A passionate advocate of confidence and creativity in the kitchen, Lynda Booth runs the award winning Dublin Cookery School in Blackrock. Her first book, From Lynda’s Table was shortlisted for Cookbook of the year in 2014 and subsequently reached the finals of the World Gourmand Cookbook Awards that year. She talks to us about her latest book Fearless Food, and the clarion call to culinary courage that lies at the heart of it.
Lynda, tell us a little about your background and what first sparked your enthusiasm around food.
I come from a background where good food was really appreciated and one of my earliest memories is going fly-fishing for brown trout with my dad on Lough Arrow. When we got home my mum would fillet the fish and fry it off in a little bit of butter and the flavour was amazing.
I spent many years working in kitchens, mainly abroad, and the exciting thing about food is that you can travel anywhere with it. I love Italian food and I wanted to work with some interesting chefs so I learned the language, travelled to Italy and knocked on kitchen doors. I also worked in Vancouver, where the produce is incredible. There’s a massive Asian culture there and I learned to cook in lots of different and exciting ways. Every time you step into a new world you’re catapulted into another food culture.
What prompted you to move into the world of writing and publishing?
I spent my early years learning from amazing chefs such as Raymond Blanc who inspired me and that’s often what keeps you working the long, hard hours. The wonderful thing about chefs is that they’re constantly passing on their knowledge and ideas. There’s a real generosity of spirit and you’re always collecting and sharing recipes, so in writing both books I was keen to pass on the knowledge and experience I’d gained throughout my own career as a chef. I found the creative process fascinating. I had a great design team, an extraordinary food photographer in Joanne Murphy, and the incredible buzz I got out of seeing the finished result makes it all worthwhile.
Tell us about the thinking behind your latest book, Fearless Food.
The book evolved initially with my kids and the whole area of building confidence in the kitchen. I knew if they had some core foundation techniques they could translate them to all kinds of different ingredients and dishes. The other thing is a very recent phenomenon that’s totally baffling. There’s a whole generation growing up who are suspicious about food and always analyzing what they can and cannot eat, so the book is about taking the threat out of one of life’s greatest pleasures. I wanted to help bring the joy back into cooking and because I make personal choices everyday when I’m cooking, the recipes in my book are “accidentally healthy”. Proportionately I’m eating a lot more veg, I still love my butter and cream but everything is in balance.
What can prospective cooks expect to find within the covers?
I’m very often lured by an ingredient on the shelf or something that’s seasonal, heirloom tomatoes, tender stem broccoli or whatever, so I wanted to create lots of recipes that were really practical on an every day basis, the sort of things you come home and rustle up any day of the week. I start by laying out core principals and techniques and then lead into all sorts of wonderful recipes. Because I love food from different cultures I wanted the recipes to be really varied, so whether your taste is for fish, pasta, Indian, meat or vegetarian, there are chapters in the book about how to create all sorts of homely dishes and then moving on to doing something a little bit more sophisticated.
I am also very aware that many people may never have put a pot on the stove while others have been cooking for years, so because I’m trying to appeal to everybody the recipes are always written from the point of view of somebody who knows very little and doesn’t understand why things go wrong. It’s about having the confidence to improvise using those ingredients and trying to make people’s life easier by giving them lots of possibilities around food. To me it’s about the surprise, I love people turning the pages and thinking, “I wasn’t expecting that!”
What do you advise when it comes to culinary success?
Everybody can learn to cook good food and everybody has the ability to be creative with food. Understanding technique empowers you to be more creative but if something doesn’t taste as good as you would hope how you transform those ingredients and lift the whole experience from something ordinary to something extraordinary? It’s about inspiring people and giving them confidence to add these extra little touches or “elevators” that make the whole thing wonderful, whether from a jar of Asian marinade, pesto or harissa in the fridge, to adding toasted seeds, roasted hazelnuts, shavings of Parmesan or whatever. Everybody has their own repertoire, so the book is about challenging people to cook differently and cook dishes with ingredients that they might not have cooked with before.
The Dublin Cookery School has been going strong for ten years now. What do you most enjoy about the work you do there?
Opening the cookery school gave me the opportunity to lure top Chefs to the school rather than me having to hunt them down like I did earlier in my career. Recently we’ve had Aoife Noonan, John Wyer from Forest Avenue, and Barry Fitzgerald from Bastible. We’ve got students coming to the school from around the world and you never know what characters are going to walk through your door. It’s a great pleasure having a bunch of people having fun creating different dishes, then sitting down chatting and eating what they’ve prepared.
Fearless Food is available now from all good bookshops as well as online at Dublin Cookery School www.dublincookeryschool.ie
Words: Martina Murray
