We're writing a cookbook because it's our idea of leaving something of a legacy for our kid. Something that says, look, we're Saints, and we are so dam proud of that. We want you to be to. We want to celebrate and share with her how special this little Island we call home is.
We've never written a cookbook before. We're not trained chef's, hell we're not even writers, but here we are - trying to figure it out and make it happen. Our goal is to create the definitive cookbook on St Helenian food
Covering not only popular recipes, but also bygone recipes before they are lost to memory and time. We're aiming to see if we can uncover the history of St Helena food, to try and figure out how this mix of mainly British, Indian and African influences melted together to create what we recognise as Saint cooking.
Our hope and ambition is to create a cookbook that can sit on any shelf anyway in the world. To hold its own next to any celebrity chef's book, and stand the test of time. So in years to come it will be a marker in celebration of St Helena through its food. We'll also share how we are going about creating this cookbook with you. As we don't know any better, and as Robin is a digital designer and Emma-Jane has written for the islands newspapers in the past - we plan to write, research, photograph and design the entire book ourselves.
Emma-Jane doing the research, Robin doing the actual book design, and together we'll write, test and photograph all the recipes and stories about them. We’re looking forward to that part! As a general rule we’ll make a recipe at least 3 times to ensure its as straight forward as possible for you to follow and make.While this wouldn’t be the first cookbook of St Helena food, we want it to be as comprehensive as possible.
Whereas the others of course included the headline cultural recipes, some of the lesser known ones are omitted, or they didn’t include the history of the food, or stories about how food shapes our culture. All of which we aim to include to create the most comprehensive book about St Helena food possible. Gonna be fun!
