Raymond Blanc interview: 'I'm a micro-idiot perfectionist. I revel in it Soon after taking on his first job as a chef, Blanc set up his own restaurant in Oxford in 1977. Shouldered by a ladies" underwear shop and an Oxfam store, it was on the "wrong side of the city." But within only a year and a half he had won his first Michelin star and, in 1981, he was in the kitchen when he received the call from another chef telling him he'd won a second. His fans were legion - and in high places. During the Eighties and Nineties, Blanc would often cook for the Queen Mother at the home of her horse trainer. She would always come into the kitchen, sit with me and talk French. She was a lovely lady. I loved the sparkle in her eyes. Her French was immaculate with that wonderful English accent. Eventually the Queen would arrive and say, 'Come on Mum, we want to go home."" Thanks to television, Blanc now cooks for us in our living rooms. But his rise to household fame hasn't been straightforward. Two divorces bear witness, he says, to the sacrifices he's made for work. He wanted, he says, to give his sons the best education he could, yet his multimillion-pound project to double the size of Le Manoir in the Nineties led him to fear bankruptcy: "I wouldn't say I was close but I was not far away from it, and that was the most frightening moment of my life." Le Manoir was only just breaking even, so, he says, he had no choice. We had to grow in order to make it more profitable. It wasn't greed. Today, though, business is good and the hotel car park is full. Blanc treats my questions as he might an uncooked meal, setting about them hungrily, trying to put food and the world to rights all at once. There's little time to eat the squid, but just enough to offer tips on how to cook it. See, squid you cook it either one minute or one hour. Never in between. Otherwise it will be a piece of rock," he informs me in what, even after 40 years here, is an unreconstructed French accent. A lapsed Catholic he may be, but Blanc cooks and talks about food with religious zeal. When I point out that he is a perfectionist, he goes further. I'm a micro-idiot perfectionist. I revel in the idea of the details. So much so that I forget the bigger picture. Blanc hasn't forgotten the history of gastronomic success in France, however. The French Revolution, as he sees it, democratised food production. It was so important because it gave the peasant the right to till his land and grow his own food. What's more, the chefs to the aristocracy found themselves out of work. "Suddenly they didn't have a job because all the aristocrats" heads were cut off or they moved to Great Britain... so these cooks opened their own restaurants and that's really very, very important. They created the auberges, inns, the little restaurants which propagated all across France, and because food was democratised every working-class person would eat [good] food. It was inclusive. Never exclusive. Helped by the country's "hundreds" of microclimates, the love of food was born. The Revolution had placed it at the heart of French life. "[In Britain] we still don't cook enough at home," says Blanc, but he is delighted by what he sees as our very own food revolution this side of the Channel. He even advocates British traditions: "What you don't know is you have thousands of dishes." It's almost as though he's playing the part of a kindly Gallic uncle, dispatched to these shores to encourage us. Despite our problems with obesity and heart disease, he is impressed by our culinary progress, in which television and the media have played a big part. The more we talk about food, the more we connect about it. It's amazing what's happening. Now food is part of our consciousness. Now it is not just a mere commodity. We start to understand that food connects with every part of our lives, whether it is our health, what kind of society we are creating tomorrow, what kind of agriculture we will have tomorrow. Blanc was an early champion of organic produce and says that sustainability is at the heart of what he stands for. His specification sheets tell him exactly how his food is sourced. I know everything about the chicken that I'm serving to you - where it comes from, what it's being fed, at what age it's being killed, how it's killed. When Blanc was a boy, his father would take him on moonlit walks to hunt for frogs, but he has long ago stopped serving them to his clientele because of the cruelty with which, he says, they are killed. A student of his, I learn, once gave him a watercolour depicting 12 frogs in a wheelchair, with a blanket stained in blood. He's not a vegetarian but he accepts we need to eat less meat. It's abnormal we eat [meat] six or seven times a week, our organism is not made that way. In the days after our interview Blanc was due to travel home to do battle with Maman Blanc in the kitchen. He leaves me with an exhortation to us all: re-learn to cook. I know cooking takes an effort, but think of the rewards rather than the effort. And I know we don't have much time in our life - we are busy, we are always working, we travel, we never see our families and there's all sort of difficulties which prevent people cooking more. But I wish they could because of the joy [they] would get out of it. So says the master. And yet, once back in France, Blanc himself is again a student at the feet of his mother. She still competes - it's her kitchen, it's her territory. She disagrees sometimes with my techniques and she tells me, 'I don't do it like that!""