Marco Pierre White is wild about mushrooms

Earlier this month I interviewed the infamously hot-tempered celebrity chef Marco Pierre White at the Box Tree restaurant in Ilkley. The Box Tree is the place that Marco calls his "spiritual home". It's where he started his career as a young man — leading him to become the youngest chef ever to earn three Michelin stars.

Me with Marco outside the Box Tree

It's a lovely place. The interview was going well, until I interrupted the flow of Marco's monologue – and he wasn’t happy. In fact, he glowered at me.

The bit of croissant I was attempting to eat stuck firmly in my throat as he sternly said: “If you’d be polite enough to let me finish my sentence...” he stared at me pointedly.

Yikes. For the rest of the interview I sat as politely as possible, nodding and smiling and let him say everything he had planned to say. Finally he looked at me, waiting. I could ask a question. 

And what did I ask? The only thing I really wanted to know: "You may be a world-renowned chef, perfectly capable of cooking up the most wonderful meal. But could you survive in the wild, fending for yourself, eating wild foods?"

After his brief pause, he responded that yes, of course he could fend for himself. He'd been hunting and fishing for years, and was a competent forager of wild food.

“I've always had a fascination with forgaing. I go collecting mirabelle plums every year with my daughter, Mirabelle. We make tarts, or mirabelles and custard. It's also good now to go and pick elderberries, which are delicious with wild duck or venison.”

"And do you like mushrooms?"

I’d tapped into something, and for the first time in the interview (perhaps ever) he smiled: “Mushrooms are quite magical things,” Marco said slowly. I probed further...

“My fascination with mushrooms started as a child. If you think back to your childhood, mushrooms or toadstools played a magical part – gnomes, fairies, they all seem to hang out around mushrooms in a deep forest; so they capture you're attention at an early age,” he said.

Marco went on to talk for a while longer about his love of wild mushrooms: he said his earliest memory of picking wild mushrooms was being taken by his grandfather: “He used to take me and we would pick lots and lots of mushrooms. Finding something as a child was always exciting. We would collect button or field mushrooms, horse mushrooms. It was always fascinating, something of a ritual and I loved that.”

Marco explained that he was brought up on a council estate on the outskirts of Leeds. But as a young boy he explored the rolling grounds of a nearby stately home. “I was very fortunate that my playground was the grounds of Hareweood House and along the River Wharfe, where I would fish.”

He said: “I used to pick blewits. Mousserons are delicious; really beautiful mushrooms, with an intense flavour. And I picked lots and lots of birch boletes, orange boletes, chanterelles, porcini. There's something quite beautiful about the amount of time you invest to find just a few; although the other day I did find 4kg of mushrooms in just half an hour.”

What's more, Marco hints that his early experiences of foraging contributed to him becoming a chef: “Those experiences as a child influenced me as a chef. But really it was mother nature that inspired me and captured my imagination. It was a natural love affair, of respect and admiration.”

So mushrooms saved the day. Who would have thought, that after such a spectacularly bumpy start to the interview, I would end up charming him with my mushroom chat...