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Keeping it simple
Nature presenter Kate Humble doesn’t claim to be Nigella, but she loves bringing her simple cooking to the world
Kate Humble never planned on writing a cookbook – an odd thing to hear from someone who is currently promoting their first one.
“I’m not a ‘grown-up cook’,” the wildlife and nature presenter confesses.
“I just make food because you need to eat to keep alive. I don’t have any kind of pretensions of being the next Nigella or anything like that – I don’t have the figure for it, anyway.”
While Kate, 53, might not have gone to culinary school, she’s being as modest as her name suggests. In fact, her first cookbook – Home Cooked: Recipes From The Farm – was written after fans of Channel 5 show Escape To The Farm With Kate Humble practically demanded it.
On the show, she had small segments cooking the simple food she ate every day – and people lapped it up.
“Around that time [2020], everyone in the world was making sourdough bread,” Kate remembers.
“Apart from me, it turns out – I tried like everybody else, and I killed more sourdough starters than I would care to admit. If there was a Royal Society for the Protection of Sourdough Starters, I would have been prosecuted two years ago, and in prison.”
Frustrated by everyone’s “smug photos” of sourdough on social media, one of Kate’s friends introduced her to an easy, foolproof soda bread recipe.
“There’s no yeast, there’s no faffing about, it’s incredibly quick, incredibly easy – even I could do it. And I did feel like a domestic goddess when I pulled out this perfect bread from the oven.”
Kate shared this recipe on her show, and her simple style of cooking struck a chord with viewers – and ultimately led to her first cookbook.
Not that it was an easy book to write, though. While the recipes are indeed uncomplicated (some incredibly so – there’s literally a recipe for putting Marmite on apple slices), Kate felt
challenged by doing something so out of her wheelhouse.
“I was given two months to write it – while we were filming the series, so I nearly got divorced every day that I was writing it,” she says with a wry laugh – but ultimately, the laborious process was worth it.
Recipes from her mother, Diana, permeate the book – the person who taught Kate how to cook (“in a time where dinosaurs were still walking the earth, it was so long ago”, she adds). This was when you couldn’t easily order a takeaway – particularly not in the rural area where Humble grew up.
“There wasn’t Deliveroo or Uber or any of those things – if you wanted to eat, you basically had to make your food,” she explains.
“The ingredients were pretty basic – there was no Ottolenghi in those days, no making things with incredible dried Iranian limes – it was shepherd’s pie, apple crumble, very basic stuff.”
This informed how Kate cooks today and what you’ll find in her cookbook. It’s arranged into seasons for two reasons: “The ingredients you’re going to get are probably going to be at their best if they’re seasonal, and the recipes you find per season are all actually what you want to eat at that time.”