The Staff Canteen visited River Cottage HQ in Devon to check out the new chefs' school and young apprenticeship scheme.
The first thing you see when you arrive at River Cottage HQ, just outside Axminster in Devon, is the
view down into the Park Farm valley with the famous River Cottage farmhouse nestling at the bottom amongst a patchwork quilt of fields, meadows and woods. You are surrounded by the sound of birds singing, lambs bleating and cows lowing lazily.
It all looks and sounds so idyllic that you begin to wonder if it's almost too perfect, as if the noises are a soundtrack and the trees and flowers some kind of psychedelic Disney props. I’m reminded of what the marketing coordinator Harriet Wild had emailed me the day before my arrival: “We’ll make sure the sheep are polished ready for your visit!” At the time I’d assumed this was tongue-in-cheek but looking around me now I begin to wonder… am I not in some kind of hallucinogenic fusion of The Truman Show and The Good Life?
We make our way down the hill towards the nerve centre of Park Farm. It takes some ten minutes to descend from the top to the bottom of the valley through the 100 acres of organic land supporting cows, sheep, ducks, chickens and pigs as well as dozens of different crops in fields, walled
gardens, allotments, urban gardens and wild produce.
Eventually we arrive in the courtyard between the old 17
th century farmhouse and the newly rebuilt barn used for dining and events. It’s the building between the two, however that I’m here to see – the even newer cookery school which was opened last year to accommodate a new, government-funded chefs’ school and apprenticeship scheme.
Inside, the school is just as glossy and impressive as the surroundings; huge windows look out over the impossibly beautiful valley, spacious well-appointed work stations dot the room. Everything is shiny and clean and new. The young, flustered trainees bustling around the place with red faces
probably don’t know how lucky they are, not until they get out into the real world of tiny cramped kitchens and hairy, sweaty head chefs anyway.
The group that are in today were all put forward by the Prince’s Trust. They are getting a taster of the River Cottage way before hopefully starting full time apprenticeships in September. I even get to try one of the dishes they’ve cooked. The other finished plates, I’m told, will go to St Petrock’s, a homeless charity in Exeter. Then, Just in case I’m about to be assailed by the feeling that this is all too good to be true, one of the apprentices promptly sets their pan on fire. Chef tutor, Stefani Smith, is quickly over to douse the
flames. “I said put a splash in, not half a bottle,” she says with a mumsy roll of the eyes, a gesture which is accentuated by the fact that she is clearly pregnant.
Stefani, one of two full-time chef tutors came from a Michelin background before switching to teaching, first at Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Cornwall then at a cookery school in Bristol before moving to River Cottage last March ready for the opening of the chefs’ school. She was attracted by the vision behind the scheme – to provide professional cookery qualifications (up to GNVQ level 3) combined with the River Cottage ethos of sustainability, locality, seasonality and good provenance.
“Standing in a kitchen just prepping food wasn’t really for me,” she says perched next to me on a serving bench with one eye still cast protectively over her students. I wanted to make more of a difference in the food industry. The best way I found was starting from the beginning,
