Annabel Langbein - Bella: My Life in Food

Bursting with tender and funny anecdotes and gorgeous recipes, Bella is Annabel Langbeins must-read memoir.

For the first time, New Zealands most popular cookbook author writes about her remarkable life and how food has shaped it, highlighting some of the recipes that have resonated most strongly with her over the years.

From her childhood fascination with cooking to a teenage flirtation as a Maoist hippie, to possum trapping and living off the land as a hunter and forager, to travelling and starting her own croissant business in Brazil, Annabels life has always been centred on food and nature. Out of this came an obsession with creating cookbooks, introducing a generation of cooks to her simple recipes for delicious, stylish meals.

Annabel has lived a huge and varied life, and she writes vividly about her many adventures. From throughout this rich life in food she has chosen 60 key recipes, created with her signature style and flair that make cooking easy for everyone, sharing them in this beautifully photographed book.

Me and my cousin Callie as toddlers (Im on the left).

My first and only modelling assignment.

I would have been about seven or eight when, during a summer family holiday, the first signs of my precocious palate came to light. After piling into Dads Plymouth, we had set off on the ferry across Cook Strait then driven southfurther south than we had ever been beforeto Aoraki/Mount Cook.

For a treat, Dad had booked us into the Hermitage, then run by the government-owned Tourist Hotel Corporation. Unlike my mothers dining room at home in Wellington, there was nothing intimate, welcoming or charming about the hotels formal eating space. The carpet, patterned in giant mustard, olive-green and orange whorls, looked like someone had thrown up on it. The ornate gold wallpaper was studded with hideous orange glass lamps that emitted a stark, blazing light. It was all new and very fancy, the latest in sixties decor. The chef was Swissthey all were in big hotels at that time. People werent laughing and drinking and talking and having fun. You werent supposed to do that. This was fine dining.

A penguin-suited waiter who looked like he had a carrot stuck up his bottom presented the menus to each of us with great aplomb. I skirted through the offerings. Ohh, there were brains. Wow.

How are the brains cooked? I piped up from my corner of the table. I saw the waiter raising an eyebrow at my father. Please, I quickly added. I could see the waiter thinking, There is a horrible child speaking to me in my restaurant .

Ahh, young lady, they are cooked in butter, with capers and lemon. You would not like the brains.

Yes please. Thank you. I passed the menu back to him.

There was an aghast intake of breath from both the waiter and my parents. It felt like an Antarctic blast had come in through the door.

You cant order anything else, you know, my father said. This is dinner. There is nothing else if you dont like it. But his attempts to browbeat me into changing my mind fell on deaf ears.

Id never eaten capers before. Id certainly never eaten brains. As I cut into them, the crispy exterior gave way to a pillowy softness. In that first taste, the sweet flavour of caramelised butter filled my mouth, and carried through to a creamy, sweet, almost melting richness.

The brains arrived on a big white plate, looking like enormous golden walnuts sitting on a buttery golden sauce flecked with little buds of green. Id never eaten capers before. Id certainly never eaten brains. As I cut into them, the crispy exterior gave way to a pillowy softness. In that first taste, the sweet flavour of caramelised butter filled my mouth, and carried through to a creamy, sweet, almost melting richness. The brains tasted just like my favourite part of a lamb chop: the creamy white cord that ran in a thread inside the bone, whichdid I know?is the spinal cord. And the sauce was the cleverest thing: toasty brown butter with a fresh tang of lemon, studded with little flavour bombs of lemony, briny pickled capers. The most perfect foil to cut through the richness of the brains.

The entire dish was so deeply delicious that, if I could have licked the plate clean, I would have.

THEY SAY THE QUALITIES you least admire in a child are the ones you most appreciate in an adult. Well, Id like to think thats the case. I was the youngest of threea demanding, attention-seeking child, always challenging, always naughty. My sister, Prue, was four and a half years older than me, and my brother, Tim, eight years my senior. The age gap meant that, as a small child, I didnt spend a lot of time with my siblings.

My enthusiasm as a toddler for raiding my mothers baking tins and using them to transform the garden into all manner of pies and tarts was unrivallednot that any of my creations were edible. I would proudly arrive at the kitchen door with yet another special pie or chocolate cake for Mummy that I had created with tiny flower buds, and the occasional herb or vegetable leaf, combined with various amounts and saturations of soil and gravel. Recipes were in the making. I can only imagine my mothers dismay at seeing her would-be posies for the househydrangeas, roses, anemonesdismembered by this bedraggled, muddy child and turned into an ugly brown gloop. Yet she never showed it, graciously taking my offerings and finding the means to proclaim some not-obviously-visible virtue.

Sometimes, though, I would work Mum up into such a state shed grab the wooden spoon and chase me around the house. There was a small, secret hiding place in the back of the linen cupboard, which bizarrely had a sliding lock on the inside. I would run outside, Mum yelling and brandishing the wooden spoon in hot pursuit. After a couple of laps of the house, Id race back inside, grabbing a can of condensed milk from the pantry on my way to the linen cupboard. Id lock myself inside, hidden, and eat my way through the can until things had calmed down. Actually, I was a brat of a child.