My name is Meera Sodha and I'm the author of this cookbook, East. Now the story of
this book started a couple of years ago when I received a call from an editor at
the Guardian and she asked me whether I'd be interested in writing a column
called the New Vegan. Now, there was a couple of problems with this in that I
wasn't vegan and I'd also just had a baby. And so I probably should have
turned it down but I decided to say yes and that's because at the time there
were huge numbers of people who were looking to reduce the amount of meat and
dairy they're eating and increase the amount of vegetables. And I'd just written
this book, Fresh India, and I could see how easy it was to eat many more
vegetables if you turn to India for inspiration because there are dosas and
dhals and incredible vegetable curries, none of which make you feel like
you're missing out on eating meat at all. And so I suspected that if I looked
east towards Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, China; that I'd find much
more inspiration for the home cook and luckily I was right. There's lots of
inspiration for the home cook from Thai som tam salads to Singapore noodles to
Korean kimchi rice. Some of the recipes have been taken from my Guardian column
but there are plenty more new recipes brand-new for this book. So we're here in
my kitchen and this is my cookbook shelf and as you can see I'm an avid hoarder
of cookbooks but I just wanted to talk to you about three books that have
really shaped me as a cook and a writer. And the first of those books is Fergus
Henderson's Nose-to-Tail Eating. Now this is the book that really taught me how
the importance of keeping things simple and fun. The second thing is he is
such an incredible writer. He's very, very entertaining and it makes this book a
real pleasure to use. So he talks about chopping parsley 'not so fine but
just so as to discipline it.' And I think that is
just such a lovely idea, disciplining parsley, and I understand what he means
because their leaves are quite hard until you start to chop them and then
they sort of settle down a bit and you know when you get to that point. And I
think incidentally he was one of the first people to start talking about food
waste because, well especially when it comes to animals, where he said well if
you knock a whole beast on the head then it's only polite to eat the whole thing.
But he applies the same logic to vegetables. So he has a recipe for eating
radishes in here where he suggests that you slather them in butter and dip them
in salt but to keep the leaves to one side to dress with vinaigrette and
to eat afterwards. And he suggests also that if you are cooking your own
chickpeas then the water that you cook them in becomes a very delicious stock
for vegetarians. So that's why I love this book. So the second book that I want
to tell you about is Stevie Parle's book Real Food From Near and Far. And this
book gave me confidence to adapt recipes and what I mean by that is that Stevie
travelled the world to collect recipes for this book and he traveled
widely into temples and cafes and people's homes and he got back to the UK
and realized that he couldn't cook a lot of that food at home because he couldn't
get hold of those ingredients. So Stevie suggests that you should adapt recipes
and in his introduction he says 'It's good to adapt recipes, to make them
appropriate for produce, season and equipment you have. But you must be
careful though to keep the identity of a dish intact.'
When I was growing up in rural Lincolnshire my mother would cook
traditional Gujarati recipes but using local British seasonal produce so she
would cook curries with courgettes that had come from a neighbor's allotment
or leeks from a field nearby and Stevie's book gave me the
confidence to be able to take what I'd learned growing up at home forward into
my cooking. In my book, East, I've got Kerlan curries made using
Jersey Royals and green beans and an Indonesian nasi goreng dish made using
spouts. So that's what I took away from this book. So the third book that I want
to tell you about is this one and it is A Taste of the Far
East by Madhur Jaffrey. And this is one of my favourite books. So this book
accompanied Madhur's TV series in the 1990s and she travels through Vietnam,
Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong and the Philippines. And I learnt quite a lot
from this book and I suppose the first thing was how important it is to be
observant of the details that surround a recipe. So many recipes these days
can just be someone's version of writing a let's say Bolognese and it has no
heritage to it or no story to it. And that is everything that Madhur isn't.
So she will collect a recipe from a particular family and she'll be very
observant about that place and those people and so you can really, it's almost
like an anthropological record of where that recipe has come from. So in the
section on the Philippines she talks about a lady called Ruby who loves
throwing parties and absolutely adores miniature ponies or she talks about an
elderly Vietnamese couple who were heralded by the government as war heroes
and the colour of their living room and what their children what homework their
children are doing in the evenings. And so you can really travel using Madhur's
book without traveling at all. And so I aspire to be more Madhur and she has
in part encouraged me to look East for inspiration and that is something
that I have gained from her but also to take down details of where these recipes
are from and to give them a home.