The Real Cele
As a passionate cook and food writer, I am committed to inspiring others in the kitchen, through my books, demonstrations and tv appearances. I am driven by an acute culinary intuition, an insatiable appetite for knowledge, and a love of the theatre of cooking.
It all started when I moved to Britain in 1989 age 19. In those days, the extent of my culinary skills was opening packets and boiling the kettle. I became vegetarian around that time, and soon I started to develop an interest in cooking. This is no coincidence. I knew I couldn’t live on tins of beans and lumps of fatty cheese. As my mental perception of food became more acute — I started to see food as something other than just fuel — my sensory perception improved too. I was desperate to learn how to cook, so I could explore the creative process of using ingredients, tools and all five senses to make something delicious. The greatest satisfaction of all, I found, was giving other people pleasure through eating what I prepared. I soon discovered that food which is cooked with passion evokes passion in the person eating it.
The whole realm of food is a healthy obsession for me, and it's not limited to cooking. So much of the fun and fascination lies in shopping for fresh, high quality ingredients in farmers' markets and specialist food shops. It also includes poring over heaps of books about food and filling my head with recipes, folklore, culinary and social history. I'm also rather partial to stuffing my face.
My passion became a career in vegetarian cooking, through catering, teaching and writing. I'm certainly no vegetarian "evangelist". I merely hope to show people how easy and fun it can be to cook, and meat is simply not part of my repertoire. You must have what I call a sensory relationship with what you cook. If you can't engage every sense with your ingredients, what you cook just won't taste right. Even if I were to go through the mechanics of cooking a piece of meat, it would probably taste horrible.
My approach, in a nutshell, is this: vegetarian cooking is more complex than simply slapping something on the grill. It requires more thought, more construction. I aim to encourage people to think beyond the "meat and two veg" convention, where vegetables play second fiddle, and to try to create a balance of textures, colours and flavours — then no one will miss the meat.
Vegetarian food still has a boring, brown,
"socks and sandals" stigma attached to it for some people. It's astonishing, but some people just don't believe a meal can be satisfying without meat on the plate. I'm working hard to do away with that perception and reinvent vegetarian food for good, this time with a sexy, glamourous image which is healthy and modern. This is my most challenging mission.
© Celia Brooks Brown 2007
