“The current media fashion for food has chased and intimidated many ordinary people out of their kitchens. Where once families and friends treated cooking and eating as intimate acts of physical and psychological sustenance they are now widely seen as part of a self-conscious and self-promoting public performance. Thankfully Debbie Bailey‘s recipes restore the epicurean experience to its rightful place. Each page of this delightful new cookbook offers insight into a profoundly personal journey of experience and emotion. As readers we join the author on her travels not as an outsider looking in to admire and envy but rather as a culinary companion. Many of Debbie’s chosen locations are gloriously glamorous but, wherever she is in the world, she generously invites us into the ordinary and daily delights of who she is and what she has learnt along the way.
Like many of us, Debbie is engaged in a voyage of discovery as to what it means to be a proud, rooted South African and also a connected, contemporary world citizen. Her personal confidence around cooking and her ability to combine past, present and future in each offering ensures that recipes reach out and embrace elements of home and away. Almost all the flavours found in this book are as home-grown as they are international because that is who Debbie is. They may have foreign elements but they are also all unafraid of ebullient innovation in a manner that marks them out as having a South African soul. Under her gourmet guidance far and near converge into a deliciously diverse coherent culinary whole.” - Anna Trapido, Food Writer
“The current media fashion for food has chased and intimidated many ordinary people out of their kitchens. Where once families and friends treated cooking and eating as intimate acts of physical and psychological sustenance they are now widely seen as part of a self-conscious and self-promoting public performance. Thankfully Debbie Bailey‘s recipes restore the epicurean experience to its rightful place. Each page of this delightful new cookbook offers insight into a profoundly personal journey of experience and emotion. As readers we join the author on her travels not as an outsider looking in to admire and envy but rather as a culinary companion. Many of Debbie’s chosen locations are gloriously glamorous but, wherever she is in the world, she generously invites us into the ordinary and daily delights of who she is and what she has learnt along the way.
Like many of us, Debbie is engaged in a voyage of discovery as to what it means to be a proud, rooted South African and also a connected, contemporary world citizen. Her personal confidence around cooking and her ability to combine past, present and future in each offering ensures that recipes reach out and embrace elements of home and away. Almost all the flavours found in this book are as home-grown as they are international because that is who Debbie is. They may have foreign elements but they are also all unafraid of ebullient innovation in a manner that marks them out as having a South African soul. Under her gourmet guidance far and near converge into a deliciously diverse coherent culinary whole.” - Anna Trapido, Food Writer