Rosie Boycott

Aged 56

Food Heaven: Roast belly of pork and her Mum’s coffee pudding

Food Hell: Haggis and offal

Former newspaper editor Rosie Boycott is best known for being the first female editor of two national broadsheets – The Independent and the Independent on Sunday, and more recently the editor of the Daily Express. An active feminist during the 1970’s, she set up the magazine Spare Rib – the motto of which was ‘Don’t cook, don’t type’.

Now Rosie owns a small holding in Somerset rearing pigs and chickens and growing all kinds of seasonal fruit and vegetables. She has recently published a book all about their experiences on the farm.

Rosie decided to take part in Hell’s Kitchen not only because she wants to learn to cook but because she in interested in food’s place in our society.

“I am incredibly interested in the whole philosophy of food, why food matters, why we should change our food habits but not just from the point of health but from a political point of view, reconnecting people with their communities and getting food back into being local and seasonal – just playing a lot bigger part in one’s life than it does. It seemed like an opportunity to do all those,” says Rosie.

She bases a lot of her cooking on the vegetables she grows in her nine acre small holding, and a lot of the produce is supplied to local restaurants and farmers markets.

“I cook a lot of vegetable dishes because we grow a lot of vegetables, if you grow stuff you tend to cook around what you have got in the garden. It does change the way you cook completely. Right now we’ve been cooking lots of things that involve broad beans, lots of things that involve squash and courgettes, like courgette lasagne, just using vegetables in as many ways as we can think of.

“We as a family cook fairly simple things; stews in the winter and I make lots of soup – I love soup. This last week I have had a least three meals of gazpacho. I can go up to the nursery and get tomatoes, cucumber, onion and pepper and I can pick them – it’s so fresh and that’s all you do. We grow our own garlic too so it is completely home grown with some olive oil, and that’s my idea of heaven. I make the croutons fried with olive oil, chuck them in then that’s my lunch.”

Rosie expects that she will share some of Marco’s philosophies on food, in particular the importance of taking the lead from Mother Nature when it comes to cooking.

“There is arguably nothing better in the whole wide world than a potato that is five minutes from the ground to the pot – the taste is extraordinary. Marco is passionate about food and I like his food philosophy. I think all chefs have got quite big characters, obviously to run the kitchen your personality has got to push its way through,” says Rosie.

She thinks her years working in newspapers will stand her in good stead when faced with the heat of the kitchen.

“The kitchen is not dissimilar to a newspaper in the sense that the best newspapers do all think in the same way, the troops all face the same direction and nothing is inconsistent in the way it is all put together.

“Presumably exactly the same things apply to a kitchen, you can’t suddenly have an inconsistency, you can’t suddenly have someone halfway down the line making the potato pink!”

Rosie has never met Marco, but hopes to learn a lot from him, particularly about fish, and is no stranger to the type of fine dining and French cuisine Marco is famous for.

“I eat lots of fish when I go out, partly because I am not a very good fish cook – fish slightly puzzles me. I can cook shellfish, I love prawns done in ginger, coriander and chilli just stir-fried. I can also make a good fish pie but I am not brilliant with fish apart from that – I am quite keen and I hope we learn a bit more about fish.

“I also really want to learn how to cook a pig’s trotter, I really hope that we get that. I love that saying ‘you can eat every part of a pig except for its squeal’. I’ve also eaten brains before and think they’re delicious.”

Marco’s fiery temperament doesn’t faze her, but Rosie does believe that if a chef has to shout, he’s not a very good chef.

“I think the best teachers are the ones that are inspirational rather than the ones that scream. Screaming to me always seems a sign of weakness, if you can’t inspire people to do what you want purely because it is a fabulous thing to do, then actually what are you doing if you have to scream?”

Not usually a fan of reality TV, Rosie says she was keen to do Hell’s Kitchen above anything else because she feels she will actually achieve something at the end of it.

“I think Hell’s Kitchen is quite cool and I will have something to do – you are not just sitting around and crawling into a heap of bugs. This has a purpose, running a restaurant, and it seems to me it will be fun actually and when you come out of it you will know something. It’s quite hard to see the downside except I will be incredibly knackered by the end of it!”

She plans to ask friends Carol Thatcher and Janet Street-Porter for advice on how to cope with the cameras after their stints in I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!

“The bit that does spook me about being filmed all the time is the fact that you don’t see what is happening. I think I am going to have to try really hard to forget about it and hopefully there are too many interesting things going on, conversations to have and cooking to try that you won’t have to think about it – I’m sure if I do think about it, it will make me incredibly paranoid.”

Rosie thinks that she’ll cope well in the kitchen and relishes the challenge, but fears she will become vulnerable if she gets too tired.

“I’m not good if I’m incredibly tired and that’s always been true. If I get really tired I get weepy – no I don’t get weepy I just get pathetic. I’m probably one of the oldest, and if people are having a bad time, hopefully they feel they can come to me. At the end of the day it’s only cooking, how upset can you really get and for how long? You know, it isn’t Stalingrad.”