Carr-Ellison Lucy - A Love of Eating

List of Recipes

About the Book

Known for their bold and bright food, Lucy Carr-Ellison and Jemima Jones are the pair behind Tart London: boutique caterers, pop-up kitchen pros and ES Magazine columnists.

Here they share their ultimate vibrant, fresh and wholesome recipes dishes that are a pleasure to make and a pleasure to eat.

Whether youre looking for a weeknight one-pot wonder, a splendid brunch, or the perfect menu for a long and lazy lunch, this book is about honest, full-flavoured and effortlessly enjoyable eating.

About the Authors

Lucy Carr-Ellison and Jemima Jones are the founders of Tart London, a boutique-style catering company that provides high-quality, healthy and delicious on-site cooking for fashion and film shoots and private events. Previous clients include Stella McCartney, Gucci, Lancme and Tim Walker, and magazines such as Vogue , GQ and LOVE . Lucy and Jemima also write a weekly ES Magazine column in which they share some of their best-loved recipes, and are planning the opening of their own restaurant following a successful pop-up.

Contents

To our Mums for giving us
the love of eating

Foreword: The Photographic Kitchen

When I first met Lucy she must have been in her teens. Like all teenagers she was trying to figure out her path in life and was considering taking up photography. She came and helped out on an Italian Vogue fashion shoot where I was taking a picture of Lily Cole dressed as bait and tackle on a giant fishing hook suspended over a Northumbrian river.

Lucy soon started to take a lot of pictures of her own which she kept in a box. She photographed friends, family and boyfriends. The pictures were good and really seemed to be going somewhere, but to support yourself as a young photographer starting out is hard, so she decided to help out in the kitchen, catering for the crew on photographic shoots. One thing led to another and eventually she met Jemima; they joined forces and cooked for all my crew, who were always hungry after the very early starts fashion photography demands. Jemima was the perfect addition to the tarty duo, chattering away serving spicy eggs for breakfast or slow cooked lamb for lunch on chilly days out on location. The two working together have come from cooking dishes on a camp stove out on a location shoot, to the recipes in this book.

My mother used to write cookbooks so I grew up constantly trawling through the market hunting for the right this, or the right that. Wed go a long way to get Seville oranges or whatever the target of the ingredient hunt was and I remember my Mums utter joy in that quest. Once we had found what she wanted, it was swung round and round in a brown paper bag, dropped in the wicker basket and hauled back to the kitchen for grating, squeezing, boiling then reducing, or whisking, mixing, folding then baking

Cooking is all about the right ingredients And taking photographs is very much like cooking.

I obsess about sniffing out the ingredients that combine to create a photograph. Ill go a long way, get up very early, and stay up very late, to seek out a specific light, colour, backdrop, animal, mineral or vegetable that I see as part of a magical combination that articulates a mood in my belly.

The book you are now about to read is a love letter to that universal joy of seeking out the right ingredients. That same discernment, obsession and taste that lies behind a great photograph is just as relevant here, freshly baked in Lucy and Jemimas oven and served as a Tart.

Tim Walker
London, 2018

The story of Tart is really all about the beginning of a friendship.

In 2010 we were both in our early twenties and living in the East Village in New York Lucy was studying photography and Jemima interning at Vanity Fair. We were having a great time: working hard and taking full advantage of the incredible restaurant culture there. We were put in touch by a mutual friend and met for the first time on the Lower East Side Lucy was running late from having a piercing done and caught Jemima in the nick of time we immediately got on not least because of our shared obsession with food. We would venture all over the city to try out new restaurants, pop-ups, shops and markets, captivated by the constantly evolving scene, and taking every opportunity to try new dishes and ingredients.

When we came back to London a few years later, we were buzzing from our experience. Happily, we found that a food revolution was taking place in the UK. People had begun to put more thought into the quality of the food they ate, and good food was more popular than ever. But we realised that one thing was missing. When wed been together on photoshoots in New York, we were always struck by the amazing, fresh, healthy food on offer it was proper food, made by hand, and a long way from the dry sandwiches and wilted salads you would be faced with in the UK. We realised that what was missing was a boutique-style catering company that made wholesome, attractive food that people actually wanted to eat and we were the people to do it. We decided to set up Tart.

In a whirlwind of early mornings and long days of planning and preparation, we went from enthusiastic foodies who loved to cook delicious feasts for friends and family, to professional cooks running on site catering kitchens everywhere from a horsebox in the countryside to a tiny minimalist studio in the city. But even though we were now cooking for bigger groups (around 40 or 50), it was important to us to create a cosy atmosphere for everyone to come together, eat and enjoy their time off. We have always made everything fresh from scratch, in situ, and this really helps not only to create great tasting food, but to inspire a sense of togetherness too. We think hard about the variety and presentation of our food. Models want to eat well, feel good and look good, but we also cater for a whole crew who need something satisfying and sustaining. We plan our menus with this in mind, providing an assortment of sharing platters that are well balanced and seasonal, but nourishing too. We are constantly inspired by our travels, always picking up ideas from the ingredients, techniques and dishes we encounter on trips and holidays, the things that make food delicious and unusual. At Tart our ethos is to take the flavours and vibrancy characteristic of our home cooking and translate it into something bigger in scale, but applying the same thought and care that makes sharing a meal together so special.