It almost started so badly. Jamie Oliver had just landed his first gig outside the River Café kitchens, writing a fortnightly recipe feature for this very magazine, and for his inaugural column he was cooking a barbecue on a rooftop in London. David Loftus was dispatched to photograph the results, but Jamie was running late: it was dusk before any food was ready and Loftus was only expecting to shoot during daylight.
“Jamie rang the picture desk the following day and said he was really worried,” recalls Loftus from his Battersea mews studio. “He said he’d hardly seen me all afternoon and didn’t think they’d have enough pictures to use.” Oliver needn’t have worried. The story cemented his position as the stellar new talent of the food world. It also established a firm friendship between the chef and his “ninja” photographer. “Jamie left a message on my answerphone – ‘I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy.’ Normally in this business you only hear if you’ve done a bad job.”
Since then, Oliver and Loftus have been in and out of each other’s lives almost every week. Loftus has worked on all of Oliver’s subsequent books
and on his magazine. “We travel a huge amount together,” Loftus says. “We’re going to Switzerland in a couple of weeks and I overheard him say, ‘Yeah, I’m sharing a room with David.’ It’s sweet, but I just think, ‘Oh, great.’ There’s quite an age difference between us [Loftus is 48, Oliver 36] and I need some sleep. Because he’s never had a brother, it means farting, burping, him leaving the toilet door open, all that kind of thing. I have brothers; I know what it’s like.”
Apart from the obvious friendship between them, the relationship works because they don’t interfere in each other’s jobs, even though Oliver is a good photographer, according to Loftus. “Jamie once worked with a photographer who had a little bowl of herbs, which he’d add even if they weren’t in the recipes. Jamie found it a painful process. I’d never dream of doing that. He does all his own styling and he is always thinking photographically when plating up. He’s the most natural chef I’ve worked with.”
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Loftus is also a very quick worker, taking less than a minute to shoot most dishes. “When we did 30-Minute Meals, we actually shot them all within the 30 minutes as well,” he says. “Jamie got a lot of stick for that book [people complained that most of the meals were impossible to cook in the time], but it did work, although I realise it was a race. Jamie is very fast and clean. Where you’d be rushing and spilling things, he’s got that chef mentality of cleaning as he goes along, with all his knives and ingredients laid out beforehand.”
The book was shot in just 12 days – “I ended up with a frozen shoulder after that; 16 months of intense pain” – and now they’ve just finished 15-Minute Meals together. “Everything cooked and shot within 15 minutes. That was just chaos.”
He’s only once critiqued Jamie’s cooking. “He tried to do this thing with cottage cheese, a cottage cheese tart, for a book. It was a shocker.” Conversely, Oliver has never held back from laughing at Loftus’s recipe suggestions. “I tried to get him to do something on tinned fish recently and he hasn’t let it go for three weeks. He thinks it’s the worst idea he’s ever heard,” says Loftus, before adding, “I don’t see why. Everyone loves sardines mashed on toast, don’t they?”
But Oliver must secretly rate Loftus’s taste in food, for he is fully behind his latest project, a compilation of favourite recipes called Around the World in 80 Dishes, based on Jules Verne’s famous novel. “It comes from ten years of being surrounded by the best chefs in the world,” says Loftus.
So he marks Phileas Fogg’s stay in Aden, for example, with Nigella Lawson’s overnight lamb shanks with figs and honey, and a trip to Liverpool on the mail train with Heston Blumenthal’s Welsh rarebit. Oliver has contributed a clutch of recipes and a fond foreword. “It started as a kind of culinary scrapbook, a mix of essays, photographs and recipes, mainly from my mother, and grew from that,” Loftus says. “Jules Verne mentions food quite a lot, so there was plenty to go on. In India, he thinks he’s eating rabbit, so I was able to say to Jamie, ‘I want to do an Indian rabbit recipe – what do you reckon?’”
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The book is full of surprises, not least a “recipe” for frozen grapes. “Jamie and I were toiling in the midday heat in the ancient and wood-fired kitchen of the Petrolo estate in Tuscany when I went ahead, against his foul-mouthed objections, and fed him beautifully frozen fragola grapes from a height like an Ancient Roman.” As only a best friend can.
Around the World in 80 Dishes by David Loftus is published by Atlantic on April 1 and is available from the Times Bookshop, priced £22.50 (RRP, £25), free p&p, on 0845 2712134; thetimes.co.uk/bookshop