Sophie Farrah meets cookery writer, TV cook, restauranteur and co-founder of The Chiswick Cookbook Festival, Jo Pratt...
Life was always going to be about food for Jo Pratt: “I love eating, and I love cooking. Food was a natural route.”
Testament to this, Jo is the award-winning and
Susan Bell
bestselling author of an impressive eight cookbooks (with her ninth underway). She is also an accomplished food stylist, TV cook and one of the four female chefs behind Heathrow Terminal 2 restaurant, The Gorgeous Kitchen, and somehow, she finds the time to organize The Chiswick Cookbook Festival, which returns for its second year later this month.
“Interestingly, sales of cookbooks dipped for a while because of the availability of everything online, but they’ve really picked up again,” she explains.
“Cookbooks are such an important source of inspiration – all the colours and enticing pictures of food. They are so beautiful, which is actually a shame in way as they are often sticky and splattered with food! But as a food writer that’s how you want your books to be.”
The festival, which runs alongside the acclaimed Chiswick Book Festival, features chef demonstrations, author talks, food and drink tastings, supper clubs, hands-on workshops and more.
“We’ve got two marquees this year and cookery demonstrations all weekend, and everyone in the audience gets a box of whatever is being cooked on stage – not just a mouth-sized bit, but a proper taster. We put ourselves under a lot of pressure doing that, but we think it’s important and makes us different from other festivals.”
Just some of this year’s names include TV cook and ‘botanical baker’ Juliet Sear, Masterchef champion Saliha Mahmood Ahmed, YouTube sensation Ian Haste, and far flung flavours from the likes of Kay Plunkett Hogge, Maryam Sinaiee, John Gregory-Smith, Asma Khan and Giancarlo and Katie Caldesi. There will also be supper clubs and numerous workshops – from knife skills to sushi making – and Jo herself will be demonstrating recipes from her latest book, The Flexible Pescatarian.
“We try to not have too much crossover with the same types of cuisine, so we have to be a picky, which is a nice position to be in.”
The festival is organized entirely voluntarily by Jo, co-founder Lucy Cufflin and a team of helpers, with participating chefs donating their time for free. All proceeds go to charity – this year The Felix Project, which rescues edible food waste and delivers it free of charge to vulnerable people suffering food poverty in London.
“There’s a real mix of us pulling it all together, we’re all very keen foodies. We don’t gain anything from it – except a few more grey hairs!”
Sept 12-16; tickets from £8; cookbookfestival.org
