Rachel Green isn’t just an award-winning chef, local food campaigner, food stylist, TV celebrity (four TV series) and author (Making The Most of The Great British Sausage, the Chatsworth Cookery Book); she insists that food production is in her blood.
Her family have been farming in Lincolnshire for 14 generations. Rachel’s mother is a brilliant cook and her grandmother before that. Rachel picked up her first kitchen utensils when she was little more than a toddler. And when she wasn’t experimenting in the kitchen, she was out lambing the ewes, shooting game or skinning a deer.
Rachel believes in getting stuck into cooking. Proper, grass-roots cooking. She slates mass-produced food and avoids anything that involves masses of food miles. ‘Microwave’ is a dirty word, as is fast-food, although sausage-lover Rachel insists that Lincolnshire sausages rustled up in a skillet are the best convenience food ever.
Rachel believes that great food is all about the quality of the ingredients. Why smother an outdoor-reared roast loin of Lincolnshire pork in spices and sauces when it oozes flavour served just as it is? Why buy fruit and veg when you can grow it in your own back garden? Why go all the way to Parma for fine ham when Lincolnshire Chine (salt pork filled with herbs) is even finer?
But one of Rachel’s favourite activities is to relax and share great local food with friends. It’s her idea of heaven. And when you’ve grown or reared many of the ingredients, as has Rachel, it tastes even better.
