Rick Stein returns - Christmas Special

0:06Before we jump into today's festive episode with Rick, I want to thank you to the UK's leading Italian holiday specialist. Unsurprisingly, Rick and I end up talking about Italy a lot on this episode, a country he knows and loves so well. He was telling me about his recent trips to Liguria, Trieste, and how Italy just keeps pulling him back. Another part of Italy is even his bucket list destination too. So that's exactly where Cetaglia comes in. With over 95 years of experience, they truly know Italy inside out. From hand-picked hotels in the best locations to bespoke itineraries filled with those off-the-beaten-path moments, their Italy experts will help you discover the real Italy.

0:48And with Citalia's Travel with Confidence promise, you'll have 24-7 support plus free amendments and a refund guarantee so you can simply relax and enjoy La Dolce Vita. So if Rick has inspired you to make Italy your next adventure, visit Citalia.com. That's C-I-T-A-L-I-A.com to start planning today. Thank you to Citalia.

1:20hello everyone and welcome to a very special festive edition of the travel diaries i'm your host holly rubinstein and today i am joined by the legendary chef restauranteur and writer rick stein so rick is returning to the podcast for the first time in about five years and i can't think of a better guest to bring a little culinary sparkle to our Christmas special. I spoke to Rick a few weeks ago. He was in his home in Barnes. I was at home. And this year he is celebrating the release of his new book, Rick Stein's Christmas. One for any foodie lover in your life this Christmas. It's a real treasure trove of kind of festive recipes and anecdotes about what this time of year really means.

2:07And we talk about this a lot in our conversation. We're diving into his Christmas rituals in both Cornwall and Australia, the dishes that really embody comfort and nostalgia for him, loads of excellent Christmas dinner hacks to make your life easier cooking this year, as well as chatting about the kind of more deeply human side of the season that he weaves into the book as well. And we're going to travel far beyond the Christmas table. We're going to hear about Rick's recent adventures filming in the Australian Outback and what he uncovered there, his newest favourite destinations, a really great Italian hidden gem and the UK restaurants that he is loving right now.

2:43So pour yourself something warm and cozy and settle in. Enjoy this festive journey with the wonderful Rick Stein.

2:57Rick Stein, welcome back to The Travel Diaries. It is so lovely to see you. It's been five years since we last spoke. Thank you so much for coming on again. Thanks, Holly. I didn't realise it. Five years. That's a bit serious thinking five years has gone by so quickly. I know. It's crazy, isn't it? So this is a lovely Christmas present for me. And we're getting into the spirit of everything festive, celebrating your new book, Rickside's Christmas, which, oh my goodness, is the most Christmassy of Christmassy books. Oh, right. What is Christmas looking like for you this year? Have you got all your plans sorted?

3:37No, not this year, because every other year I go to Australia for Christmas. So when I wrote the book last Christmas, I was in Cornwall. And leading up to Christmas, I sort of recorded everything that happened for the purposes of the book. This Christmas will be very different because, as I said, I'm in Sydney. but quite interestingly I have included a big Australian section in the Christmas book simply because I spend every other year there but I won't be cooking next this this Christmas next Christmas which is quite a relief I have cooked on Christmas day in Sydney quite regularly it's a different because it's normally about 35 to 40 degrees there's not that same sort of Christmas cheer as there is in in the UK however there is a great deal of fun and and frivolity to be had I mean we always start with a swim and and a flat white on the beach and then I get home and start cooking or we get ready for Christmas and somebody else is cooking.

4:52But were I in England, I'd be sort of starting to get ready for Christmas, you know, a month or so before. Not a great many things, but maybe doing the odd Christmas pudding or Christmas cake or things that can be done ahead. Working through that fabulous checklist at the start of the book, which I think I'm going to be referring to every year that kind of countdown of what I need to be organizing as as the uh the days grow nearer to the big the big day I love that it's such a great thing to have included yes well um it's I think I'm quite I'm saying quite early on this isn't um what I do necessarily it's what I say so I mean I have worked out the sort of perfect Christmas plan but also what I did which I hope people find quite amusing and maybe interesting is actually record how it went this last Christmas and just to show you know how the best plans are mice and men sort of thing but mostly show that how I got through it where things went wrong but also how it worked and ultimately last Christmas was a great success.

6:08Yeah. What was your biggest lesson that you want to impart from your experience last year? I think, I mean, one of the things that I've sort of picked up really from doing it for the purposes of the book, it's so many things can be done the day before Christmas, the roast potatoes. What I did this last Christmas was to, is to boil the potatoes and have them ready to be roasted the day before. What I've worked out is as long as you don't put them in the fridge, but you leave them out somewhere, it's quite easy. They will taste perfect the next day. And the other thing I've learned about roasting potatoes, you don't need to put your potatoes once boiled and drained off and steamed and drained off into a really hot fat.

6:57You can just add the fat at the same time as the potatoes. And what I do always with potatoes is cook them in duck or goose fat because I particularly like the flavour of a crisps. And the other thing I picked up really was that, again, through thinking through the whole process, was I find that if you're cooking for, say, a dozen people, making gravy just before you serve your turkey or whatever it is or beef is really a very simple operation normally becomes something of a nightmare if you've got people willing around you with odd glass of champagne wanting to talk to you don't do it then do it even I did it on purpose the day before what I did was just get I cooked goose but turkey applies the same thing I made giblet stock which is quite common in in the the gravy that you do at Christmas I made it the day before and I made the giblet stock and because I had plenty of time I used some chicken stock that I had in the freezer as well to reinforce the sort of savoriness of the stock and I actually made the gravy because I always like a bit of flour in the and I just used duck fat made the thickened with a bit of flour made the gravy and the next day when and I'd made the gravy it's there it tasted great that's the point that I made lots of it which is very important at Christmas I've made probably about I don't know a litre wow but the next day all I did was take some of that gravy when I got the the goose out of the roasting tin poured off the fat and then I deglazed the roasting tin with some of the gravy that I made yesterday very easy and just And then the final touch.

8:47But something that's sort of simpler as that just makes all the difference because, you know, at the last minute, it's sort of all about the timing. Yeah, it ties it all together and elevates it at the same time. Yes. Of all the recipes in the book, which dish would you say best captures the Christmassy comfort and joy for you personally? Well, I mean, normally there's 110, I think, recipes in there. And there are all the standards. There's roast turkey, roast goose, roast beef, Christmas pudding. I suppose for me, the two that stand out, and one of them is what everybody else does as well, I think, which is a glazed ham which is like we do have really good hams in this country and again i prefer a green gallon rather than smoked but i really love great glazed ham i think it's really because of the my sort of memories of my my mother's christmases which of course is a child meant so much for me and i i glaze the ham first of all as i'm sure everybody does by breaking clothes into the ham after it's born you boil the ham you take the skin off you stud the ham with clothes and then you glaze with a mixture of mustard english mustard and brown sugar and then put them back in the up put it back in the oven to to roast a little bit just to get some color and a glaze on the ham and i i just think that is the stalwart christmas really i i would say that wouldn't I the other thing that I really love is that my parents when I was little used to have a party on boxing day and make a particular sort of sliced potato salad sorry a sliced cabbage salad a bit like coleslaw with a few other ingredients they quite often put some some celery some apple some hazelnuts into it and a dressing really simple dressing of of just vegetable oil not olive oil just vegetable oil and vinegar and salt and a little bit of sugar which I just love that for boxing day with baked potatoes I suppose from my point of view the other thing that I've done for a lot of years really is to cook a whole turba on Christmas Eve and that's not part of a British tradition generally but I mean fish is particularly on Christmas Eve it's very much a tradition in other European countries yeah what I particularly love about doing that at Christmas Eve is I've got a turbot kettle which is this sort of vaguely diamond shape but slightly off well it's actually that's the shape of a large flatfish and I poach that in actually just poach it in water not a quart we are it's salted water and and then do that with hollandaise sauce and maybe poach it in the kettle, lift it out, and then serve it with hollandaise sauce.

11:53So delicious. I mean, the book is obviously abundant in these lovely recipes, but you mentioned your Boxing Day traditions with your parents. It's also a deeply personal book, and reading about your feelings about Christmas and how winter can be a challenging time, especially if you've experienced loss around that time of year. Why did you feel that that was important to also bring it into the book because it gives it a real humanity well I think it was really that I just wanted the book to be more than just a collection of recipes and um I think you know I wanted people to know what Christmas means to me and I do find that sort of um roll run up to Christmas in some ways we're quite lucky in this neck of the woods in this part of the world to have a cold Christmas because it isn't great times sort of like in winter that the nights are very long the days are short the weather's pretty awful generally and I started the book with a sort of simple walk from where my house in Chiswick to up to the shops in Chiswick and just observing it was a horrible November day very bitter very dark very windy a lot of rubbish everywhere I make this maybe unfortunate observation that the underpass that I always had to go through quite often smells of urine so it was like really giving it to you and I actually say in it that I'm sort of ashamed of the rubbish because I am ashamed to live in this country with so much rubbish around us I wish we could do something to clear it so I'm really painting this you know unpleasant because what I then want to do is say once this sort of idea of Christmas comes into your mind which to me happens in later November and I also observe in this early part of the book that both my father and my sister died in November so it's a dead month to me but there's something about Christmas and that's I just think we all need Christmas we need this time in the dead heart of winter to lift our souls so I thought it was really important to get that in there but I think there is a serious sort of emotional side of Christmas but then of course I'm filling the book with you know lovely recipes and lots of silly things like Christmas number ones and what everybody watches on the tv at Christmas If Christmas wasn't going to be in Australia or in Cornwall, where would you choose it to be?

14:31And would you do something unusual with the menu on that year? Well, I mean, I guess I've very rarely had Christmas elsewhere, but I have. And I don't think I've ever cooked anywhere other than here or in Australia. but I do remember going for Christmas with one of my sons Charlie and Sass, my wife and my stepchildren, Olivia and Zach and some friends to Thailand to somewhere near Phuket I think it was and we had Christmas in a Swedish run hotel which seems quite unusual but quite apt at the same time yes, quite apt so there were lots of sort of evidence of sort of Sweden in the hotel, like sort of gingerbread houses and various biscuits and stuff that they love.

15:25Lots of lobsters for lunch. Lovely. And all outdoors, of course. So, I mean, it was pretty memorable, actually. I mean, I think if you're not going to be in the bosom of your family for Christmas, you might as well go somewhere, you know, completely sort of out of the unusual, like Thailand. But it was, you know, fabulous. fabulous actually do you know i've never had a hot christmas in my 37 years and i i i'd like to to just see whether i i still get that christmassy feeling the intangible christmassy feeling do you get it when you're out in australia oh in australia i do because i mean that's really um so weird because they cook actually my wife sass's family cook and lots of australians do I've learned over the years, they cook the same sort of Christmas lunch or dinner as we do, except that they go for a certain amount of excess and they won't just have a turkey or roast beef or a goose.

16:28They'll have everything. They'll have a turkey, they'll have roast beef, and they'll have ham all for Christmas lunch. Yeah, well, I was reading that in the book and I was just thinking, who is cooking all of that amount of food? You need a whole team of people to produce that. What nice about it is that everybody brings something. Right. So I mean, you're not really responsible for all those. I think it's just because, you know, it's hard to sort of say, no, don't bring anything. We've got it all because it is this period, this season of sort of generosity and sharing. So I think everybody, you know, accepts that they're going to have far too much food.

17:09But then, of course, it's days after when it all gets eaten. That's the best bit anyway. Yes, exactly. Exactly. But the other thing I really like about Christmas in Australia is just because it's not cold and dark. And I've sort of said in a book that I'm quite sort of, I find the fact that my wife says doesn't really, doesn't go for sort of Christmas carols or the sort of Christmas stuff that we go for because it's sunny, you know. Yeah. Although it is a bit sad. She loves Wham's Last Christmas. She's got great taste, Rick. What can I say? I mean, it's one of my favourites as well. In Spotify, it's sold like, I don't know, it's listened to sort of like not just millions, but not billions, but like so many people.

18:05Today's episode is supported by Natur Hotel Forsthoff Guts. We'll be back with Rick in a moment, but first I want to tell you about something I'm so excited about. Next month I'm taking my very first trip now that we are a family of four. Feels like such a milestone. I've been very thoughtful about choosing the right place for that getaway. So we're heading to Naturhotel Vosthofgut in the Austrian Alps. And this really feels like a hotel that truly understands families and what makes travelling with little ones feel joyful rather than stressful. It's a family run hotel and you can really feel that warmth and care in everything that they do.

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19:34You've recently returned from spending a long stint out in Australia, haven't you? And I was interested to know, I know that you were travelling around a fair bit. Was it all kind of familiar places or did you explore anywhere new this time? No, I was very lucky that I got asked to make a TV series out there just in New South Wales. you know on the on the outside it looks like quite a difficult life but the the conversations you have with the people there and of course you just sort of think of them all as being sort of very rough rugged to Aussies but they also have a sort of intellectual life and what I particularly like there's this part of New South Wales called Burke and this expression which sort of suggests after Burke is nowhere called the Back of Burke, right?

20:27So that when we went to a sheep station sort of at the Back of Burke, but you realise that, A, the people have really interesting neighbours and they may have to go a couple of hundred miles to meet up, but they do meet up. And also there's this sort of influx all the time, it seems to me, of what they call the grey nomads, which are retired people travelling in sort of caravans or motor... whatever they call, recreation vehicles, who do bring a lot of sort of interest into the area. So you think you're going into this sort of empty, isolated place, but it's not quite like that. And as it happened when we were filming there, there had been a lot of rain about, I don't know, a thousand miles away in Queensland, which gradually over about three or four weeks filtered down to the outback and all the rivers were full of water and fish.

21:23No way. So you've got to really experience it in a guise that most people don't see it. Yeah. So I mean, for me, I mean, it's just one of the joys of doing TV. You get to go to parts of the world that, you know, not only would you probably not visit, but you will certainly not visit doing something like making TV. Which shingle place from that trip should food lovers put on their list if they're going to New South Wales? the coast is i suppose as people have said is very is quite urbanized so really the great cooking i have to say is on the coast so i would say sydney is the place to go to because you know it just has great food and when you get in inland well it's a bit like the same going to sort of parts of rural england that haven't had any sort of makeover from you know restaurants good restaurants near but more so because in england or in the uk generally you can't go too far without finding a really good restaurant because it's a small country but some of the places we had to eat in australia were mostly pubs i can remember a particular i mean and the food was not good you know it was not good it's like pub food but worse just think well of course it's not going to How many foodies are there running sheep stations?

22:50But I imagine then in the mountains and in the hills, are there some hidden gems? Yes, I mean, it's interesting because the distances so far, people all travel four or five hours maybe to get a good feed, as the Australians would call it. But there has to be some connection. I'm thinking particularly there's this quite legendary small town in southern New South Wales called Gundagai, which just happens to have the most wonderful, well, it used to be called a milk bar. but it's sort of like a burger joint milk bar but very Aussie called the Niagara and the reason it's called the Niagara because it opened in the 50s or maybe the 40s when all the people that opened those sort of places that sold burgers and I don't know chicken jar grilled chicken were thinking we've got to be trendy we've got to name this something to do with America so Niagara it's called the Niagara Falls and you find little gems like that that actually it's very sort of beautiful restaurant art deco being renovated by a couple that sort of understood the sort of historical importance of an early Australian milk bar so you know those are the gems that are sort of fabulous.

24:13Fabulous I'll include that in the episode show notes so that my Aussie listeners can add it to their list or anyone in fact it was really nice actually Rick going back and listening to your travel diaries from a few years ago at the time your all-time favorite destination was Rajasthan but I know that you know it's always so hard to pick and people's choices evolve over time so I wondered since then is there any way you'd add as a number two I've just been with my wife Sass to the Ildiree near La Rochelle but which we really love because i i lots of people have been there and i'd never have and i can understand why lots of people have been there because it's all seafood they're all oysters and longestines razor clams what else did we have we had lobster we had crab it's like you know right out of island right out in the sort of atlantic bear biscay um but i just i just forgot But one of the things they do so well, I think, in France, on that coast, on the Atlantic coast, Brittany, you know, even up the channel, is mayonnaise, right?

25:30They just have this really lovely mayonnaise, which you don't seem to find anywhere else. I mean, I've copied it in my restaurants, which is basically just, I use sunflower oil and eggs and mustard and salt and vinegar. that's it but it just goes for me so well with them prawns as well with long steam prawns lobster crab you name it and it's just so i just was sort of taken back to a time and before when i started with my ex-wife jill started the seafood restaurant padster we were influenced by going to places in normandy and britney for that sort of simple french seafood and to go back there and just see that it's still alive and kicking.

26:20It was really nice to me. So, you know, I might go to Rajasthan because the curries are fabulous, but I just loved going to a place like that, you know, Ilderay. How would you spend a perfect day on Ilderay? Bicycling, because it's dead flat. So our days were spent, get up, have a swim, breakfast, French breakfast, of course, café au lait and croissants. Actually, they do very nice scrambled egg. You know, normally in a hotel when you get scrambled egg, you think, oh, God, that's because they don't want to fry eggs. But they make this sort of quite sort of chunky scrambled eggs. But then they serve very finely chopped chives and a choice of either parmesan or emmental grated to put on top.

27:10And then the thing you do on the Ile d 'Aire is bicycle because it's flat. and everybody bicycles and there's bicycle tracks going right around the sea so you just go off and um you know what we just i don't know bicycle about 20 k's and uh maybe have some lunch but the other thing is that the oysters are their sort of speciality the local oysters and they're cheap and there's dotted around the older way there are these little oyster places where you can have a glass of white wine or champagne and eat oysters and look out over the sea thinking a sort of manet because he did one of his paintings was the bay of akashon which is really where um ilderay is of a sort of seascape and i was you know slightly green sea with sort of white sails in the background it's just you know it's really nice because you know if i'm used to going somewhere like Thailand or Rajasthan just to go back and just say this is really civilised actually.

28:15How about the UK restaurant food scene at the moment? I'm sure people always love to ask you this but where are your kind of favourites at the moment that you would recommend? Well I mean funnily enough the one I really recommend is very close to here in Barnes. Oh yeah. It's called Riva. It's been there for about, I don't know, probably 30 years, 40 years. And it's really lovely Italian food. The thing we love about it is the guy that owns Riva called Andrea Riva has been there ever since it opened. It's one of those rare restaurants these days where the patron is always there, you know, and he can be a bit sort of irritated at times.

29:06Other times he can be very, very, you know, full of fun. He loves his music. So he has these sort of playlists which might drive people to distraction. But it's just what I love about it. The food is great. You know, it's really good Italian food. They do Vitello Tonato, which I love. But also, it's just the sort of sense that somebody owns this place and loves it, you know. So that's some place we go to lots, I must say. And actually last year, earlier on this year, I'm just trying to think where I've been. There's a place up in north of Newcastle called Whitley Bay, Riley's Fish Shack. The thing I like about it is, as I said, it's just right down on the beach, built out of two shipping containers.

30:00And it just does local fish, but it has this really lovely dish, which I had called crab souffle with thermidor sauce. Oh, wow. Very, I mean, they're young people running it, you know, really hardworking. and when we were there I did a stage show in Whitley Bay and we just went there for lunch before it it just had this sort of fantastic atmosphere because it was so sort of impromptu it was cold when we were there but they had these little sort of coal fires built into the wall near where you sat and they were only about I don't know 12, 15 inches wide but just very I'm not sure whether I remember whether it was coal in there or or wood but it just sort of I don't know had a fun atmosphere it's a great atmosphere exactly great atmosphere yeah yeah there we go I love that and also it sounds as though that does sound like a lovely and complex rich dish that kind of freshness that will have just come from the produce being so nearby you can't beat that i think we had some i think might have been cuttlefish or certainly had some scallops and um and squid but you just it was definitely just come straight from market from north shield's market yeah yeah so where in the world are you most excited to visit for its food now what what are your hot takes on like the next big foodie destination would you say um well i've just recently we've been to a porter which i'm sure you you know which is um fabulous for food and the doro we went to on a little trip up the doro river to look at some of those port houses and the food there's great i mean i i just think portuguese food is really rugged whether it's seafood or sort of country food there's a sort of honesty and a sort of unpretentiousness about it oh really lovely place in northern Italy in Liguria called L 'Iguela you'll have to look it up it's quite it's only about 50km south of the border with France but it's one of those sort of sort of Italian resorts, quite upmarket, but not massively.

32:32It's a sort of place where Italians from Turin or Milan go, you know, year after year. So I was quite interested. You know, there's all this sort of stuff about second homes in the UK. I was asking a local what the population of this really quite sort of large,

32:55town on the coast in Liguria was and they said oh in winter it's about I don't know 780 in winter in summer 22 ,000 it's just lovely to be in a place that's sort of not specifically designed for British tourists not there's anything wrong with British tourists but it's about Italians. So the food was lovely and the whole sort of, I can't remember the right expression. Is it called passi e giato? You'll have to, you know, the way people dress up at night and walk around in their best clothes and sort of, you know. Like on the promenade. Yeah, exactly. And they sort of go do the circuit. I mean, you know, I just love Italy as well as I'm sure you, do and i'm sure you do holly anyway but it's just i do i do what made you pick it um well it's funny enough we were just thinking of going to um the cinque terre and um positano and it just was so expensive and i just said to the agent the travel agent which we use always um is there somewhere that you would sort of recommend nearish to genoa and and she just said well there's this place called the Hotel Windsor it sounded like so Italian because it was so Italian because it wasn't at all like sort of posh Windsor it was a lovely hotel right on the beach and we just really liked you might get a bit sort of squiffy but I'm not yeah pissed off with the fact that um You know, every beach in Italy is manicured and there's so many umbrellas.

34:40But being Italy, you look down the beach and the sand is perfect and raked every day. But the umbrellas are really lovely colours. Like each part of the beach has got one colour and then the next colour. It just, you know, just makes you smile. So photogenic. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's it. That's it. When we last spoke, you were about to go to Trieste. Yes. How was that? That was really good. I mean, it's sort of, I guess, a part of Italy again. I mean, lots of people go to Liguria, but perhaps less people go to that part of sort of northeastern Italy. And it's sort of because it was part of the sort of Austro-Hungarian Empire, Trieste for so long.

35:28and I think probably incidentally the only port for Austria for a long time it has a sort of sort of I don't know an Austrian feel about it but tempered with Italian cooking so that the food was fabulous the seafood dishes were fabulous and also the wine I can't remember but you can tell me what that part of that I mean it's actually very close to where the I suppose you say what's it called that sweet busy wine that everybody loves um prosecco we on the way from venice to chieste we went through the the village of prosecco but i mean i think good prosecco's nice and then the wines in in chieste were great the architecture was fabulous food was great it's one of those you know i did this series some time ago called long weekends i mean that would be somewhere I would choose a like a shop because the trick with making long weekends was to find places generally not necessarily that that we didn't visit a great deal like I don't know Bologna was particularly important and worked really well and Trieste would be another one and how about Tbilisi did you make it there no I didn't I mean I think things got a bit sort of I can't remember what happened to Covid, I guess.

36:53Of course. I can't quite remember how it did nothing. Politically, it's not quite such a sort of pleasant place to be, but I think it's still all right. You know, now it's easier than ever to get there. British Airways and another airline, mainstream airline, can't think which, both launched direct flights from London this year. What's the bucket list? I'm writing to you there, Holly. Tbilisi. yeah that's for that's for episode number three let's not leave it another five years though rick ideally thank you so much for reminiscing with me about your travels and about your special christmas memories our final question as we always as we talk about with the bucket list at the very end so we've got tbilisi on there anywhere else that you're dying to visit well Well, again, I mean, I think we've got to get to South America soon.

37:47And I think probably still Argentina. I think that was where I said last time. And there's no reason we haven't got there since. Again, I'll probably try and get away with blaming COVID and all that time that took up. And I think probably apart from Argentina, probably Peru, although I've got really good friends from Brazil. So I think Argentina, Peru and Brazil on the bucket list big time. And the other place, which neither SAS or I've been to, is Lake Como. So we're hopefully going there in November, which apparently is a really nice time of year to go there. Oh, yeah. It won't be so overrun with tourists.

38:28It's beautiful. Where are you staying? Don't know. So funnily enough, the Hotel Windsor that we stayed at in La Rhea has a sister hotel on Lake Como. So maybe there. Maybe there. Well, if I may, my favourite hotel in the world that I've stayed in, that I've reviewed as a travel journalist, is on Lake Como. Called? Pasalacqua. it's the sister hotel to Grand Hotel Tremezzo which is a kind of grand dam in the area a family run hotel and the family's daughter has set up Pasolacqua and in the first year of its opening it was number one on the world's 50 best hotels so it really has left a massive impression on the travel world Thank you for that tip it's absolutely beautiful you would you won't regret it it's that juxtaposition of amazing design incredible food and a fantastic setting um and beautiful people that run it so yeah maybe that's one to add to your bucket list yes i will definitely put it down fantastic thanks so much rickstein for joining me on the travel diaries again it's been a pleasure and happy christmas Great, yes

39:50Well, that brings us to the end of this Christmas special with the lovely Rick Stein I hope you're feeling suitably festive and maybe even a little inspired for your own Christmas cooking this year Rick's new book, Rick Stein's Christmas is out now I'll be back in a couple of weeks on the 30th with a very special guest to close out the year the actor and national treasure Richard E. Grant Until then, have the best Christmas everyone and thank you so much for listening to The Travel Diaries. I'll be back soon.