Learning to take it slow

Chef Gizzi Erskine’s new cookbook is all about investing time in the kitchen. Ella Walker and Lucy Hubbard find out more

GIZZI Erskine is not into fast recipes, or ‘easy’ ones, for that matter. Don’t expect corner-cutting tricks and 10-minute meals with this new recipe collection. In fact, she’s of the mind that, if you’re going to eat a crab, you ought to know how to buy one fresh, crack it open properly, and unhook the creamy flesh yourself. It’s this style of cooking - investing time, energy, care, attention - that’s “how I genuinely get my thrills”, explains the 39-yearold chef and TV presenter. So, if you’re always in a hurry, the London-based food writer’s new cookbook, Slow, might not be on your ‘must-read’ list - although it ought to be. Gizzi’s food is “technique-based and ingredients-led”, meaning Slow is laden with dishes that require a little more effort than hungrily snatching at the nearest available supper. “What I really love to do is sit around a crock pot or a lovely roast - a dish that’s been in the oven for a really long time,” she explains. “Everyone sits together, shoulder-to-shoulder, with glasses of wine, helping each other serve.” Within the book, you’ll find a sticky oxtail stew and salt-baked sea bass, Polish golabki (stuffed cabbage leaves), pastries and cloud-like lemon puddings, as well as hand-pulled noodles and a rich lamb hotpot. It’s structured around process, the aim always being to cook meat so luxuriantly that it falls from the bone with barely a nudge. “Yes, it might take you an afternoon to learn how to make fresh pasta or fresh noodles, or to make a proper stock, but what you get out of that is something that tastes so much better and is so much better for you,” says an unapologetic Gizzi. Slowing things down, she notes, is a way to better become “at one” with your ingredients, their heritage, their properties and culinary possibilities. Essentially, she’s not going to dumbdown cooking for you, but that doesn’t mean her food is out of reach: “I want people to be challenged. Often, we’re told we’re not capable when we are, we are all capable of doing anything we want.” She’s interested in the slow growing of foods, too. Not interfering in terms of antibiotics being given to enhance animals, or pesticides being applied to crops, as well as the cooking of them - provenance and quality of ingredients, she says, is crucial. But Slow isn’t designed to be “worthy” or to make you feel bad. “I’m very, very aware of the implications of money on [better quality] food,” Gizzi admits, “but also, if we want to make a difference in the world, we all need to start cutting back on [industrially farmed] meats. Despite a stint as a professional bodypiercer, Gizzi cannot remember a time she didn’t cook, and spent a lot of her time in Asia as a child, due to her mother’s work in Bangkok, Thailand. “I got to eat as much Asian food as I could. That’s probably where I learnt to cook,” she remembers. “Me and my mum will eat anything, and we’d head off and go to the markets and eat all the seafood.” It was a bonding experience: “My mum always said to me when I was younger, ‘You’re so good, you eat everything,’ and that pushed me to eat.” The flip side to that is the satisfaction Gizzi now gets from feeding others. “You get that gratification like, ‘Oh my god, that’s so delicious,’ and, ‘Wow, how did you do that?’ - I mean, obviously, I sound largely narcissistic, but I get the biggest kick from it.” Gizzi trained at Leiths Cookery School (it’s often noted that she came top of her class) before landing a BBC Good Food internship, and going on host cookery programmes like Cook Yourself Thin on Channel 4. She’s also worked in professional kitchens, such as St John Bread & Wine, but has never felt cowed at being outnumbered by the predominance of male chefs in the industry. “I’ve never perceived myself as being any different to a man, and that’s a privilege, because I know that I have been brought up like that and I know that I’m lucky,” she explains. “There is no reason why, particularly young women, can’t achieve any of the things that boys can. “I can’t lift a 50kg bag of rice,” she adds, “but even men struggle with that.” Having launched two new businesses this year - her Mare Street Market restaurant-cum-deli and Pure Filth, her veggie burger joint - and written Slow, her plan now is to not “spread myself too thin”. “I want to get it all right: I want to be good at business, I want to get better as a cookery writer, I want to keep enjoying myself and doing what I love,” she says seriously. “I want to be really good at my job.”