Given her credentials as an award-winning food and drink writer, it may be surprising to learn that Fiona Beckett didn’t learn to cook before going to university. Her family never particularly enjoyed cooking, she says, so it wasn’t until she left home that she began to experiment with recipes. After spending her university life living in halls and digs, living on various combinations of “chips and beans”, Fiona’s first experience of cooking for friends was a lamb stew with aubergines after she left university. “It was quite ambitious for a first recipe”, she reminisces. “The only problem was I thought a clove of garlic meant a whole head of garlic, so it was totally overwhelmed by garlic.”
Clearly, her learning curve was steep. As the author of seventeen food and drink books to date, many students will recognise Fiona as the writer of “Beyond Baked Beans”, a godsend of a book containing cheap, healthy and easy recipes for anyone living away from home for the first time. While the book is aimed not only at students but at anyone on a budget, “Beyond Baked Beans” was a hit with the populace of universities up and down the country; such was its success that two more titles were subsequently released, “Beyond Baked Beans Green”, a book of vegetarian recipes, and “Beyond Baked Beans Budget”, a response to the feedback received from students after the first book. Early on this decade, while some of Fiona’s four children were at university, she started to get the feeling that student cookbooks were somewhat outdated, and didn’t contain the sorts of recipes that students were really using these days. “The recipe books were pretty dire”, Fiona tells me. “Tins of tuna mixed with condensed mushroom soup, topped with crushed crisps – that sort of thing.”
With fourteen other books on the subject of food and drink under her belt, Fiona was inspired to write “Beyond Baked Beans”, which was first published in 2003 and enjoyed immediate success.
Now five years on, Fiona is writing a new cookbook titled “The Frugal Cook”, due for release this autumn. At the suggestion of her publisher, she began a blog at the beginning of the year to chart her progress in writing the book.
The result was a very comprehensive and entertaining site which follows Fiona’s culinary life, listing new recipes or new variations on old favourites which are tasty and affordable. She also enjoys writing the blog, saying it helps her clarify her thoughts. Her use of the internet as a literary medium seems to support the idea suggested by her most recent books that she has a profound understanding of the needs of students. As well as her blog, Fiona also writes for her website, beyondbakedbeans.com, which is a treasure-trove of recipes and culinary tips alike. There are sections for food for special events, and in terms of tips, everything from cooking apparatus to seasonal ingredients to tips on how to stay healthy are covered.
Advertisement
Healthy eating is important to Fiona, who collaborates on beyondbakedbeans.com with Kerry Torrens, a qualified Nutritional Therapist. I ask Fiona about her and her children’s experience of healthy eating at university. She was less than impressed at the nutritional value of her own chips-and-beans-based student diet, but says that her children had a different experience. Coming from a household where food was so important, they understood the importance of healthy eating and found that they had no choice but to make time in their busy schedules to cook good food. So what changes have there been in student cooking between when she and her children were at university respectively? “There was certainly much more consciousness about food”, she says of her children’s days as students. “Most of them cooked for themselves at some point – they found it was the only way to get home-cooked food.”
Fiona feels there has been a marked improvement in the standard of university catering facilities, but notes that such facilities are not cheap. Fortunately, her children found that their self- catering was cheaper than other alternatives, and expenditure on facilities versus ingredients balanced itself out. However, she remarks that for the modern student, “money was much more of an issue.”
Fiona is also keen to highlight the social importance of cookery skills. Just as her first experiences of frugal cookery were often for her and a group of friends, her children cooked for their fellow students while they were studying. “They found it was a great advantage socially. If you can cook well, everyone wants to be your best friend. And being a good cook can be very seductive...”
Recently on her blog, Fiona has been chronicling her adventures in frugal eating in France, where she and her husband spend a lot of their time staying with Fiona’s mother-in-law who lives there. “It’ll be interesting to see how much cheaper [cooking] is” she writes in one post. “Unfortunately the exchange rate isn’t too great at the moment but food generally costs less than in the UK”. Reading about all the delicious ingredients and the bargains she finds in French markets, I am prompted to ask how much inspiration she has taken from travelling and from foreign cuisine.
Certainly, for her frugal recipes, a great deal; she notes that typical meat and fish-based Western meals are a lot more expensive than “ethnic food”, and says that the latter is therefore a good option for anyone working on a budget.
Advertisement
Her children were well-travelled by the time they started university, as were most of their contemporaries; this, she says, perhaps explains the current generation’s dissatisfaction with the tuna/crisps/mushroom soup-esque monstrosities. For Fiona, Middle Eastern and North African food have been a particular inspiration: “I couldn’t cook without spices”.
With all these delicious and varied recipes floating around, I ask Fiona what are the favourites for her and her family. “Hard one, that. Mine – and my eldest daughter’s – would probably be a Spiced Sweet Potato, Pepper and Aubergine Bake which is cheap, delicious and really easy to make. The boys would probably go for the No-carve Roast Chicken Dinner with sausages and bacon, which is exactly the same as a traditional Sunday lunch without the hassle of carving up the bird (you use legs and thighs). My youngest, who’s a gravy addict, swears by the Amazing Marmite Gravy. My younger daughter would no doubt go for the Warm Chocolate Chip Cookies...”
For cheap and easy to make recipes go to www.beyondbakedbeans.com and to read Fiona’s blog go to thefrugalcook.blogspot.com. The book of the blog will be published in hardback by Absolute Press in the autumn