Feast en famille
As the bible of French cuisine I Know How to Cook is translated into English for the first time, Sally Howard meets ‘England’s favourite French chef’, Jean-Christophe Novelli, to discuss food, family and farmhouses
PHOTOGRAPHY CHRIS TERRY
“Michelle, Jean and I eat together,” says Jean-Christophe Novelli in his thick-asbéchamel French burr, as he sucks a little of the sauce off a piece of chocolate chicken fricassée that he is feeding to his 13-month-old son, Jean. “What I love most now is that Jean can eat with us – a little steamed spinach or celeriac, rice or semolina, protein, seasonings to mature his palate, vanilla if he’s being choosy – all babies love vanilla.” Clearly, Jean is not going to be fed Heinz or Cow & Gate any time soon.
Jean is actually Novelli’s second child. Christina, his daughter by his first wife, Tina, is 22. He is divorced twice, after briefly marrying a South African model called Anzelle, but, at 48, Novelli is reflective and relishing new fatherhood. He met his fiancée, Michelle Kennedy, a glamorous 33-year-old from Luton with a year-round tan that would make a footballer’s wife weep, on the concourse of the town’s airport. “Not quite across a crowded room,” smiles Novelli, “but a kind of modern romance to it, I think”.
Jean-Christophe and Michelle’s life – in the 14th-century Hertfordshire farmhouse where, for the past six years, Novelli has run his successful Cookery Academy – seems as glossy as a Hello! spread. Novelli, however, is at pains to emphasise how theirs, at heart, is the simple life. “I came from a poor family,” he says. Novelli grew up in Arras, an industrial town in Northern France, in a family with Italian roots, ‘but when you don’t have anything, you do with what you’ve got, and that’s where the real happiness is. A warm brioche from my mother’s oven, for example, or a soup – food created from nothing, really.”
Novelli, born to a mother who’d survived childhood polio and a father who also struggled with his health, was a difficult child. “I was a caged animal – hyperactive, lashing against authority. So my mother taught me how to love, and to share, through food. It was her way to express herself, too, as her life was so limited by her illness.”
Novelli says his appreciation of carefully sourced ingredients came from trips to the market as a child. “I’d go to carry my mother’s bags, four days of the week,” he says. “She would never buy from the same vendor and would only be influenced by the colour and smell of the vegetables, so she’d end up looking at six stalls just to buy a bunch of haricots verts. As a kid it made me mad, but now I respect that.
“For years it was my job to go and buy the bread in the morning,” he says. “I remember I used to be completely fascinated; paralysed by the misted-up window of the bakery – the people, the smell. To me it was a fantasy, like buying gold. If I was ill and couldn’t visit the bakery, I couldn’t bear it.”
One day at school, asked to compose an essay on any subject by a teacher he had a rare affinity for, Novelli decided to write about the bakery and gained access to its kitchen for the first time. “After waiting for all those years, it was like an Alice in Wonderland moment,” he says. When Novelli left school at 14 without a diploma, it was to the same bakery that he looked for work. “I became their boy, riding there on my bicycle in the dark, fixing the bakers’ rum at 2am, making sandwiches at 6am when their shift was over.”
But Novelli has never looked back. At 20, he was appointed private chef to Elie de Rothschild in Paris and, by 22, he was holding the reins at the late Keith Floyd’s Devon pub The Maltsters Arms, a gig that spring-boarded him to a succession of successful restaurants, from Maison Novelli in Clerkenwell to Les Saveurs in Mayfair and a career in TV which, of course, included Hell’s Kitchen.
In his forties, after 30 years at the stove, Novelli has changed the pace with his Academy, a project proposed by Michelle and daughter Christina. “Frankly, I never liked teachers, so it’s surprised me how much I enjoy it,” he says. “Sometimes the thing that will make us happiest is there beneath our nose and we don’t see it.” So it is with their family feasts. Novelli’s Academy staff, friends and Michelle’s family often eat together, one big, rangy, extended family: “I want to create for Jean that sense of celebration that I remember as a kid – the pure anticipation of the weekend, or a big Sunday lunch.”
In this spirit, it was a generations-old Novelli family dish that he first cooked for Michelle. “It was a sea bass with vanilla pipérade and tomato sauce, which was one of my grandmother’s recipes, but with my own twist. I believe each generation should adapt what went before – an homage rather than a copy. My grandmother owns the way she used to cook that dish.”
More memorable for Michelle was the family meal in Arras in 2007 when Novelli proposed. “We were at his sister’s house,” she says, “and I remember her son Marino was cooking pancakes; this fabulous smell carrying through the house. Jean-Christophe took me outside and dropped down on one knee as all of his family pressed their faces against the kitchen window inside.”
Then there is yet more Gallic romance, as we fall onto Novelli’s unctuous chicken fricassée – “a great winter family lunch, as good with game” – Novelli feeding a spoonful to Michelle, Jean gurgling and, somewhere in the distance, a BlackBerry bleeping urgently. The scene, too, sums up Novelli’s aspiration: traditional family values with a modern twist.
I Know How to Cook (Je Sais Cuisiner), by Ginette Mathiot, is out now, published by Phaidon
Thomas Cook Travel Magazine readers can get a 20% discount on courses and demonstrations at the Novelli Academy. The offer applies to any course purchased before 30th April 2010 for attendance on that course at any time before 31December 2010, using booking code TC0410. www.jeanchristophenovelli.com
ART NOVELLI
Fricassée of Chicken with Chocolate
4 chicken legs or 8 thighs
Sea salt and ground black pepper
1tbsp smoked paprika
Extra-virgin olive oil
2 bay leaves
1 sprig of thyme
1 tbsp cumin seeds
4 garlic cloves
2 medium onions, sliced
¾ tbsp organic cocoa powder
Plain flour
75cl red wine – preferably Merlot
2 tbsp clear honey
Divide the chicken legs in half through the natural joint (ie separate the drumstick from the thigh). Do this without splintering the bones.
Season with salt and pepper and dust with paprika. Add enough olive oil to coat and leave to infuse for at least one hour.
Heat a heavy-based pan and carefully place the pieces of chicken in. Add the bay leaf, thyme, cumin and garlic.
Fry the chicken on both sides until golden and evenly coloured. Remove from the pan, with the herbs and garlic.
Add the sliced onions to the pan and sweat down until soft. Add the cocoa powder and mix in.
Return the chicken pieces and herbs to the pan, and combine.
Sprinkle on enough flour to absorb any fat residue and form a basic roux.
Stir in the wine. Ensure there are no lumps and the sauce is just thickened. Adjust the acidity of the wine with the honey.
Bring to a simmer and remove any impurities that rise to the surface.
Place the lid on and cook on the stove top for 10 minutes to ensure that the chicken is starting to cook. Place into the oven and cook for 40 minutes at160ºC.
Finish with a good dousing of olive oil.
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