Elevat your greens to greatness!

Even sprouts rise to the occasion in Marco Pierre White’s delicious vegetarian festive feast. And the beauty, he tells Frances Hardy, is that the dishes will delight carnivores too

Marco Pierre White is delicately spearing chestnuts with a cocktail stick, and patiently securing them, one by one, to a branch of cooked Brussels. He brushes the whole concoction with clarified butter, before roasting it in a hot oven for ten minutes. The branch is then propped up like a Christmas tree, inviting us to pick our own. Simple but ingenious! Who said sprouts were boring?

‘The world of gastronomy is usually very serious,’ he says in a hushed voice barely above a whisper, ‘but every so often elements of fun creep in. And all it takes is care and imagination.’

This little piece of culinary enchantment will be among the centrepieces on his festive table this Christmas because Marco, one of the world’s most celebrated chefs, is going veggie. Yes, the very same red-blooded culinary colossus who was famously photographed as a young man brandishing a meat cleaver is abjuring animal protein – or at least eating much less of it.

Marco – the first chef in Britain to win three Michelin stars and at the time (he was 32) the youngest in the world to achieve the highest culinary accolade – is following a prevailing trend towards plant-based food. ‘It’s the millennials, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘My daughter Mirabelle, who’s 20, is 99 per cent vegetarian and lots of her friends are. It’s a combination of health and planet-consciousness.

‘When I was cooking in the 1980s you got the odd vegetarian in and you’d think, “Oh God, I’ve got to do something for them now.” But habits have changed and now, if you combine fish-eaters and vegetarians, I’d say they account for half our customers.’

Marco, who turns 60 today, also tells me he’s given up shooting, embraced cruelty-free fishing and that this year all his New Year’s fireworks will be the silent type. I ask him how he’s celebrating this landmark birthday. ‘I’ll be working,’ he says. ‘I like to work every day or I feel guilty.’ Won’t there be a party? ‘Mirabelle’s talking about taking me out to lunch,’ he says, ‘but Christmas will be the main get-together.’

And this week he shares his favourite festive meat-free flavours as we showcase a series of sumptuous vegetarian recipes he has created exclusively for Weekend readers to enjoy over the holiday season in a glorious

12-page pullout. As well as those sensational sprouts, the recipes include endive and goat’s cheese tarte tatin, a roasted cauliflower and onion dish that’s perfect for a main course, and a ‘meaty pappardelle’ with ragu of mushrooms (meat-free of course).

Ma rco is dismissive of the tired old clichés we’ve come to expect about vegetarian cooking. ‘Nut roast? Here’s my confession: I’ve never eaten one,’ he says. ‘It’s never captured my imagination. And I don’t like the idea of vegetable Wellington. Why put beautiful vegetables inside puff pastry? It never goes that well. Strudel or filo pastry are better. I like vegetables to be served in their truest and most beautiful forms.’

He also reveals that a decade or so ago, prompted purely by curiosity, he actually went vegan for a year, also giving up alcohol, caffeine and tobacco. The experiment

‘I like to eat vegetables in their truest forms’

‘forced me to use my imagination and make vegetables interesting and delicious, and also to cook and present them with a sense of occasion. The trouble with a lot of vegetarian food is that it doesn’t sustain you. You eat a meal and you’re not fulfilled. Instantly you’re hungry again.

‘So I used the insights I’d learned from three-star Michelin cooking and applied them to create food that was intense in flavour and texture, and substantial rather than soggy and watery. And during that year I lost more than 5st, slept better and had more energy.’

Today, although he’s smoking again (he jokes that his habitual breakfast is ‘three courses: a coffee, a fag and a cough’) and enjoys a glass of wine, he eats much less meat and fish. Typically he’s vegetarian for four days a week. And his zeal for a flavourful veggie dish is messianic. Today he shares it, not only with our readers, but also in a cookery course, Delicious Vegetarian Cooking, part of the BBC Maestro e-learning service.

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