Q&A with Annie Smithers
Chef, gardener and restaurateur Annie Smithers chats with our events manager Chris Gordon about her new cookbook, Annie’s Farmhouse Kitchen.
Your new cookbook is a collection of the menus you’ve cooked for your wonderful restaurant (du Fermier). I love this. How do you collect your ideas to pull such an such an impressive array of recipes together? Are you a note taker?
When I first thought of writing this book, it was because I had amassed a huge body of work at du Fermier. A different menu every week for three years seemed worth sharing. The menus each week are driven by my produce from the garden – there is always something that needs using, and thus the array of recipes. When it came to compiling and choosing what was to be used for the book, that’s when it became difficult. There were so many to choose from. The process was made possible by old fashioned record keeping and a new age prompt. Each week my staff hand write the menu and each menu is filed for posterity. Along with that are the photographic records that exist on my social media feeds. So, notes of a sort are taken. And yes, I’m a thoroughly modern girl and collect ideas, albeit photographic ones.
Seasonal produce seems to bring out the best in everyone and I like how your recipes are centred on the changing seasons. I also like your simple-to-follow instructions; there are no ‘airs and graces’ but rather, the knowledge is shared in a gentle, practical way. Does this describe you as well as your recipes? Are you what you cook?
My recipes have to be based on seasonality, as they are based solely on what my garden delivers each week. As the food is in the French Farmhouse style they are not meant to have any ‘airs and graces’. It is food that has deep roots and is to be shared, enjoyed, and should encourage you to linger at the table over long, generous, nourishing feasts. Food to converse over. Some of the recipes are simple, but some of them are deceptive. There is some fearsome technique hidden away in a couple of them. One thing I like to do is to try and demystify some fairly basic dishes. Roast duck and cassoulet for example. I like to encourage people to practice cooking; not all recipes will work for you first time, some take several attempts. This is never failure, this is learning. As I’ve got older, I think I have become gentler, practical and more pragmatic. But I’m also happier and more content with who I am, so yes, maybe I am what I cook.
What’s your favourite dish in the cookbook? Is there one that you keep coming back to time after time?
Oh, that changes all the time. As we head towards winter, I would have to say the cassoulet. It embodies so much that I love about food. It’s a recipe and technique shared and taught by a friend. It uses a myriad of charcuterie processes. It has such a rich cultural heritage. And it is incredibly delicious, and an absolute showstopper when you serve it at the table.
I’m a bookseller so I have to ask you about your own reading habits… Do you read? What are you reading now?
Yes, I read, but at the moment? Nothing. It’s an awfully busy time when you release a book. But at the end of April, I’m off to holiday at a sustainable Cashmere goat farm on the outskirts of Chianti for a couple of weeks. Lined up is Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time as I’ve loved his work for a very long time. And my mother has given me Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed and a copy of The Tempest to read. She will never cease to be my English Literature teaching mother.
