Rick Stein's latest cookbook is a mash-up of modern and traditional recipes

Rick Stein’s Food Stories is a book with a three-strand premise. It combines the BBC Two TV programme of the same name, in which the Padstow chef visits operators who are very much a product of their environment, such as Pam Brunton of restaurant Inver near Loch Fyne in Argyll, who shares a recipe for creamed cannellini beans with roast lamb, or a Filipino chef called Nallaine in Belfast, who owns food stall Kubo and who provides a recipe for pork belly adobo. This is combined with a nod to Stein’s previous book, Food Heroes, where he visits producers and asks to share their stories and the food they produce, and the third element, which involved tasking his recipe tester Portia Spooner to comb the internet to find out what people are cooking and talking about and to discover what supermarkets are tempting their customers with.

The result is a mash-up of modern and traditional, of contemporary recipes mixed with ones that have been made for generations, ranging from Victoria sponge to sushi, with Stein even embracing the air fryer in a recipe for halloumi fries with red pepper dip.

He reminisces about his time cooking at the Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, his global travels and the many memories of recipes he’s gathered over the years, all told in his distinctive voice and with an energetic curiosity for new ways of thinking about and cooking food. He extols on, for example, the fact that the people of the UK don’t on the whole eat enough fish until he realised that fish fingers are perennially popular, so the fish and seafood chapter contains several recipes for breaded or battered fish, including salt cod fishcakes and cod bites with beer batter. He comments on the food at the Royal Brompton Hospital during his recent heart surgery and, finding some of it lacking, offers his own recipe for cod with linguine, tomato and coarse green pesto.

There’s a touching story about some of the producers of the UK who are the last of their kind, such as Morecombe’s Ray Edmondson and his spiced brown shrimps set in butter, the shrimps caught by his friend Ray Porter, who goes out on a Heath Robinson-esque tractor made mostly of rust and scaffolding to collect them every day. This followed by a crotchety observation that it really should be scampi in the basket (never scampi in a basket, god forbid) and that £1 for tartare sauce at his Cornwall takeaway is actually a perfectly reasonable price as it’s made properly and not poured from a giant container.

The recipes are a combination of Stein classics, such as Dover sole à la meunière, Cornish puff pastry pasties made with strong Cheddar and potato and ‘Stein’s chips’ with Goan masala curry sauce, along with modern takeaway favourites, such as falafels with tahini dressing, Turkish lamb kofta kebabs and Chinese crispy duck pancakes, followed by cooking your granny would recognise: pot-roast brisket with parsley dumplings, roast topside with a showstopper Yorkshire pudding, bread and butter pudding with sultanas and an apricot glaze, baked Alaska and sherry trifle. A fond portrait of the sort of food eaten across the UK today, by anyone from his restaurant guests to supermarket customers, with a nod to Stein’s enduring love of the sea.

Rick Stein’s Food Stories by Rick Stein, BBC Books, £28

Photography by James Murphy