How Anna Jones became the standard bearer for modern British vegetarian cooking
Some people can listen to a piece of music and immediately identify the chords, pick out the intricacies of the bassline, recite the relevant musical theory, perhaps remember the drummer’s name.
Others, like cook and author Anna Jones, can taste a plate of food and pinpoint the ingredients, however slight they might be. They can discuss the techniques that went into the dish, compare it to this recipe they saw from that chef 20 years ago.
“That’s not something that anyone taught me,” Jones tells me. “That’s not something that came from anywhere apart from, I guess, my own brain and my own desire to recreate what I was eating.”
Discovering that you have superpowered taste buds sounds like the start of any chef’s career, but it’s surprisingly not an analogy I’ve heard before. Jones didn’t learn to cook standing on a stool next to her grandma or mother. “My mum is a good cook, but she doesn’t love cooking. It’s not something that brings her great moments of joy or something she laments over.” Instead, her mum, presumably humouring her daughter’s childhood curiosity, would supply Jones with cookbooks and let her prepare the family dinner.
That special intuition for taste and flavour comes to the fore in Jones’s newest book, . Released in March, it sees her take 12 hero ingredients that she says are
