Gizzi has a taste for revolution
Gizzi Erskine tells ELLA WALKER about her guide to being a savvy eater
COOKBOOKS take time to write. There’s recipe testing to perfect, measurements to clarify, photos to style and snap. With Restore, chef Gizzi Erskine’s latest cookbook, she also had to keep pace with science – an ever-changing avalanche of the stuff.
After four years of work, the result is both a recipe collection and, she hopes, “an accessible translation of what the hell’s going on in the world at the moment”.
Restore: A Modern Guide To Sustainable Eating, encompasses dinner (of course), but also the food industry and its myriad problems, all the while drawing on environmental and agricultural science.
Erskine’s last cookbook Slow, had its foundations in a growing public awareness around good produce and making the best of ingredients, Restore she says, is the natural next progression. It has, she admits, “been quite a feat”.
“You’re battling trying to keep up with something that, suddenly, has gone from being a quite slow progressive movement to suddenly, bosh! There’s so much to learn,” she buzzes. “We filed this book four months ago and
I’m already like, ‘Ohhhh, there’s still so much to say!”’
A huge amount of research has gone into it, and although “produce has always been what gives me thrills,” the crux of Restore is finding a balance between “really delicious recipes and making a practical guide for learning how to be an ethical, agriculturally savvy eater”.
Alongside recipes for lamb neck stew, salt-baked celeriac, braised courgettes, green shakshuka, black pepper crab and cauliflower pasta, London-born Gizzi, 41, examines the environmental concerns around monocropping [growing the same crop year after year on the same
land], explores how to work with waste, and addresses issues within the meat and dairy industries.
While the book has many a vegan and vegetarian recipe in it, Gizzi does take umbrage with the idea “we’ve been sold that the only solution is veganism, or eating a plantbased diet,” when this too would likely have its own agricultural repercussions.
When it comes to what we can do as individuals with regard to sustainable and ethical eating, Gizzi thinks it’s a matter of looking at how
meat and veg is produced and demanding better. “If we really want to save the world, we’ve all got to be involved,” she says, and to “protest this using our own wallets”.
Does she think we stand a chance of reframing how we eat to restore the planet?
“I do believe that there is good in the world,” says Gizzi.
“All the best revolutions have come from the real people, and there could be a revolution from people’s homes, I really do think that.”