Gizzi Erskine’s favourite food
Gizzi Erskine’s new book is all about getting off the fast-food treadmill and taking the time to enjoy cooking up comfort food
In the past few weeks, chef and cookery writer Gizzi Erskine has experienced the best and worst of social media. The former came after she posted about her tears at feeling too fat to attend the GQ Awards. Having done so late at night, she awoke to an outpouring of love with messages of support from around the world, including from Hollywood stars.
It was all very different to when she posted a picture of herself cuddling a piglet during a visit to a welfare-friendly pork farm – the response to that was nowhere near as nice. ‘I had 3,000 abusive messages, including death threats, on my page,’ she says. She is unrepentant about her visit and her championing of meat as an ingredient to be enjoyed. ‘I was annoyed, not upset,’ she says. ‘I got so much hate from vegans. They asked, “How could I be in a room picking up piglets and see them as meat?” But I can. It’s not a disconnect, I think about it all the time. But meat to me is medicine, I need to eat it.’ What’s important, she says, is the provenance of the meat. ‘I was one of the first people to preach that if we’re going to eat meat, we have to know where it comes from; that it’s reared the right way. It’s about valuing the food we put in our mouths.’
Gizzi’s new cookbook Slow is certainly a celebration of great ingredients, with time taken to cook them well. It’s an eclectic mix of luscious dishes that are poached, steamed, braised, baked and roasted, and which reflect not only her roots – a mix of Polish, Scottish and Jewish – but also her travels around the world and love of unusual ingredients. The book includes advice on everything from how to trim a crab to making stock, basic sauces and buying cuts of meat.
Gizzi is the author of half a dozen cookbooks, but this is the one that gets to the heart of her. ‘I wanted to do a book about how I cook at home,’ she says. ‘I was sick of constantly being asked to do a quick and easy recipe for something – that’s not how I cook. I enjoy technique, the process of looking for ingredients, chopping them up. I’m a trained chef; it’s more than a passion, it’s a vocation. I want to show people that techniques such as making noodles and pastry are really easy.
‘ The modern approach to cooking seems to be all about valuing convenience over quality,’ she continues. ‘ Yes, there are times when we want quick and easy solutions but, at other times, we want to cook for the people we love and take care and time over what we are making. It’s therapeutic – it means you can focus on making something really delicious. When I spoke to people about their favourite foods, they said stews or a really good pasta sauce that takes ages.’
A stew is one of Gizzi’s favourites, and there are a number in the book, from Sticky Oxtail Stew to Caldeirada Fish Stew. ‘Coming home to the smell of a stew cooking made me feel cosy and safe. It still does.’ she says.
Other family recipes in the book include her mother’s Braised Sour Red Cabbage. ‘I eat a lot of really good food and when I claim that my mum makes the best version of a recipe, I really and truly mean it. Red cabbage is one of Mum’s great side dishes. We have it with everything from sausages to pork chops to Christmas lunch.’
She spent a year writing Slow and did it alongside creating Pure Filth, her plantbased cuisine collaboration with Rosemary Ferguson, and opening her restaurant Open Kitchen in Hackney’s Mare Street Market, a buzzing food destination she co-founded. ‘It’s been the most satisfying year,’ she says. ‘Running a business is not something I had done before. I set out to cook really delicious food and hope people enjoyed it, and they did. The space is beautiful and it’s a real success.’
The workload was tremendous – ‘ What can I say, I love working,’ she laughs – and it’s this that led to her weight gain. Although her days were spent tasting food, ‘when I came home I wanted to have that wind down, have a glass of wine with cheese,’ she says. Having hit the gym again, she has lost a stone. ‘I think I’ll get to 11st but to get to 10... it’s impossible for me to be extreme.’ Especially with all that slow cooking to do. ‘I am very much looking forward to the winter. Making soups and stews and loads of apple sauce... I can’t wait,’ she says.
taking care and time over what we are making is therapeutic