On the 6 May 2011, you shall be giving a talk at the National Library of Wales. Tell us a little bit about your presentation?
In my illustrated talk I shall discuss the by-ways, which led me to a career first as a wildlife artist and then as a cookery writer (with a stopover for a couple of novels and a trio of memoirs along the way). Over thirty years I have published around 20 food-related books as well as contributing regular columns to magazines and national newspapers.
As a regular visitor to the National Library of Wales do you use our resources for your own work and research?
Indeed I do. Lacking any formal education after the age of 15, libraries have always been my university. You’ll find me in the National Library’s Reading Room hunched over my computer several times a week.
Tell us a bit about your new book ‘A Cook’s Year in a Welsh Farmhouse’?
A Cook’s Year is an account (with recipes) of the changing year in a wild an beautiful place, a story of land and people, a collaboration between two people, food-writer and photographer, who share a love of where we live and what we do.
How important is it to use local, seasonal produce when cooking?
Local, seasonal and fresh is a relatively new notion in a region where the growing season is short and what the land does best is grass. If culinary traditions are dictated by latitude, climate and geography, in the old days, the daily dinner in a rural household depended on dairy-products, root-vegetables and grain-foods supplemented by conserved meat from the household pig fed on the whey from the butter making. There’s still an appreciation of excellence in cheese and pork-products in evidence in the fortnightly farmers market in Aberystwyth, while Tregaron continues to support two butchers and its own slaughterhouse.
If you went to live on a desert island – which cooking utensil would you take with you?
A boiling-pot with a lid. Every culinary tradition has its own version of the cawl, and you can’t make a soup without a pot.
What’s in your kitchen cupboard?
Locally-milled flour and yeast to make my own bread, sea-salt, dried beans and lentils, olive oil, tinned tomatoes, Turkish pepper-flakes, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, sherry vinegar, honey from local bees, Bols curry-powder and dried milk just in case.
‘A Cook’s Year in a Welsh Farmhouse’
Friday 6 May
7.30 p.m.
Admission by ticket £10.00