Gordon Ramsay Read Online Free PDF Page A

or for fools. And little wonder that he says bad language is one of the world’s least important sins. As far as Gordon is concerned, ‘hell’s kitchen’ wasn’t just the title of some future television show. It was also the place that had first saved and then almost destroyed him. ‘My life has been an incredible roller-coaster ride,’ he said in 2005. That ride had taken in incredible highs and terrible lows. And it had begun almost 40 years earlier in a family that risked being torn apart by alcohol, violence, drugs and fear.

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    E gg and chips. Ham, egg and chips when Mum was feeling flush. Steak and chips with a fried egg on top on special occasions when Dad took the family out for cheap Sunday lunches at a local hotel. They are not the sort of mealtime memories you might expect to hear from the man who would turn out to be the highest-profile and most imaginative chef of his generation. But that was pretty much all Gordon Ramsay ate as a child in one of the toughest parts of Glasgow. That and tripe.
    ‘We didn’t have a lot of money, so it was a very hard upbringing with very limited food on the table,’ he says. ‘We never sat down to a starter, main course and pudding and we had to eat everything we were given. There was no such thing as “don’t like” in our family. Tripe is the obvious example. It wasn’t exactly anyone’s favourite, but we had toeat it when we were served it. Mealtimes weren’t exactly much fun back then.’
    Gordon was born on 8 November 1966 and named after his hard-drinking, heavy-smoking father – a man who had swum for Scotland at the age of 15 and had seen life as a brutal competition ever since.
    A PE teacher in a local school, Gordon Ramsay senior was as traditional and as chauvinistic as they come. His attitudes and rules were the only ones that mattered in the Ramsay household and from the start he made it clear that his elder son was never expected to do as much as boil an egg, let alone cook a proper meal. On the family’s council estate, the idea was that men were men, and women, only women, were expected to spend their lives in a kitchen.
    What the men could do, however, was go out to find food – as long as they killed it first. So Gordon, his younger brother Ronald and their dad would sometimes leave the rough city streets behind for a weekend’s fly-fishing on the River Tay. They were rare peaceful days in a childhood where storms were brewing from the very start. Gordon says, even as a young boy, it was obvious to him that his father had an eye for other women, a problem with drink and a temper he could barely control. He was frustrated and angry at work and he brought all those feelings and more home with him – though it was to be many years before Gordon found out just how much his mother had suffered at his father’s hands on those long Glasgow nights.
    Like most men of his generation, Gordon’s dad had two passions in life: music and football. Bored by the first, his son tried desperately to win his affection by sharing the second. The family were lifelong Rangers supporters and,after two seasons of begging to go to a match, Gordon finally got taken through the gates of Ibrox Park just after his seventh birthday. It was one of Scotland’s big derbies, a sell-out clash between Glasgow Rangers and Hearts, and to this day Gordon remembers it as an ugly, dirty match played in front of a frightening, threatening and sporadically violent crowd. ‘And I loved everything about it,’ he says.
    But thriving on that sort of experience at just seven years old wasn’t enough to impress Gordon senior – because he hadn’t been there to witness his young son’s confidence. Instead, Gordon had watched the match from his Uncle Roland’s shoulders and it was with his uncle that he would return to Ibrox again and again over the next two years. His dad, meanwhile, stayed at home brooding about the imagined slights he faced at work and the