Sharing her simple cooking
Nature presenter Kate Humble talks about her foray into food
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 – I don’t have the figure for it, anyway.”
While Humble, 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,” Humble 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 Humble’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.”
Humble 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), Humble 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.
“I’ve always lived by the adage, which is attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt – I’ve no idea whether she actually said it or not – but apparently she said, or somebody clever said: ‘You should really do something that scares you every day’,” says Humble. “I love that idea of being challenged or pushed out of your comfort zone a little bit – not to the point where you’re terrified all the time. But it is easy to get a bit comfortable professionally, and personally sometimes we all need a bit of a jolt or a bit of a change.
“I think particularly in the last two years, where everything has been so weird, a lot of the time it’s been very tempting to sit with a duvet over your head and pretend the world isn’t out there. So for me, it was really good to have what was a hugely intellectual challenge – it stretched me in ways I had no idea about.”
• Home Cooked: Recipes From The Farm by Kate Humble is published by Gaia, priced £25. Photography by Andrew Montgomery. Available now.