Anna Jones

​Anna Jones food writing and ethos: vegetables and eating seasonally
 
I first discovered Anna Jones through a Belgian friend of mine a number of years ago while on a visit in Brussels. Many of the delicious, home-cooked meals we enjoyed over those few days were straight from an Anna Jones cookbook. I even remember the first dish that I tried, it stood out to me that much. It was a panzanella recipe with a twist - an autumn panzanella. Those of you familiar with the Italian ‘peasant’ dish of panzanella will associate it with stale bread, ripe tomatoes and generous glugs of good quality extra-virgin olive oil. In Anna’s version, she did what she does best and tweaked the recipe to suit a new season. Plump tomatoes and refreshing cucumber gave way to earthy roots and wintry greens to reinvent this classic. I was hooked. From that first encounter with Anna Jones’ recipes, way of writing and general ethos, I have built up my collection to include all of her cookbooks, most recently her topically zero waste-themed ‘One Pot, Pan, Planet’.
 
Anna champions vegetables, first and foremost. The majority of her recipes, if not all, are entirely vegetarian. If the recipe contains dairy, she often gives vegan alternatives, noting that she is adept at tweaking her own recipes to cater for vegan family members and friends.
 
A hallmark of all four of her books is that, interspersed among the thoughtfully-written and humour-infused recipes, there are entire sections just listing out vegetables, when they are in season and how best to prepare and cook them. Simple as can be. She helps you realise how over-complicated food shopping and prepping and cooking can become, if you let it. Her books remind you that it really can be as simple and pleasurable as sussing out what’s in season and throwing into the pan or the oven for the shortest time necessary.
 
This cooking and eating seasonally is a thread running through all of Anna’s writing and recipes. ‘The Modern Cook’s Year’ is, in fact, divided up by season. She takes us by the hand, reminding us of and introducing us to the primary ingredients to be found in the fresh, hopeful days of spring, through the heady, lazy days of summer, stopping off in a crisp, invigorating autumn before settling into a slow, cosy winter. She makes you feel excited about food, and the possibility of food, again.
 
What is most important and refreshing to me, though, is how subtle this focus on vegetables and seasonal eating is. This might sound strange to say about a cook and about books whose entire focus is on building recipes and meals around seasonal vegetables. Bear with me. What I mean by this is - Anna succumbs to none of the, to my mind, gimmicky “seasonal / plant-based” food writing of recent years. She isn’t imploring us to be vegetarian or vegan because that’s what the flavour of the month is. She isn’t reminding us that for the good of our health, for the good of the planet, this is the way we should be eating. She is just quietly, unassumingly writing and cooking this way, and letting the results speak for themselves. Anna cooks and writes this way because Anna cooks and eats this way. She believes in this way of life. She has built her career in food doing what feels right to her and, if this resonates with others (which it so clearly has), great. If not, I can’t imagine she loses sleep over it.
 
I could write forever on Anna and her recipes (and maybe I will write more at some stage!), but, for now, I’ll rein myself in here and provide just one final thought. Anna doesn’t just guide us through the seasons - she brings us on trips around the world, introducing us to exotic ingredients and traditional recipes that we might have never come across. In doing this, she always acknowledges that she is just a messenger, reminding us that the true experts in these different cuisines are the locals, the generations that came before and passed down recipe after recipe. She prefaces many of these delights with a short paragraph on her first, often crucial, encounter with an ingredient or a recipe. She gives the impression that, in coming across this food or cookery style in an out of the way Japanese izakaya or in a bustling kitchen in the north of Italy, her life was changed.
 
It’s a similar feeling to the one I had when I first discovered Anna’s cookbooks in a warm and welcoming apartment in Brussels one frosty January.

​Kelly Girardi