 Good afternoon. Guts is a subject very close to my heart. Many, literally I suppose. It seems very polite once you knock the animal on the head to eat it all. So it's exciting to be here discussing guts. But the guts have a feel, the animal's spleen when it's in love, swells. Stop spleen guts is something beautiful. Or tripe can set in uplift at same time. Magical. But anyway, I'm not here to discuss guts sadly, as much as I could. It's juice, my favourite chef in the world, Mara Henderson. Thank you very much. Am I doing that right? Thanks so much for having me everyone and it is an honour. So anyway, the passion, the probe and the problem, that's my title. Why am I here? Well, I wasn't quite sure except I once banged on to Rene for a while. I was over excited one night, too many chefs in the room, but I do love a chef and often think I could write a book about my life in chefs. When I was a young chef I liked nothing better than the creative, steamy, competitive, hard atmosphere of the kitchen. The more chefs the better, the more there was to do the better. And I still seem to have so much energy that I could carry on into the night with my kitchen mates and still be fresh the next morning. Not so much anymore, but you know, I try. Now, the theme of this talk is guts and I'm going to use the old Anglo-Saxon menu of word guts, which is courage, like a lot of people. Courage. As we all know, it takes a lot of courage to cook and run restaurants, to push forward and to make it work. For a long time I lacked confidence and spent many years sitting back on starters and not taking on the more responsible jobs. Then one year's eve I said, come on, Margot, and I made it, my New Year's resolution. Shaking bit. To push myself into the unknown, into the place, I knew I could and should be because, after all, I was ambitious and still am just like the next person. And it was amazing. As soon as I said yes, I made that resolution and everything fell into the place. From that moment on, I've always said yes, you can. Well, I try and say yes, yes, you can instead of no, you can't. And in the year that followed, the first year I went for it, I was given the opportunity to run a kitchen and was made head chef at a new restaurant opening in Notting Hill. I didn't have much idea what I was doing, but I knew I had to put together a team. And that's exactly what I did. We all went for it. Peter Gordon, a great force and a calming influence. Catherine Barocloff, she had a gentle touch and her food was delicious. I read like crazy. I read a lot of women writers that I still read and love and cook with. Elizabeth David, Stephanie Alexander, Alice Waters, Mary Sue Millican, loads of others. It was inspiring to read about women who were succeeding, not only as cookery writers but as chefs as well. There were also a few blokes, of course, but I was definitely heading to cooks who cook simply and allowed the ingredients to speak for themselves. Well, Elizabeth David, she changed the world of food in Britain along with Machala Hazan. They brought European regional food to Britain and introduced aubergines and haraco beans to a land that was eating white sliced bread. I was very inspired by these women and I looked up to them and they helped me move forward in more ways than I can say. I might just have a quick sip of water quickly. Anyway, a few years later and one day there was this gorgeous generous man sitting opposite me and we knew very quickly we were destined to run a restaurant together. I knew he was wonderful and I sensed his brilliance with food instantly. So I suggested we open a restaurant and he said, I don't know why we haven't thought of it before. We had known each other about four days or maybe two. And it happened that Fergus and I opened the French House dining room. The quails came in and I being a cook of the 80s started boning them all out and of course Fergus said, no, we will cook them whole. It was giddy times of love and cooking together. We did battle away over the menu but it was a partnership over the stove. Then Fergus went off to St John and did all this stuff. And I stayed at the French and that's when Fergus and I started having children. Children, as we all know, they take your world, your love and in my case they also took my food. And it took quite a few years once I came away from looking after small children to find my courage again. I am still rebuilding. It's a little like the bionic woman. We can rebuild her. We can make her better than before. She will cook again. It's my mantra. But this time it was even harder than the first time and that got me thinking. I was terrified all the time, well I still am and especially in front of you lot and at first my fears just seemed to be the normal ones. Am I good enough? Can I prove myself? Can I cook that dish well enough? Will I fuck it up? Will I be screamed at? Will they like it? All that stuff that goes on and on. But then I began to realise there is another problem. Women don't need as much courage as men. They need more. Why there are not more women running kitchens? Women through history have always been nurturing. They love cooking. They've been cooks in the professional sense. Women love to cook. But they're not around. I mean obviously there's quite a few here but this is quite a special. But you know out there it's like blokedom. Boys club. They're missing from our public cuisine. They're not in charge and they are still the outsiders. And here is a reason. There is a difference between men and women's approach to food. In fact I think this is my theory and maybe this is the wrong place to say it. But since it's courage, guts is the theme here. I'm going to risk saying it. But there are actually two kinds of cooking. A really great restaurant is aware of both and finds a way to combine them. There is male cooking and female cooking. Feminine cuisine as well as masculine. Well what does that mean? I think it's ancient. I think it goes right back to the stone age. Women produce food, men provide food. In other words we breastfed while the men went out and hunted. Both were necessary. We need both to survive and both are still in our instincts. Our anatomies decided that. But today in the big picture in the food industry and in the restaurant industry I think that the male approach dominates. And the female one can be sometimes overlooked. Food in a lot of kitchens is treated as well. Not the enemy but as a problem to be solved. Something to dominate, something you have to give up at secrets. Kitchens are turning into laboratories. They are filled with tools and weapons. Kitchens today are filling up with vacuum packers, suvies, probes and all the other stuff. And sometimes the instinctive part seems to get lost. It makes me weak to be told that to confit a duck leg in a plastic bag in water is just as good as confitting it in duck fat. I mean it's just terrible. Anyway. It's terrible! Terrible! The loving nurturing side of the trade, the instinctive side, I would say the feminine side is being overlooked. I think of the food industry as a whole. And I know a lot of this has been said much better than me. We all know terrible things have happened out there. Battery farming, genetic modification so that we can drench the crops and the environment with pesticides and so on and so on. It's when this approach, I think the male approach, the hunter had to go out and make war on nature. It's when this approach dominates and obscures the other side working with nature that it leads to disaster. Look at Mad Cow's disease. Anyone in their right mind could tell instinctively that feeding rendered dead sheep to cows was not a good idea. But oh no, the money boys, the scientists, the lab rats, I know the good scientists as well, they knew best. And in England we had this terrible crisis and people died. That's a fact, making war on nature. Now I'm not saying, so maybe I should have a pause quickly. Now I'm not saying anything like that is happening in our kitchens, but the general approach is to neglect the instinct of the nurturing, the working with nature, we need to make a place for the gatherer as well as the hunter if you like. And that is when I want to ask the question again, where are all the women chefs? Where are they all? I don't know, hiding. There are a few here. Melanie and I have been partners together, business partners, for 19 years. But there are not so many female partnerships in our trade. Why not? Is it because we're too scared, we've been kept out, we're afraid? Do young male chefs not want to listen to us? Or is our approach just out of style? Or maybe it's the press as well as a lot of what we also think. I can't help noticing the food that women love, regional instinct of cooking for example, is not being celebrated in the top 50. Where is regional cooking going? It needs to be celebrated. I feel we will lose the old ways, the delicious simple ways. I worry for the young men who want to be superstars and have a probe in their pocket and have forgotten what their granny's cooked. Are you serious about cooking in plastic? Vacuum packing, sous vide cooking? Where is it going? This is really scary. Plastic is carcinogenic. Making more plastic and more factories for more chefs and more sous vide is really bad. How do we strike a balance? Well, obviously new technology can be great. The male intellectualisation of food can be great, but there must be a balance. The kitchen must welcome the gatherers as well as the hunters. And it's good to be able to acknowledge that some of our most cutting edge kitchens all really do, of course. The foraging movement that is celebrated right here is all part of what we're talking about. And there's one part of the answer. If we get there. It's quite hot over here. It's the lights. So now I've told you what I don't like. So what do I like? What am I passionate about? What I like is platters that are groaning with unctuous flavours. What I like is when things are sticky and oozing and people are not afraid to gnawer on a bone. What I'm passionate about is when food is cooked that is a celebration of the uniqueness of the occasion. They're coming together of the season and the location. I love to celebrate the moment. That moment when there are piles and piles of food whose beauty is natural and simple and time-honoured and just waiting to be savoured and not contrived or distorted through tricks and manipulation. I'm happiness, like I keep saying, when the ingredients are allowed to speak for themselves. Like it or not, women do tend to cook in a different way from men and the way we respond to food is different too. But the aim and the ultimate purpose is the same. Nourishment, eating the pleasures of being together. Last paragraph. And so here we are at a symposium. What does that mean? Well, someone told me that a symposium is a Greek word and it means a drinking banquet, a feast of love, and isn't a feast of love a worthy aspiration. If it isn't, you hunters and gatherers, I don't know what is. So, well done everyone.