High flyin’ chef settles in Sidney
By Christine van Reeuwyk - Peninsula News Review
Published: December 04, 2008 1:00 PM
Published: December 04, 2008 1:00 PM
Russ Hudson entered the air force on a dare. It led him to a military career that included in-flight cookery for the Royal Family and former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. He has autographed menus from the Queen Mum and Trudeau.
“I don’t have a picture with the royal family, protocol wouldn’t allow that,” he said. Hudson does have a couple of himself with Trudeau on board his aircraft, one where the former PM is in his sweats.
Hudson was in junior high he said, enjoying an outdoor picnic lunch with his girlfriend in a park near their Winnipeg school. “We’d just finished lunch and this military aircraft flew over, it said RCAF under the wings,” he recalled, telling her perhaps that’s the career path he would take. She responded with a “you wouldn’t dare.” The next day, two weeks before his 17th birthday, he signed on. “So I did it on a dare,” he said with a laugh. “I put the uniform on and never took it off for 29 years.”
Hudson’s biological father was a Spitfire pilot, lost over the English Channel just after the war. So perhaps the love of aircraft was in his blood.
“I’ve been around airplanes all my career,” Hudson said, sipping tea in the lounge at the Shoal Centre.
In the fall of 1978 he was offered, and accepted, the job as attendant on military passenger jets.
“I flew the line for years,” he said, referring to the long regular flights that criss-crossed Canada and overseas to Germany. Then he got a call from the CO of the squadron. The flight attendant assigned to the Royal Family had been in a serious accident.
“He called me into his office and said ‘you’re going on the royal tour,’” Hudson recalled.
“The reason I was selected was because I was a chef,” he added. “It has served me well in getting premier jobs in the aviation world.”
Hudson worked more than three years with the Royal Family, including the Queen of England and her mother. Because of protocol surrounding the Queen, Hudson didn’t get to know her well, but enjoyed time spent with the Queen Mum.
“We hit it off really really good,” he said, remembering conversations about growing up on the farm, and her favourite Corgi dogs. “We travelled all over the world, all the Commonwealth countries of course.”
The reason Hudson was chosen for the assignment was because he was a chef. Around that time he also became personal chef for then Prime Minister Trudeau.
“It was almost three years with him,” Hudson recalled. “I didn’t do a lot of line flying [after that]. I was dedicated to VIP flying.”
Those flights took significant preparation
“I had to design the menus here in Canada then fly them over to her chef,” he said. Then two weeks before a slated flight, Hudson would travel to Buckingham Palace himself, to prepare.
With the Royal Family he would head to Hyde Market with undercover Bobbies in tow and then the food would then be scrutinized by security.
“From raw food at the grocery store to the plate, there were a lot of steps,” he said.
Cooking in-flight didn’t entail precooking portions and packaging it up for reheating on the plane, “everything was cooked fresh on the airplane,” Hudson explained.
Around that time was also when he flew with the prime minister, and recalls Trudeau as “a workaholic on the plane.”
“A brilliant man, loved his country with a passion. We spent lots of hours talking in the plane state room,” Hudson said. “He was the kind of guy who respected people around him.”
As the chef, Hudson was responsible at times to select a handful of fresh roses for Trudeau’s boutonniere.
“That was his signature item. Anytime he was in public he’d wear a rose in his lapel,” Hudson said. Though the chef would bring a selection of about five roses, only one could be worn, the rest went to the female flight attendants, Hudson recalls.
“Mr. Trudeau was a cedar plank salmon guy,” Hudson said without hesitation. “I used to do it with a maple balsamic glaze. It’s my own creation.”
The PM was surrounded by fancy buffets and dinners worldwide so “sometimes it was keep it simple on the plane,” Hudson said. Once he made a caribou ragu, simply because Trudeau wanted to try the meat as it was a mainstay of the Inuit people he spent time with.
Hudson remembers the former prime minister’s sons Michel and Sacha Trudeau as babies. “I was sitting holding these kids when they were babies,” he said. “He loved his boys with a passion … the best was when he’d throw the press off the plane and enjoy family time.”
“I’m anxiously following Justin [Trudeau’s] career,” he added. “It’s my personal opinion he would make a good prime minister, because he already has the intellect of his father.” Justin Trudeau was elected a Member of Parlaiment for the riding of Papineau, Quebec during the recent federal election.
Another high point in his career came when Hudson was chosen for the honour of preparing and leading culinary teams to the Culinary Olympics in Germany.
“I was really determined to get the military involved in it,” he said. They spent a year planning and training in Lahr, Germany. In the end the teams took two medals. The A-team got gold and the B-team silver, Hudson said. “Now all those kids are career cooks in the military across the nation.”
Later, Hudson spent time teaching the culinary arts at Okanagan Valley College in Kelowna, Northern Lights in Dawson Creek and Selkirk College in Nelson.
He wound up back in Calgary working as a chef at a couple of care homes and with commercial airlines then one day cohort Ray Martin drew him a picture of the plane he’d flown in BC. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It was a beautiful airplane,” Hudson said.
The job was so plush, he’s got to stay hush. Hudson can’t talk much about the job that brought him to the Peninsula five years ago. He was a chef on a corporate jet — the kind that attracts the ‘jet set’.
Mise en place is never so critical as when you’re cooking in a galley thousands of miles off the ground.
“You’re the cook, you’re the server, you’re the dishwasher, you’re basically by yourself,” he said. “When you leave the ground, if you forget something you can’t go back. I lived by checklists.”
That’s part of the reason that menus and shopping lists were worked up well in advance. “It was so critical to the success of our flights,” he said. “You can’t go to the corner grocery store because you forgot the milk.”
“If you forgot a small item you can’t run to the grocer to pick it up, it’s happened to me,” he said.
With the last company he worked for, Hudson recalls a flight of movie stars where he couldn’t fulfill all the requests of the VIPs. “It was demanding for me and for my employer,” he said.
Hudson retired for the third time about two years ago.
At the time he had a scroll saw sitting in storage and discovered a wood working shop at the Shoal Centre. It was there that he met manager Judy Wiggins who was looking to fill the head role in the kitchen.
Hudson began working part time about 15 months ago at the Shoal Centre, and took over as food service manager and executive chef late last year. Now he’s responsible for the dining at the centre as well as the new Tuck Shop with famous ginger scones and the fabulous food at the monthly dining and entertainment event, An Evening at the Shoal.
“An Evening at the Shoal is a constant sellout,” he said, attributing the culinary success to teamwork.
“I have a great team in the kitchen,” he said. “What happens around here they make happen.” That would include sous chef Paul Marshall, and George Coathups as well as servers Marge Clancy, Deborah McCarroll and Gurdeep Bharaj. “You’re only as good as the team around you,” he added. “I’m the kind of chef who, if I won’t do it myself I don’t expect anyone else to.”
Though he originally came out of retirement — again — for the position, Hudson says he’s loving every minute of it. Plus he’s become attached to the area.
“I love Sidney with a passion, nothing will get me to leave,” he said, noting there have been some job offers. “We’ve become a real family here … It’s not just the cooking, it’s the interacting with the residents that I love.”
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