Desert island dishes: recipes from London's top chefs

We’d never eat Sunday lunch because all the family were too busy taking care of the guests. Instead we would always have Sunday dinner with 25 to 30 members of the family sitting around a table, my grandfather at the head and the children at the other end. My grandmother used to cook this wonderful roast chicken with fries, which I found completely amazing.

With a family like mine, you weren’t allowed to be a fussy eater. My cousin hated tomatoes, and when we had them (which we did all the time) he wasn’t allowed to leave the table until he had finished. He would wait until our grandfather started to nod off after the meal, and as soon as he fell asleep he’d throw them away.

Sunday was also when my uncle would cook pastries in the morning for the dessert trolley, like the éclairs au chocolat or the choux. For me it was a dream to look at them, waiting until the end of service so we could eat whatever the guests had left. I loved sweet things.

We didn’t often help out in the restaurant, because a professional kitchen was a dangerous place for children. But when ceps were in season the local peasants would sell them to the restaurant, and the whole family would have to get involved with washing them. We also had a little vineyard, and every year the family would gather to harvest the grapes and make the wine. My grandfather would kill one of his pigs and we’d have a huge feast.

My grandfather was really hard on his children, but so proud of his grandchildren and loved to take us to the village market each Wednesday. Because he was so famous in the area it was like God arriving in the market; there was so much love for him. Sadly, I never cooked for him because he died when I was 14. My father says that if he could see what I was doing now, he wouldn’t believe it.

Grandmother’s roast corn-fed chicken stuffed with wild mushrooms

Serves 6

1 corn-fed chicken from Les Landes (ask your butcher to clean the liver and keep it to use in the recipe)

1 head pink garlic

Parsley stalk

1 tsp rock salt

500g Jersey potatoes

2 pinches Espelette pepper

For the stuffing:

100g white bread

100ml pouring cream

2 shallots

500g wild mushrooms (a seasonal mix)

2 cloves pink garlic, minced

½ bunch flat-leaf parsley

2 stalks tarragon

125g salted butter

1 tsp salt

½ tsp Espelette pepper

First, make the stuffing. Add the bread to the cream and mix using a Robot Coupe. In a pan gently fry the shallots, add the wild mushrooms and the garlic and cook for 10 minutes. Add the herbs and butter, then season well.

Prepare the chicken. Stuff the back of the chicken with half the head of garlic, the parsley stalk, chicken liver and rock salt, then tie up the back with string. Using a sharp knife, carefully cut and peel back the skin of the breast, making sure the skin remains attached to the breast. Put the stuffing in place, and replace the skin on top. String the chicken well, making a nice shape.

Clean the potatoes, leaving the skin on. Coat a large oval cocotte with duck fat and slightly roast the potatoes. Add the chicken, spray with duck fat and season with salt and Espelette pepper. Add the rest of the garlic evenly throughout the cocotte.

Cook for 45-50 minutes at 180C, basting the chicken breast regularly. After cooking, allow the chicken to rest for 10 minutes, then carve.

Place the chicken pieces on top of the potatoes and serve from the cocotte.

Skye Gyngell

Culinary director for Heckfield Place, Hook, Hampshire (heckfieldplace.com)

I grew up in Sydney, but I couldn’t wait to get out of Australia. Sydney was quite parochial; a big city but everyone knew each other, and I felt suffocated. I wanted to see the world. And Australian men are traditionally very chauvinistic: I see my daughters being friends with boys now, and we would never have had that.

My dad was CEO of a television company, and my mum was an interior designer. We had a lovely house with a big garden and a beach at the end of the street. It was a blessed childhood, and I feel sad that my kids haven’t had that outdoor experience.

We ate simply at home; a lot of salad and fish. But when I was 11 my dad had a midlife crisis and became macrobiotic, and the whole house changed; it wasn’t fun to eat there any more, so we went out. My dad would take us to swim on Bondi Beach every Saturday. Afterwards we would have chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches and drink a Passiona, a fizzy drink, as a treat.

The most memorable meal I have ever eaten is bouillabaisse at Claude’s restaurant in Sydney when I was 17. It was mesmerising with its heady flavours of saffron, fennel, orange and sweet, fresh fish. But it was Damien Pignolet’s confidence in serving just one dish in his restaurant on Friday nights that so transfixed me — the idea that one meal could be so perfect, and provide such a feeling of conviviality among the guests, all sharing the same thing. I was struck by his conviction and I wanted to be like that.

Bouillabaisse À La Damien

2kg fish: red mullet, wild sea bass, turbot, langoustine (cooked) and live clams

1 tbsp olive oil

2 medium yellow onions, finely sliced

4 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed

20 or so saffron strands

1 fennel bulb, finely sliced

1 kg ripe tomatoes, sliced in half, seeds removed and roughly chopped

1 tbsp dry white wine

1 litre water

Peel of 1 orange

4 fresh bay leaves

Sea salt and freshly ground black paper

Ask your fishmonger to gut and scale the fish, then cut into two-inch pieces. Scrub and soak the clams and split the langoustine in half lengthways.

Warm the olive oil in a large heavy-based pan. Sweat the onions. Stir in the garlic, saffron, fennel and a pinch of salt. Raise the heat and cook for 5 minutes. Add the tomatoes, orange peel, bay leaves and wine and cook to reduce. Then add the water and fish. Place a lid on the pan, turn the heat to high and boil vigorously until the clams open and the fish is cooked through. Taste and season with plenty of pepper and perhaps a little more salt.

Serve in warm bowls, accompanied by rouille and grilled bread.

Pierre Koffmann

Head chef at Koffmann’s, The Berkeley, Wilton Place, SW1 (the-berkeley.co.uk)

I was my grandparents’ favourite. Until I was 15 I spent all my school holidays on their farm, 100km from my parents’ house in Tarbes near the Pyrenees. But I was working; I’d take the cows to the field, look after the ducks and clean the pigs. I wanted to be a farmer for a while.

The farm was very traditional. They had no fridge or tap water; everything was eaten fresh. If my grandmother wanted to store food she would put it in a basket and lower it to just above the water line in the well. She spent most of her life working in the fields, where she was very good at being the boss.

I wasn’t very good at school; I was the kind of student who had the report ‘Pierre can do better’, until the day they decided that Pierre could do better somewhere else. So at 14 I had to choose a job. In Tarbes there weren’t many options: there was the French railway, or the postal service. Then I passed an exam for cookery school. I went on strike a few times; the French are very good at striking. When I left school, the headmistress wrote ‘Pierre will never do anything in catering’.

My grandmother had a huge influence on me, but, in fact, my mother was the better cook. She loved to have people over for dinner to gossip about the neighbours. She cooked a daube de boeuf once a week during the winter. Every area of France has their own version, always cooked in the local red wine. My mother would start it the night before, and when it was cooked we would fish out the meat and eat it with mashed potato or pasta.

Ox cheek braised in red wine

Serves 4

700g ox cheek, cut into 12 large pieces

100g seasoned flour

50ml vegetable oil

150g carrots, roughly diced

150g onions, roughly diced

110ml good, dark red wine (eg, Shiraz)

4 garlic cloves, chopped

1 bouquet garni

120g button onions, peeled

30g butter

½ tsp sugar

Preheat the oven to 200C/Gas Mark 6. Roll the pieces of meat lightly in the flour. Heat the oil in a casserole until very hot, then brown the meat quickly. Add the diced carrots and onions, cover and sweat for 10 minutes.

Remove the fat from the pan. Deglaze the casserole with the red wine and bring to the boil. Add the garlic and bouquet garni and season. Replace lid and oven-cook for two and half hours until tender, stirring regularly.

Put the button onions in a pan and cover with water. Add butter, sugar and some salt and cover with greaseproof paper. Bring to the boil and simmer over a low heat, tossing from time to time until they are brown. Keep warm.

Take the daube out of the oven. Lift out the meat with a slotted spoon and place in a serving dish, pass the sauce through a sieve, add to the onions and pour over the meat. ES