Celebrity chef 'Huge' Furnlee Wittgenstein

‘Huge’ Furnlee Wittgenstein was born posh. And nice. Very, very, nice. The most recent in a long line of Furnlees ‘Huge’ resembles nothing less than a large, slightly overweight but enthusiastic spectacle wearing spaniel. The epithet ‘Huge’ was bestowed upon him at his minor public school owing to the size of his tuck box. Apparently.

Furnlee had been a robust child with a robust appetite. Meal times were his greatest source of pleasure, and his interest in food, where it came from and how it was produced intrigued him more and more as he grew up.

His outgoing personality, boundless energy and let’s face it, greed, landed him a job at a trendy restaurant in Fulham famed as much for its pretentiousness as for its cuisine. It was not a long lived relationship however, and Furnlee soon parted company with its chef proprieters.

Deciding that poncy London restaurants were not for him, Furnlee struck up a deal with a TV producer for a series of programmes which saw him travelling around the UK eating wild and sometimes very weird things, woodlice fritters being one of them, celandine and hogweed salad another.

At heart a bit of a hippy, the next stage in his career led him to the West Country and another TV series. Single handedly resurrecting the seventies concept of self sufficiency and the good life, ‘Huge’ invested in a smallholding and reared his own stock. He grew fruit and vegetables, went fishing, caught eels, killed pigs and made sausages, built a smokehouse, charmed the locals, joined the WI, drank a lot of beer in the local hostelries and generally had a bloody good time.

The programmes of his time at Pond Farm became cult viewing and he made an obscene amount of money from the sale of several award winning books based upon his experiences there. But his tour de force was his brilliantly written tome about the pleasures of rearing and eating meat and which sealed his place as a pioneering foodie and all round good egg at the same time as pissing off the veggie burger eating brigade which, let’s face it, is never a bad thing.

‘Huge’ continues to live in Devon with his wife and three young children. So, posh, nice, and now very, very rich he can claim his rightful place as a National Treasure even if he does look like a spaniel.