Norfolk Floyd on Britain and Ireland

King's Lynn is a very interesting place -

especially when Naughty Nellie is performing!

She'll star in my new gastronomic thriller, "Dial M For Mackerel".

So, with a glad heart, I donate the programme's budget to a celebration of Norfolk's food.

In the words of the master, Noel Coward, Norfolk is, in a phrase...

"terribly, terribly flat."

But East Anglia has always been one of Europe's rich melting pots.

This is where the Norse,

but its reticence belies a strong character, reflected in the recipes and produce,

not to mention Oliver Cromwell, like myself, a misunderstood man.

He wouldn't have approved of plans to dredge the sea-bed

in order to build motorways.

Plans that could put an end to this plentiful source of seafood.

I have a fine time, don't I ? Cruising down the river... Absolutely idyllic!

I'm heading for the Wells Bar, which is NOT a pub,

but this hell of white water ahead of us.

Beyond it are the shrimp grounds.

We'll call this potted shrimps - the hard way!

"Shrimp" is an inadequate word for 2,000 different species of crustacea.

These little brown shrimps

have a funny habit of swimming backwards.

These are the freshest brown shrimps you'll ever see.

No wonder they're so expensive.

Not exactly a huge catch for 4-5 hours trawling.

And it's jolly hard work.

I was going to cook these on the boat,

The man who wrote that stuff

about those who go down to the sea in small boats...

knew what he was on about!

Don't whinge about the price of anything that's won from the sea.

At Wells-next-the-Sea, the serious business of preparing shrimps continues.

These little boats have shrimp boilers on board.

This ensures maximum freshness and flavour.

But sifting these little beauties reminded me of blackberrying -

one for you, one for the basket.

The smell of freshly boiled shrimps wafting on this April evening

became an endearing memory of Norfolk.

867...

868.

You need, this is important, some melted butter,

which I melted in the galley.

Skim off the scum from the top.

You don't want that to ruin the dish.

All you otherwise need is a good pinch of mace...

Quite a lot of mace, because we've got enough shrimps for a little army.

Stir the mace in. Add lots of lovely black pepper.

Quarter to seven on this lovely April evening...

and my little fingers are frozen!

It DOES worry me, though, as I prepare these...

So we must make sure it doesn't happen.

Right! The mace, black pepper...

then you simply pour in this wonderful melted butter...

till it comes to the top.

When it sets, you have a golden crust of butter.

We won't even bother to put that in the fridge,

we'll leave it here for an hour or two.

Ten to seven, and they're open in a couple of minutes! I'm off!

And so to the US base at Mildenhall in my armoured potted shrimp carrier...

and a quick rundown on American food from Sergeant Joey Garcia.

Like sauteing the chicken and then frying it...

But me, I eat anything! I love chicken.

Have you eaten any British food while you've been here?

When I'm off duty I try things like...Yorkshire pudding? Right.

And the traditional Sunday dinner.

Have a nice day!

It's brilliant, isn't it, the flying suit?

Getting into the American way of life is fantastic,

but also armed with the British potted shrimps!

I've got some chums here. Eh, Sergeant?

Yes? Sergeant Susan Luck. What are you doing here? Cooking!

What are these things? What is this lady doing?

Treat me as a simple English native. I haven't been to America.

She's doing Southern fried chicken, her own recipe.

What's special about your recipe? MY recipe! Wrong person!

What is YOUR special recipe?

My special recipe...what I do...

after I clean the chicken,

I marinade it in red pepper, a little ginger, hot sauce,

white pepper, and a little chicken base.

Marinade it for a little while in the refrigerator.

Mmm!

It's VERY good.

What's happening here? These are black-eyed peas...

Like the song, "It was the third of June. Another dusty Delta day"?

Right. "Papa said, pass the black-eyed peas".

They're made with ham hocks and onions,

and cooked for about eight hours.

Fabulous!

This is...

That's like a cassoulet, a French dish of beans and pork...

I've been making this... a very British kind of dish.

I went out and caught these, shelled every single one of them,

Look at that face! I didn't do that to your black-eyed peas.

you'd really enjoy them.

It's perfectly OK if you say they're dreadful.

We will, of course, edit this whole sequence from the programme.

So, tell me...

See what you think. Good? Mmmm.

They're just boiled and mixed with melted butter,

mace and black pepper.

Needs salt.

It's lovely, though. Tastes like shrimp.

It IS shrimp. Needs salt, do you think? Yes.

I don't think I'll open a potted shrimp factory in Memphis!

I'll go and have another mint julep with people who appreciate me!

Who was that schmuck?!

cooked by ace chef Robert Harrison.

It's time in the programme for a piece of serious cooking.

And I'm going to take a back seat and let Robert,

my old mate cook some scallops for us.

I know he has already got some chopped shallots,

little bits of chopped bacon. Now that is a julienne of vegetables.

What are the vegetables in it?

It is a mixture of peppers, green, red, white peppers,

carrots, celery, leeks. But anything you want, really.

Fine, good.

Some fresh - and that's the exciting thing - fresh chopped basil.

That's the main ingredient. The main ingredient. This is lime juice?

Yes, that's right. And some excellent Norfolk fresh scallops.

And a bit of wine. So what do we actually do?

Right, shall I start cooking? Yes, please. Put the butter in the pan..

Get it very hot. Fry the shallots and the bacon.

Very, very hot, but no colour. That is very important.

Those have got to start off on their own before the bacon goes in?

Are you in on that, Richard?

Scallops, shallots and bacon at this stage. Again, no colour.

Cook the scallops until they are just opaque.

No more, otherwise they go very tough, very chewy.

So you fry them quite well. And now, the second menu ingredients.

The wine. And how much of that? Pour.

More, more. That's fine.

And the lime juice, please.

Whoa!

Too much lime juice. I put too much lime juice in.

Well, you'll be eating it!

So at this stage, they are quite opaque.

They are fine. We take them out, keep them warm.

And later on we can put them back in, just to finish cooking. Right.

And very important not to overcook scallops when you boil them. OK.

The julienne of vegetables. What's the... I'm totally convinced

that British chefs are in the ascendancy. We're not so frightened

of imitating the French any more. What, in your mind, is the state

of British cooking? I think with all the local produce we are getting,

especially young vegetables are now being picked, new suppliers

coming along, that's why really chefs are becoming more...

better cooks, really. Yes, because of the... It's a matter of supply.

And the great interest taken, of course, by the suppliers,

by the cooks. The housewife now is getting more involved.

They are demanding more all the time. You've got it absolutely made,

of course, cos you can walk into the garden and pick what you like.

What would you do if you weren't a chef?

Have you got something else you'd really like to do?

I always wanted to write.

THEY LAUGH

So, the butter's in there,

At that stage, we add scallops and the juices.

Again, just to reheat. Finish their cooking process very carefully.

Do you have difficulty getting people to work along with you?

Erm... no. I mean, the boys in the kitchen are very, very

into their food, as well. They really enjoy it.

They show a lot of interest and give me ideas, too, of course.

Really? Lots of ideas, yeah.

What's the next phase? The last thing is the basil,

which I add at the end, so it stays very fresh, very green.

The flavour really comes out. Lots of basil. I love it.

It's up to you. You get it in the summer in the garden.

We have red basil, we have cinnamon-scented basil,

lemon-scented basil. They're lovely. You can have a whole combination

of flavours just from one herb. It really is my favourite herb.

You need to be as much a gardener these days to be a cook,

as anything else, don't you? A greedy gardener, yes.

You can smell the basil coming out. You certainly can.

The wine, as well, keeps its scent so well when cooking.

Want some more sauce? Mmm.

Now, this isn't actually a difficult dish to cook, is it?

There's an awful mystique which surrounds cooking.

And here's one dish that is simplicity itself, as long as what?

What are the golden rules for this dish?

A lot of people put cream in beurre blancs, to stop them curdling.

I just don't like cream in beurre blanc.

It must be very velvety, very light. That's got to be watched, of course.

Make sure it doesn't curdle. And just your own sense of flavour.

And the freshness of the herbs and the freshness of the vegetables,

that is essential, isn't it? Can I pinch some of this?

Again, not overcooking, keeping everything very fresh.

Now, are you sitting comfortably?

Because I mean this in the nicest possible way.

I don't want East Anglians to get upset about what I'm going to say.

Promise? You see, this placid region is set in a, sort of, time warp.

Even the names are carved from marzipan.

I feel that the spirit of good King Woofingas lives,

or has, in fact, never gone away. But back to the cooking.

I want to create something which says "East Anglia", on a plate.

I want a couple of good ducks and a chunk of smoked bacon.

Well, we have fresh ducks from one of our local producers.

Brilliant. We'll have three.

And a large chunk of that smoked bacon.

You say where. About there.

That'll be fantastic.

That'd be superb. Thank you very much.

Look at this. Here, you can actually buy it.

This is what you must all have in your larders, all the time.

Can't get it out. Hoist by my own petard.

And there you've got this lovely, lovely brown stuff.

Melt that over a little piece of fillet steak or a turkey breast

and you've got a fantastic sauce.

Good cooking has good larders, and that's the sort of thing we need.

There's something else here which is superb and I'm very fond of.

This is called brawn.

It's pig's head and stuff like that.

All simmered away, straight off the bones,

and allowed to set in that pot.

Something which typifies real, real English cooking,

and talking about that, I'd better get on with my next sketch.

I like to come out and cook something on my own.

It is, after all, MY programme.

But, here in Norfolk, you have to share SOME things.

This is 1988,

and it's an anniversary, it's a birthday,

of something very important. Guess what it is.

Well, it's the frozen pea!

It's the 50th anniversary of the frozen pea.

That's why we've made a cake.

Norfolk is a great place, Britain is a great place.

We stay in hotels and restaurants, and they look after us very well,

but we tend to get the same kind of food.

Richard, round the ingredients.

A duck...I've diced it into morsels.

Some lovely carrots.

Some little white turnips.

Some stock. Up to me, Richard.

The giblets, feet, winglets,

onion, bay leaf and carrot, stewed in water.

You don't have to use a stock cube,

you CAN use the real thing.

Some wonderful bacon.

Gives flavour to the whole dish.

Some diced onion.

But, most important, the green pea.

In here, I've got this heavy dish with butter burning in the bottom.

with wind and rain.

We have to speed things up.

So, although I'd like those to be nicely sweated, in goes the duck.

Let that bubble for a moment.

Do you remember Lear?

Shakespeare? Well, I can't. But I've got it written down.

When he was on holiday in Norfolk, he said,

as he was overlooking Wells-next-the-Sea's beach,

he gazed down and he said:

"Hangs one there that gathers samphire.

"A dreadful trade."

Later, a BBC assistant will pick that up.

But samphire, this is it,

this crunchy, wild, seaside asparagus,

We're now going to create some magic. Over there, Richard,

and we'll get ourselves out of that sequence in a second.

Thanks to the magic of television, my beautiful duck is cooked.

I wish, as I travel round the country,

that I could have a simple dish like this.

Whether it's a duck in Norfolk,

a rabbit in Somerset or neck of lamb in Lancashire,

some simple food cooked with love.

Talking of love, have a look...

Remember I chucked the duck, onion, carrot and bacon in?

Remember the stock I made?

The giblet stock of water, neck, onion and stuff like that?

It's REAL, simple, English, BRITISH food.

The sort of thing you should be cooking instead of lasagne,

pizza and chilli,

in your wine bars and pubs.

"LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY" BOOMS OUT

I KNOW I'm banging my patriotic drum about British food,

but I really DO want an OBE.

Talking of tradition, I was very pleased to find...

living proof of our culinary heritage - Norfolk dumpling.

How many dumplings have you made in your lifetime, Kath?

I've lost count!

It's home-cured smoked bacon.

Is that enough? No. A little bit more.

I like to make it nice and tasty.

The proof of the pudding, after all, is in the eating!

Steaming away for a couple of hours.

I've never seen one of these before!

Look at THAT!

That is BRILLIANT! A golden crust.

It's going to tip out, isn't it? I'll loosen it just to make sure.

I don't want you to have a collapsed pudding. No!

Right...

Look at THAT!

That is a Norfolk dumpling, my little dumplings!

How I wish you could smell...

Look at THAT!

The bacon, the onions...

Look at it, for God's sake!

I haven't eaten for hours! That is real, REAL food!

It's really filling, too.

See what you think of your own cooking.

What's all this about a Valentine's card?

I had a Valentine's card, "from Floyd, with love."

I thought, "Someone's kidding me. They know I always watch it."

It said, "Your PLAICE or mine."

Plaice? Like the fish. Because you do a lot of fish cookery.

I could leave the fish for this!

I feel... It's brilliant!

The bacon's lovely, isn't it?

Smashing. If you're going to do this dish, get some REAL bacon.

Smoky bacon. It gives the onions a nice flavour.

That little bit of seasoning and stock

makes it really lovely and juicy.

It's always difficult for me to wind up a sequence...

I think the best thing to do... because we never have scripts...

So, Richard, work out a nice way of drawing the camera back,

while we enjoy this, and leave us in peace.

Subtitles by Janice Hamilton BBC - 1988