voices in food.
ADAM’S ONE-POT WONDER
PHOTOGRAPHS: JASON ALFRED PALMER, ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
“When I need a boost, I make my special soup: a heap of onions cooked down with garlic and ginger, followed by chicken stock and lentils. I chop in black pudding for iron and finish it with lots of lemon. It’s my healthy soup on steroids. I’m a white burgundy boy and would serve the soup with that if I had friends round. Otherwise, I make it a rule not to drink at home on my own.”
ADAM’S ONE-POT WONDER
“When I need a boost, I make my special soup: a heap of onions cooked down with garlic and ginger, followed by chicken stock and lentils. I chop in black pudding for iron and finish it with lots of lemon. It’s my healthy soup on steroids. I’m a white burgundy boy and would serve the soup with that if I had friends round. Otherwise, I make it a rule not to drink at home on my own.”
My Food Fight dessert, a winning dish on Great British Menu, was inspired by the comics Beano and The Dandy... not by real life! If I’d done that when I was a kid, my dad would have given me a clip round the ear. I grew up in Dundee, where the comics were created, and there’s a statue of Desperate Dan in the city centre. There are pictures of me and my brothers and sisters climbing on top of him.
I went into hospitality so I didn’t have to go to university. In Scotland university is free, and the idea in our family was that you got your degree, left Dundee and did something with your life. But I was the less bookish one and more on the creative side. I went down the apprenticeship route and ended up – this skinny little boy in his dad’s suit – arriving at the five-star hotel Gleneagles for my very first interview. It was held in the ballroom and I thought, “What the hell, do people live like this?” Everything was so beautiful. I was 15 years old, and I got the job.