My countryside: Rick Stein :: Country matters

'My parents only ever had candles on their Christmas tree – my father didn’t believe in electric fairy lights. This meant that ours could be lit for just a magical 20 minutes at a time. My little sister Henrietta and I weren’t allowed to see the tree before it had been decorated on Christmas Eve and lit the next morning. So, even though we had to walk past the room in which it stood to get to the stairs up to our bedrooms, we always had to cover our eyes. We never peeked – it was too much of a pleasure to admire it for the first time on 25 December, dressed with sparkling glass baubles and with candles aglow.

'I grew up on a small mixed farm near Chipping Norton. It was 150 acres set in the most beautiful Oxfordshire countryside. I was the second youngest of five, with two sisters and two brothers, and we had an idyllic childhood. From the age of eight or nine, my friend Les and I could be found tinkering with nuts, bolts and spanners, dismantling old tractor engines and agricultural machinery. When I reached my teens, I often helped my father with the harvest and haymaking.

'When we ate Sunday lunch, Dad was fond of saying, "Everything on your plate was grown on the farm". He was, in fact, a "gentleman farmer" and, during the week, worked in London as a company director of the family distillery business, which he ran with his brother Rolf. The farm didn’t make any money but provided us with wholesome, organic seasonal produce – something I took for granted.

'Growing up on a farm is fine until a certain age – then it can become quite lonely. As a teenager, I liked to spend as much time as possible in Cornwall, where my family had a holiday home. It was an Art Deco house that my father and uncle had built on the clifftops near Padstow. I’d go to socials at the golf club in Trevone on Friday nights and meet boys and girls my own age. The countryside was a contrast to Oxfordshire, with great vistas of blue sea and an elemental landscape created by the Atlantic gales that seemed to blow everything out of the ground. En route, during the long car journeys, Henrietta and I would vie to be the first to spot the sea. Today, I split my time between my home in Padstow and one in Australia, but I still have pleasure in glimpsing a sliver of the ocean on the horizon.

'My mother was an inspiration to me in the kitchen. I didn’t cook much as a child but I spent a lot of time watching her and picked up many techniques that way. Mum was raised in south London and went to college in Cambridge, so her cooking was the sort you’d find in a Constance Spry or Elizabeth David book. As my parents travelled a lot, she would often prepare Italian dishes, too, which was quite unusual in Britain in the 1950s.

'Christmas dinner, however, was always traditional. Dad would invite various relatives around and there were often up to 20 of us at the table. We didn’t rear turkeys, so my parents would buy a lovely fat bird from a nearby farm in Kingham, which would be served with sprouts, two types of stuffing – sage in the breast and a chestnut mixture in the neck cavity – and bread sauce on the side. But what was most superb about the spread was Mum’s gravy. She didn’t thicken her sauce – she’d add perhaps just one tablespoon of flour – but she’d use homemade stock and the fat from the pan the turkey had been cooked in. It was made with the goodness of the bird. Although these days I’ll usually cook goose rather than turkey, I still make my gravy and bread sauce just as she used to.'

Rick Stein OBE is a chef, restaurateur, television presenter and cookery book author. Buy his memoir, 'Under a Mackerel Sky' (Ebury Press, £20), for the discounted price of £15.99 in the All About You bookshop.