Whole mackerel over coals with garlic and garden leaves (pictured above)įor me, cooking these little fish over coals to blacken the skin is the perfect way to eat them. She says Time & Tide feels more personal than its predecessor and whatever the Daphne du Maurier comparisons, it really does capture the romance of living and cooking – and cooking for a living – in one of Britain’s most bountiful food regions. Two years on, Scott divides her time between the restaurant, TV appearances and writing. I thought they’d never give it to me but they said, ‘Yeah, that’s fine.’” It’s built on the sea wall, it’s beautiful. “They asked me to stay and I said I’d love to but only if I can have the building next door. The space formerly occupied by Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen at Watergate Bay came up and she agreed to do a pop-up. When Covid hit, she sold up and looked for a new challenge. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she recalls. Before her current restaurant she ran a pub, the St Tudy Inn in Bodmin, where she earned a Michelin bib and a spot on the Top 50 Gastropubs list. She has been working in kitchens ever since. But then I ended up going out to France” – to stay with her cousin who was running a restaurant with her husband in Burgundy – “which kind of saved me. I was in and out of hospital and just really not in a good place. “I was very ill when I was a teenager, I was anorexic,” she says. Photograph: Harry Borden/The ObserverĬooking and dining together were important in Scott’s family growing up in Sussex, but her relationship with food hasn’t always been easy. There are also some French classics including ratatouille and bouillabaisse, a nod to Scott’s half-French grandfather.Įmily Scott, photographed for OFM at Watergate Bay. There’s cantaloupe gazpacho, which kicked off that G7 dinner. That simplicity comes through in Time & Tide too: saffron crops up again in risotto and in monkfish curry. “You’re as lovely as your ability to cook,” he wrote when she asked him to sign her first cookbook, 2021’s Sea & Shore. “That kind of sums up my style of cooking.” Joe Biden seemed to like it. “Just fish on a plate,” she says, laughing. For the main course, served to Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and co at the Eden Project, she roasted turbot on the bone and dished it up with a miso beurre blanc. The quality of Cornish ingredients gave Scott the confidence to cook very simply at the G7 summit. “If you were to ask anyone where the best fish and seafood come from, I think Cornwall would appear on the list,” she says. She waxes lyrical about Cornish saffron, asparagus and clotted cream, which she uses instead of butter in some of her baking. “I love the fact that Cornwall is my home and where I’ve made my career – it’s a really nice food scene down here,” she says, namechecking Rick Stein as well as local chefs Paul Ainsworth and Nathan Outlaw. Even after 25 years, she says she’s “never a local”, and for that reason gets a bit awkward when I suggest she has become a face of Cornish cuisine. She has been running food businesses ever since, beginning with a cafe in Port Isaac which she opened when she was 23. Scott didn’t grow up in Cornwall but holidayed there as a child and, following a stint cooking in France, moved to the county in her early 20s after marrying a local. Just fish on a plate, that kind of sums up my style of cooking Demands on her time have only intensified since she cooked for world leaders at the G7 summit in 2021, but her days “always start by the sea, whatever the weather”, usually with an early-morning beach walk with her spaniel. “But it is very beautiful here,” she says of Watergate Bay, where her restaurant, Emily Scott Food, nestles against the sea wall. “I was feeling really romantic that day,” admits Scott, laughing when I ask her about the Du Maurier line and implying that her Cornish existence isn’t necessarily all cream teas and smuggler’s coves. When she’s not explaining how to make crab sandwiches and gorse-flower fudge to pack for boat trips, Scott is evoking sea mists and screeching gulls, precarious cliff walks and the whitewashed walls of her Newquay home decked out with nautical maps and seaweed prints. And so it appears from the gorgeous book as a whole. E arly in her new cookbook Time & Tide, Emily Scott writes that her life in Cornwall could be “drawn from the lines of a Daphne du Maurier story”.
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