Food & Drink
Britain’s Best Home Cook winner and Asian food fanatic Pippa Middlehurst shares the secrets of some of her favourite exotic dishes
Recipes from Pippa Middlehurst, plus South Africa’s best wines
My book Dumplings and Noodles isa personal collection of my favourite recipes, from Taiwan, China and Japan. They are dishes that I regularly cook for myself and my family at home. I wanted to create a book with recipes that are achievable and approachable – a book I wish had existed when I began cooking Asian food. They have mostly been transcribed from my scratty, soysplattered kitchen notebooks, filled with doodles and notes legible only to myself – and made this way because I once thought nobody would ever see these recipes but me. Yet here we are.
My love of cooking Asian food began when I was a young child. My maternal grandad, a toweringly tall, proud Irish Catholic, used to take me and my brothers for dim sum. He was a lover of fine things and his keen eye for the very best meant that my first experiences of Chinese food were far removed from the typical red gloop that most children in the north-west of England would have been introduced to at that age. I vividly remember him ordering from the steaming dim sum trolleys with absolute confidence, considering we were the only non-chinese family in the restaurant. I can still feel the curiosity that was sparked in me as a six-year-old as bamboo baskets were set down on our table. My amusement at my brothers’ faces as they tried egg drop soup for the first time – and hated it. It was the new and unfamiliar flavours and textures in this food that they found so repulsive, but which I loved so much. ■