“I was given this voice, I’m sorry it doesn’t have volume control! I apologise profusely,” bellows chef Jeremy Lee during our lunch in the Blue Room at Quo Vadis in Soho, the Dean Street restaurant and members’ club he has presided over since 2012. He needn’t apologise, however. As anyone who has spent a minute in his company, or indeed been around him at all, can attest, the ability of his warm, orotund Scottish accent to fill a room is all part of his charm, which comes by the bucketload.

Like his demeanour, Jeremy’s cooking is equally beguiling. His fare is of the sustaining, generous and delicious variety, and quite proudly the product of a childhood spent under the care of an Elizabeth David-obsessed mother. In fact, the pies and puddings of Jeremy’s formative years are the genesis of a career that’s been spent translating homespun recipes into restaurants contexts, which for 18 years was done to much acclaim at Terence Conran’s Blueprint Café at the Design Museum.

Here, Jeremy tells us of growing up in a house that placed an enviable degree of importance on food; why a beautifully-designed room matters as much as what’s on a plate; and what modernity in food means to him, plus get his recipe for fig and almond tart.

Jeremy: “I was born and raised in Dundee, a place famous for its three Js: jute, jam and journalism. My mother was the daughter of a jute agent in India, but the family settled in Dundee when the war broke out.

“My mum was wonderfully talented. Ever-nimble with her fingers, she sewed, knitted and cooked with great dexterity. She went to Atholl Crescent, which was the great catering school for ‘ladies’ in Edinburgh, and she knew how to cook.

“I was born in 1963 and grew up very much aware of a simmering resurgence in food. It was post World War II and rationing – a dour, miserable realm (that we seem hell-bent on returning to!) that nevertheless had people like Elizabeth David beginning to make people aware of proper cooking and produce. My mum fell head over heels for it and got fully swept up by the whole thing.

“And then my dad’s mother, my grandmother, was a huge part of our growing up too, and she cooked very couthy, plain Scots food: lentil soup, mince and tatties, potato soup, Arbroath smokies, things like that.

“So, we grew up with an extraordinary mix of delicious food, which was all very carefully cooked and considered. And always from scratch.

“In those days, there were no supermarkets, so we would tumble down the high street to the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer – my parents loved shopping and finding things. There was a wonderful amassing of ingredients and produce to take home and mum cooked for us every night.

“It was a very remote place and there was not much else to do so you could get very involved with food and cooking. But I didn’t help out at home; it was mum’s sanctuary! You weren’t even allowed in. But she would look after me and I would sit there, this funny little round boy, mesmerized by this image of my mother sitting very gently and calmly with four children tearing the house to rack and ruin on a daily basis, which she would then restore immaculately like Mary Poppins, all while cooking these delicious things.

“Oh, and there were no restaurants. In fact, my father hated restaurants. Instead, there was always a great performance put on at home when they cooked for their friends. They would plan well ahead and cook something truly impressive. I often recall an image of my mum just sitting at her place on the counter, cigarette in one hand and a coffee in the other, trolling through the cookery books.

“It was always Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson or Claudia Roden, and she would just cull the recipes. If it was for the family, it would be a big Scotch broth or a cock-a-leekie. But for friends, it was a crown roast lamb and very grand, magnificent cuts of beef. And all the good things that went with it… amazing vegetables.

“Dundee is right at the estuary of the River Tay and beyond that, right the way down to Perth, is the Carse of Gowrie, the great berry growing region of Scotland. Fantastically arable. All the carrots came out with soil on them and they all tasted of things. One of the things I found really interesting when I moved south was vegetables not tasting of anything. I’d put ten carrots in a pan and it just tasted of sugar!

“As my career as a chef then began to move on, I was always more interested in home cooking; I was never really particularly driven by restaurants. And the thing I found most interesting was that, while I was learning to cook, I didn’t lose that home approach, which is a testimony to the kitchens and the chefs I worked with.

“They were all rather intrigued by me because I was not the norm. Most chefs came from tins of beans land. You know, it was a very different realm back then.

“Amazingly, I think I always had a frame of reference for good food because we grew up with it so well. So, there is an enormous amount be said for nurture, when you grow up with something as part of daily, civilized life.

“It’s what mom and dad insisted on. We all sat down to the table and never had the television on. That was unthinkable, as would have been sitting on the sofa with food on your lap.

“So, when I eventually got my first gig doing my own restaurant, which was in Islington, the menus I wrote harked straight back to Elizabeth David, that was the immediate thing.

“I wasn’t interested in emulating anyone but I was hugely impressed and inspired by chefs like Michel Guérard and Alain Chapel, all those legendary names of the great band of Michelin Star chefs that pulled the green baize door down and let light into the kitchen and illuminated everything, rather than this stilted, stuffy way of eating and the stilted atmosphere that came with it.

“Because that was what restaurants were. There was always a really horrible apricot tablecloth that came right down to the floor and chintzy crockery. An awful and oppressive, boudoir-stroke-old-people’s-home way of doing it. It was really grim, just not fun and boring, actually.

“Mostly, it was when Terence Conran started rethinking things that it started to change. I still think he’s one of the godfathers, responsible for the resurgence in restaurants and good food in this country. 

“His restaurants, like Bibendum, opened at the same time chefs like Rowley Leigh, Alastair Little and Simon Hopkinson were coming onto the scene – I think it was the meeting of those great minds that started to really get things going.

“They bought modernity and brightness, and flavour, and colour, and zest, herbs, seasoning. And it was chefs’ books that were being looked at, the work of food writers. Suddenly this enormous, unbelievable archive of writing that had never really been part of the professional kitchen was unearthed. And it was all from home cooks.

“Also, because the restaurants relied on great producers and suppliers, as the cooks got interesting so did the produce, and suddenly you had folk doing wonderful things. And that all reminded me of shopping at home with mum and dad, whether it be for some lentil soup or a grand French bistro feast we were preparing (for my 21st birthday, my mum cooked boeuf a la mode – that’s how geeky and uncool I was! But it was so delicious).

“Terence Conran came to eat at the restaurant I was working at in Islington and sort of clocked me, and said, ‘Blueprint Café is going free at the Design Museum, do you want it?’. You didn’t say no to Terence!

“It was a beautiful dining room with an amazing terrace overlooking the river and the east London skyline. I went to see it and thought, you know what, rather than cooking on a high street with a bus drudging past all the time, this is pretty gorgeous. I got there and sort of fell in love with it. 

“You can be the best chef in the world but if you have an ugly dining room, it wouldn’t be the same thing. It all has to come together, as one. And no one thing should stand out over the other – I learnt that from Terence. Harmony is vital, and it should all work, giving a feeling that, the second you arrive, you’re in the right place, that’s exactly where you want to be, exactly what you want to be doing and that you’ve made exactly the right choice.

“The thing I adored about the Blueprint was that it was very simple, just Eames chairs, no table cloths, David Mellor cutlery, really good glasses, and a classic, sturdy, Terence-designed room, with sweeping wooden floors, an enormous wall of windows, mirrors everywhere so the light flashed and twinkled. It was pretty amazing.

“If the menu, room and service all come together as one, then you have a very nice thing going on – it’s a good restaurant. And it’s exactly the same at home.

“I like a big table at home. I’m not very good with dinner at home for four or six, that’s just not my thing. It’s always 12 or 14, with a big pot on the table to help yourself, slapdash and marvellous. Always great, but not formal – I’m not very good at formal at all.

“My kitchen at home is more like a scullery, actually. It reminds me of my grannie’s flat, who lived in an old Dundee tenement. I’ve been in my place for about 20 years now – it’s hard to keep count these days! I got a lovely big room with big windows and that was enough for me. I love its height, it’s got huge concrete ceilings with great big struts across it, which are very beguiling, and it has original windows.

“Cookbooks are something of a compulsion of mine, and the second bedroom in my flat is entirely taken up by them. At the moment, I am beyond excited because Canal House Cooking, run by two amazing women in America, called Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton, have just produced their second large-format book.

“I constantly look for new inspiration. Where I am happiest is in Italian and French regional cooking – both are very much a bedrock of what I do. Because I was brought up in a very remote part of Scotland, where a courgette was glamorous, my discovery of produce was just like ‘wow’.

“I found that the food of France and Italy that I so loved lent itself amazingly to British produce. Poached chicken is not that far away from bollito misto, which is not that far from a pot-au-feu.

“But I detest the terms ‘peasant cooking’ and ‘rustic’ because it’s all so disingenuous, and to demerit it with all these snooty middle-class terms is really annoying. My new favourite one is ‘bourgeois crisis.’ I don’t know what it is, but apparently it’s what we’re in…

“The home food I love most is made out of necessity and frugality, when you use everything. One of my favourite things to do is to just go shopping, and buy stuff I love the look of, get home and then see what to do with it.

“When it’s just me I have sardines on toast. If they’re tinned, it’s just how they are but if they’re fresh I cook them with leeks and spring onions and put a fried egg on top, which I love. I love little dishes like that.

“There’s a wonderful therapy in cooking – it’s a calming thing to do and I think there’s something satisfying about putting cooked food on the table for yourself and your loved ones, and the gratitude of folk for it, even if it’s scrambled eggs on toast with anchovies and capers (which is one of my all-time favourite things to cook at home).

“The expectancy of doing restaurant cooking at home is nonsense and I find that if you have a loaf of bread, a packet of butter and some eggs you’ll never starve, and eat like a king, in fact.

“I eat out when I can, and my favourites are St. John, Brawn and Black Axe Mangal. I love Brawn, very much. Rochelle, I adore, both of them – ICA and School. Royal China, endlessly. Anything with chopsticks, really – Silk Road, Royal China Club when I’m feeling flush, for the best dumplings ever.

“Those Vietnamese places on Kingsland Road are great, just fun places to be. They’re always madly busy, and I think they have the restaurant business down because they know how to ram a restaurant. It’s amazing.

“I don’t know if it’s a generational thing, but I don’t feel compelled to make my own bread, my own charcuterie or smoke my own butter (why you have to smoke butter is beyond me!). I learned that a long time ago with dishes I ate in Italy and France and would come back and, like an idiot, try and emulate them, and quickly realised you need the sun (holiday wine doesn’t travel!) – it’s about being inspired but not trying to replicate.

“My favourite thing in the world is to go to friend’s houses, and I’m blessed with some very good friends – some chefs and some just good cooks. My favourite chefs I have to say are Fergus and Margot – lunch at theirs is just one of the loveliest things indeed, and often turns into dinner too. Wherever they have lived, it’s been wonderful. 

“Modernity in food? Oh lord, if there’s one thing that terrifies the living daylights out of me it’s calcifying, being stuck in a rut, mired and lost in time and being a fossil. It would be awful, a terrible, terrible thing to do, and it’s very easy to do. I think one of the things that’s so important is staying engaged with life and to engage with folk of every age and type. 

“Modernity is not leaping in a spaceship and flying to the moon, by any stretch of the imagination (how awful would it be to turn the moon into terminal six of Heathrow; ghastly!). Where I see it with food, which I like enormously, is the change from restaurants offering stodgy, flour-thickened sauces with skins on them, heavy, rich, indigestible – unlike my mother’s cooking which had a lightness and a brightness to it – to what you sit down to now, which is magnificent, confident cooking.

“At the Design Museum there was a constant stream of extraordinary figures, modernists who enjoyed things and life, like artists, and architects, writers, actors – folk who were doers and liked to create and make things but not haughty and stuck up, quite the opposite. People who were bright, modern and dynamic, dead stylish, had bags of charm, were very educated, informed, considered, and the chat was great – as was the wine!

“It’s very hard to define because it’s forever evolving and ever-changing. It’s never there long enough to be one thing. What one sees is things being added constantly to this ever-changing, evolving thing called modernity.”

Fig & Almond Tart

The original old faithful. There is no point making this tart on a smaller scale. Enjoy the leftover with glee over the coming days.

The pastry
250g plain flour
125g unsalted butter, cold
A pinch of salt
50g icing sugar
2 egg yolks
1 teaspoon cold water

The frangipane
500g Marcona almonds
500g unsalted butter
500g caster sugar
4 eggs

Figs
12-15 ripest, best figs
1 tablespoon honey
Juice of 2 lemons
12 grinds of a pepper mill

Confectioner’s custard
500ml milk
Half a vanilla pod split in two, lengthwise
150g caster sugar
6 egg yolks
20g flour
20g cornflour

Mascarpone cream
200ml mascarpone
200ml Jersey cream

Almonds
25g roasted until golden, cooled and chopped
A tart case, 12” wide, 1” deep

Preheat your oven to 160ºC. Place a rack in the middle of the oven and place a tray below on another shelf.

To make the pastry, place the flour, butter, sugar and salt in a food processor. Render this to a fine crumb. Add in the egg yolks and water. Whizz until a ball begins to form. Tip this out onto a board and knead lightly and quickly. Wrap well and keep in the fridge for an hour at least, overnight preferably.

To make the frangipane, grind the almonds to a coarse crumb. Beat the softened butter with the sugar until just mixed. Add in the eggs, one at a time. Beat in the almonds. Remove this to a container, cover and refrigerate.

Line a tart case with the pastry. Add in the frangipane, until 4/5ths full. Bake in the oven for an hour then reduce the temperature to 130ºC for a further 15 minutes. Take out and leave to cool.

Slice the figs and lay evenly over a large dish. Anoint evenly with honey, lemon juice and black pepper and put to one side.

To make the confectioner’s custard, bring the milk to the boil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan with the vanilla pod and 50g of the caster sugar. Meanwhile, put the egg yolks and remaining sugar in a large bowl and whisk for one minute, until the mixture lightens and becomes paler. Gradually add the flour and cornflour in a fine shower, mixing them in delicately with the whisk.

Remove the vanilla pod from the saucepan and add half the boiling milk to the bowl. Whisk vigorously and add the resulting mixture to the remaining half of the milk in the saucepan.

Return the saucepan to a brisk heat and whisk vigorously for a minute or two, taking care that the whisk goes right to the bottom of the saucepan to prevent the mixture sticking. Turn the custard into a bowl and leave to cool.

In a separate large bowl, whisk the mascarpone smooth and add the cream and the now cooled confectioner’s custard.

Assemble your tart. Remove the tart from the case and place on a handsome serving dish. Spoon the mixed mascarpone, custard and cream onto the tart and spread evenly. Lift the slices of figs and arrange artlessly over the cream. Spoon over any and all remaining fig syrup, strew with the roasted, chopped almonds and dust with icing sugar if you desire.