When Anna Jones published her first cookbook, A Modern Way to Eat, in 2014, she was invariably described as “a vegetarian food writer”. These days, she notes, she’s mainly just “a food writer”. Only one word has been omitted, but it speaks volumes for the fact that many of us have changed the way we eat. “Putting vegetables at the centre of our tables,” as Jones likes to say, has gone mainstream, either for a few meals a week or permanently. “Which is something I feel really happy about,” she says.
Something else Jones is very pleased about is the OFM award for Best New Cookbook for her third collection of recipes, The Modern Cook’s Year. “I did a big old whoop when the email came through,” she smiles, when we meet for coffee near her flat in east London. “And a little victory dance round the kitchen.”
Jones certainly didn’t imagine that she was on the cusp of anything revolutionary when she started out. She became a vegetarian about a decade ago when she was working in Jamie Oliver’s test kitchen. The initial plan was to try it for six weeks and she recalls struggling to even discuss it with chef friends such Tim Siadatan, another graduate of Fifteen in London, who’d moved on to Fergus Henderson’s St John (Siadatan is now chef-director of Trullo and Padella restaurants).
“I remember feeling nervous saying the word ‘vegetarian’,” says Jones. “St John was the big thing at the time, it was nose to tail, trotters and snouts and all that, and I was going down a very, very different road and I didn’t feel there was anyone else with me at that point.”
Jones is certainly not alone now. She has an army of followers for her books and her weekly Guardian column. Dishes such as the one-pot spaghetti with tomatoes and kale from her second book, A Modern Way to Cook, and her aloo gobi, a roasted cauliflower tray bake with turmeric and coconut from The Modern Cook’s Year, have become instant classics.
“I still think I’m going to get a knock on the door from the Italian embassy about that one-pot pasta,” says Jones. “But I have researched the recipe and apparently it is something they used to do in Puglia.”
Jones says she learned much from her seven years working with Oliver. “He was endlessly annoying because I’d make something, it was the best I thought I could make it and he’d be like, ‘Do this, this and this,’ and you’d do it and it would be 10 times better,” she recalls. “Working with him, you also see which recipes people connected with, and how convenience and ease – ease in the kitchen but also ease of getting ingredients – are so important. The things that are uncomplicated are the things that people are going to end up making.”
Jones’s other great skill is that, reading her books, you never feel you are being lectured. “Rather than wagging a finger at people and telling them not to eat meat and not to eat fish and the impact on endless things, I think people are more persuaded by a nice plate of food,” she says.
“I’m not a scientist,” she continues, “I don’t know the ins and outs of what’s going to happen to the planet, so I stick to what I know. And what I know is lentils.”
Jones laughs, “It’s a bit wider than lentils, hopefully.”
