostly in Wellington.

"I was too cheap, so they gave me lots of work. I cooked for New Order, whose singer didn't eat avocado. Cooked for U2, Simply Red, Jimmy Barnes. I cooked for Miles Davis, who did the entire show with his back to the audience, wearing these tiny bejewelled slippers. And I cooked for Stevie Wonder. We had instructions that everything must be vegetarian because Stevie was vegetarian, so we made all this beautiful vegetarian food, then after the show they all went up to eat and a guy came down saying `Stevie wants chicken! Stevie gotta have some chicken, man!' I had to jump in the car and drive down to the Newtown KFC."

As the afternoon rolls on and the fruit cake shrinks, we talk about many other things. Our shared affection for curried sausages and sausage casserole, despite our shared distress at the borderline pornographic sight of boiled sausages with their skins rolling off. The fact that your relationship with someone greatly affects what you should cook for them. We talk about some of Till's other food-related ventures, which include a book, a state-of-the-art pie-cart to send around food festivals and a plan to involve community groups in catering for big events.

And then, just before my taxi arrives to take me back to the airport, we find ourselves talking about death and Till says something that shows just how deeply he cares about the relationship between people and food.

"In the old days, especially in rural communities, groups like the Women's Institute would constantly fill freezers with food for events like funerals. These days people just hire caterers, which is a real shame, I think.

"When my mother died last year, I got mates in the catering business to cook her favourite dishes from her own cookbook for the funeral reception. Her friends all recognised that food, which was lovely!

"And when my wife, Tommy's, mother died this year, we had a wake at her house and I made all the food from stuff that was in her freezers. She was an amazing hoarder, with bits of left-over casseroles and so on in freezers all over her house. I thawed it all out and served it up, and people loved it. She didn't know it when she was making those meals, but she ended up doing the catering for her own funeral."

A new series of Kiwi Kitchen starts on TV One, Saturday at 7pm.

 

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