Herald
Café: From law to travel...tell us about the transition.
Naomi
Duguid: The best way to understand a place, I think, is by looking
at what’s there and asking yourself questions about the how and why. Food is
fascinating and a wonderful route to understanding.
HC:Most of your books seem focussed on Asian/Southeast
Asian cuisine. Are you personally fond of this cuisine?
ND: The first six books I wrote were in collaboration with my
ex-husband. We looked at staple foods in many places, first in a book about
Flatbreads, and then in a book about Rice. Well Asia is a heartland for both, and the Indian
subcontinent especially. I find food and different communities' ways of
expressing themselves in their food traditions so interesting, and nowhere is
that more evident than in Asia.
HC: What makes your cookbooks so appealing?
ND: I know that people respond to the mix of stories and
photographs, along with the recipes. I am interested in daily fare, home
cooking, and in celebrating that, rather than in “palace food” or festive
dishes. I want people to engage with the food traditions of others and
appreciate them. And the best way, it seems to me, is through the daily home
cooking repertoire.
HC: How did you collate the material for your books jointly with
your ex-husband Jeffrey Alford as well as your solo book ’Burma: rivers of Flavour’?
ND:
One of the important elements in making the books that we did
jointly was that we each made solo trips and we also made trips as a family
with our kids, starting from when they were very young.
HC:
What are your memories of your your first visit to Goa?
ND: We were in Goa about 12 years ago. We learned a lot about
food, photographed rice cultivation and more, and based ourselves at Palolem. I’m
looking forward to spending time in Panjim and to eating fish!
HC: Tell us about your book ’Burma: River of Flavours’.
ND:The Burma book is very special to me, party because it was
the first book I did on my own, but even more because when I began it, Burma
was a place oppressed by its military-totalitarian government. People were very
afraid of the authorities. In the course of the three and a half years that I
worked on the book, things began to evolve in Burma, and as a result, people
became less fearful.
The book starts
with Burma Basics: some flavourings and ingredients that come in handy for
assembling Burmese dishes. The cuisine reflects Burma’s geographical location
and its history: it’s clearly Southeast Asian (fish sauce, shrimp paste, etc
are essentials for many dishes), but there’s more than a hint of the
Subcontinent, for example in the way shallots/onions are used to underpin flavour,
and the use of turmeric, and more…
HC: Tell us about your next
book, ‘Taste of Persia’.
ND:My next book, due in September 2016, engages with the
Persian culinary region, that is, Iran and the Caucasus countries plus
Kurdistan. Of course, Persian cuisine has had a huge influence on places much
farther away from Iran, such as Pakistan and India, and also on the cuisines of
central Asia from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan and beyond. But I wanted to connect
the dots in the immediate region. Georgians, Azeris, and Armenians each have
very distinctive cuisines, but they also share common threads with each other
and with Persian tradition. That’s why I think of the area as a Persian
culinary region. And it’s a way of contextualising, for as we know, food is
fluid and evolves through movement of peoples, expansion of empires, and trade.
Present-day foods in the region reflect that.
The book has travel
stories and recipes, a chapter devoted to fruit, for example, because it plays
such a huge role in the region’s cooking – one for breads, another for rice
dishes, and so on. The vegetable dish repertoire is huge and the soup’s
amazing.