Ever since she was a child Allegra McEvedy has had a passion for
food. On family holidays abroad she'd note down her favourite
dishes, describing the smell of ice-cream and the old man who sold
snails, and marvelling at grissini. Rather than write about the
cornucopia of culture her historian father was introducing to her,
she was fascinated to discover that the floury Italian dough sticks
were considered part of the bread family: "I was like, 'you're
kidding' and laughed myself off my little stool."
As a young chef in her 20s she became more focused, aware that the
notes she was taking could be a useful future resource for writing
recipes, whether it was for restaurants or newspapers.
"Essentially, what I am is a recipe writer and I was sort of aware
as I travelled and went to these places that the more I wrote down,
the easier my life would be when I got back and then the more
inspiration there would be to draw on."
As a professional chef, she gradually developed a healthy
admiration for the tools of the trade, earning her stripes at
Robert de Niro's Tribeca Grill in the mid 1990s and soon afterwards
going west to San Francisco (not the gay Mecca she'd hoped
for) where she learnt her most important lessons of all:
provenance and how to really make the most of ingredients. "I was
taught by Alice Waters [owner of legendary 'foodie' restaurant Chez
Panisse] that every ingredient has a history and that history
defines its flavour. It's a simple thing we take for granted now
but it just wasn't like that then, so in that way it was hugely
formative and really getting back to basics. You know, I was making
my own prosciutto. It's just cool shit to do and it's things you
don't usually get to do."
Gleaning the information for her new book, Bought Borrowed and
Stolen (Recipes and Knives from a Travelling Chef), ever since she
stepped over the Channel, aged seven, Allegra describes her new
tome as a "real love-project". Getting all the required information
for a book of 123 recipes from 19 countries was no mean feat. "In
some countries, like Malawi, you're reduced to animal noises and
pointing but it's quite likely they won't talk to you and you have
to just work it out. Writing this book was so interesting because
normally you just think of a recipe and you cook it and you're not
quite sure of the end. You've got an idea of the end point and you
know you're sort of working towards it. But with this, I had the
end point, so I knew what it should taste like and I had to just
work it all backwards."
With colourful personal stories about the places, the dishes and,
crucially, the knives she's collected from each country she
visited, all accompanied by Andrew Montgomery's beautiful, earthy
photographs, the book is a joy to devour, literally and
visually.
We ate some of the gems from the new book when we attended her
recent launch. Find out what Amy Lame and other guests
thought Here
