Early life
Pressdee was brought up in Gower and recalls:[1]
As a child I was fascinated by lobsters, oysters, sea bass and almost anything you could find and eat from the sea. I soon became interested in cooking the produce myself, and what could be a finer meal than fish and shellfish I had caught that day?
I can remember the very cranny where I caught my first crab and lobster; the very rock where I perched and cast for my first bass at Whiteshell; the smell of fresh foods cooking , and the appetite that a day on the seashore gave me. I would scrabble over the rocks for crab and lobster while my father sometimes went out in the boat for bass and mackerel. Someone else would shove a push net across the beach for prawns. We would pick mussels and winkles from the rocks, gather the seaweed laverbread, or search the cliffs for wild mushrooms.
The local farmers exchanged Gower new potatoes and cauliflowers for a few mackerel. At night we might take out the drag net and trawl deep in the dark water for sole, plaice, skate and even squid and cuttlefish. I can remember returning dozens of spider crabs from the lobster pots, not to mention kilos of whelks, conger eels, whiting, mullet, pollock and fiddler crabs, which today are all prized.
Pressdee goes on to recount that the family had a fishing hut at Rhossili where they caught and cooked everything. The fishing hut was "aptly named Kitchen Corner" and was the last point before the causeway to Worms Head:[2]
We would have hut feasts of the catch, cooked on a small Primus stove and a feeble two-burner Calor Gas hob. But what was turned out with such limited facilities was finer than most restaurants would even aspire to.
