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Ainsley's odyssey

Claire Webb - 10 March 2020

Every time Ainsley Harriott cooks paella, he remembers a holiday souvenir that his mother proudly displayed on the kitchen cabinet when he was young: a replica of the Spanish rice dish with painted peppers and prawns. “Visitors would say, ‘Ooh, what’s that?’” he recalls. “From a very young age I remember travelling abroad. All my friends at school thought my holidays were very posh because I went on planes, instead of to Blackpool or Margate. My dad was in showbiz – he was a pianist and entertainer – which meant we had a bit of money. So I was really lucky and it opened my eyes, especially in the food department, because they didn’t adapt the flavours for tourists as they often do today.”

 

Nowadays, many of us wouldn’t think twice about hopping on a plane to Spain or cooking a paella at home, which is why Harriott decided to explore the far reaches of the Med in his latest cookery show. “Let’s be honest, so much of the Mediterranean has been done,” he says, “so I thought it would be nice to open it up and look at the islands and places that have influenced those countries.”

 

His first port of call is the French island of Corsica, the aptly named Île de Beauté. Lying a few miles north of the Italian island of Sardinia, Corsica is the Med’s most mountainous island with more than 200 beaches, crystal-clear waters, craggy peaks, excellent vineyards and historic towns. Its chief claim to fame is being the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1769, shortly after France bought the island from the Italian city-state of Genoa. The French emperor never lost his Corsican accent and dreamt of independence in his youth. “If Napoleon had been born 15 months earlier, he would have been Italian and not French,” notes Harriott.

 

“Corsica still has a local dialect that’s closer to Italian than French. The Italian influence is evident when you look at the menus – stuffed pasta, risotto, rustic stews – but you can also find lovely boulangeries with home-made pastries. But the real beauty of Corsica, for me, was the fact that a lot of restaurants and hotels are owned by families.”

 

Many Corsican dishes are flavoured by the wild herbs that grow on the maquis, the fragrant, flowery shrubbery that carpets much of the island and accounts for the island’s other moniker: “the scented isle”.

 

In Spain, he eats his away around Andalusia, which is famous for its Arabicinfluenced dishes, fried fish and seafood, and fabulous charcuterie. Harriott couldn’t get enough of the melt-in-the-mouth slivers of jamón ibérico, which is a far cry from the packaged cured ham in British supermarkets. “The taste is just unbelievable. It lifts your spirits and lingers. That’s what they do really well: good-quality food, whether it’s wonderful hams or olive oils.”

 

Seville’s answer to fast food is serranito de lomo, a not-so-humble ham sarnie. “It’s made with fried peppers, tomatoes and salty, seared pork tenderloin, and it’s the don of sandwiches. When you bite into it, the juice trickles down your chin. Beautiful.”

 

Seville is said to be where tapas was invented, but you’ll wonder why its ubiquitous bars are empty if you like to dine early. “You go out at 7 o’clock in the evening and no one is in the restaurant. Go at 10 o’clock at night and places are full of families. I love the fact that they take their young children out with them, and when you talk to people about their food, they’re always talking about their parents. ‘My mum used to do this’, or ‘My dad used to cook that’.”

 

Surprisingly, Harriott’s final destination is the Middle East, as he explores how ancient spice routes linking Europe and North Africa with Asia shaped Mediterranean cuisine. The highlight of his visit to Jordan wasn’t the wholesome Levantine fare, delicious though that is, but visiting Petra, an abandoned city hewn out of mountains in the Wadi Rum desert. It was built by the nomadic Nabatean people some 2,000 years ago and lay at the crossroads of trade routes.

 

“It blows you away because you think, how did they have the engineering? How did they have the skills to be able to mastermind doing something like this? It is breathtakingly beautiful , and you could go off trekking for three days and find hundreds more amazing palaces and tombs.”

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