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Kyle Cathie |
Royal moment for cook-book queen
Publisher Kyle Cathie’s latest offering has an introduction by Prince Charles, writes Gerald Isaaman
Allegra’s book costs £19.99 if you want the recipes, and the Duchy Originals Cookbook £25.
KYLE Cathie’s doctor mother taught her to cook. “From the time I was 11 we had to make a meal a day, though I don’t remember my very first dish,” she insists. “And I’m sure I’ve never been a natural at cooking, but I will experiment with anything you can throw at me.”
That’s one reason why all her own three grown-up children are good cooks but, more importantly, why Kyle is the uncrowned queen of cookery books, the independent publisher whose recipes have gone round the world and earned her company its own well-baked crust of success.
From her offices tucked away behind Marks and Spencer in Arlington Road, Camden Town, she produces up to 25 new books a year while maintaining a back list of some 200 titles, all currently being sold.
Among them is her very first one, Patricia Wells’ Bistro Cookbook, the best-seller Fifty Great Curries of India by Camilla Punjabi, which has sold almost a million, and cookbooks by celebrity chefs such as Anthony Worrall Thompson and others covering all the great cuisines.
But the latest one has a distinctive royal flavour, along with an introduction, no less, by Prince Charles. This is the Duchy Originals Cookbook compiled by Johnny Acton and Nick Sandler, who offers a passionate behind the scenes guide to some 140 organic products, from oaten biscuits made from grain grown on the Prince’s land to Balmoral honey cake. The food, to be found, paradoxically, on many a supermarket shelf this Christmas, has a touch of class as well as old virtues to it, the aim being to tempt people away from an unethical mass market culture while, at the same time, raising raising £6 million for the Prince’s Charities Foundation.
Prince Charles wants to heal the divide between the consumer and the land, to reconnect what we eat and what is good for us with the preferable local farmer and “so rebuild a thriving indigenous food culture in this country”.
Kyle adds proudly: “Prince Charles was involved at every stage. He is the reason d’etre of Duchy Originals and has approved of what we have done. I was disappointed, absolutely, not to meet him, but then I didn’t really expect to.”
The beautifully produced book is already soaring in the charts and is itself a stark reminder that Kyle started her enterprise in the empty garage of her Westminster home in 1989 when her late lawyer husband suggested it could become their children’s playroom.
“I said let’s have chickens in there,” she recalls with a grin. “He said: ‘You can’t keep chickens in the centre of London’. And I said: ‘Well, if we can’t have chickens then we’ll have a publishing house – and I’ll start one on my own.’”
By that time she had already spent 13 years with Pan books, had worked for Hamish Hamilton and Macmillan and had colleagues willing to join her. “It was a bit spartan at first,” she admits. “It was so cold that our accountant wrapped his legs in tartan woollies all the time, but at least we had a computer, which was quite rare then for a small publisher.”
Books on poetry, gardening, health and beauty, the mind, body and spirit, as well as a preponderance of dazzling cook books, have poured out ever since, Kyle’s ambition always tied to her belief in publishing “books with an absolute ability to stay in print for a long time.”
Her determination overcome one early set-back when all the firm’s Apple Mac computers were stolen systematically in three burglaries over six weeks before, after several moves, she arrived in Camden Town in 1997.
Today, having grown like Topsy, she has a staff of 22, a turnover approaching £6 million, a host of backlist titles and a new books catalogue that sticks to no more than 25 titles a year, with the prospect too that, like Duchy Originals, they will be translated and sell in other countries.
Kyle dismisses any thoughts the she is overcooking the subject her company thrives on.
Some critics believe that celebrity chefs on TV are pure entertainment, that the vast array of ready to cook supermarket dishes makes for lazy cooks, if no cooks at all.
“Most of the food you get in supermarkets is very bland, is controlled for salt and for flavour and reflects only a certain quality of ingredients,” she counters. “The best quality steak takes just five minutes to cook and tastes so different from anything cheaper.
“Entertainment? Oh, yes I think the chefs are marvellous. If that’s what it takes to cheer you up at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning after a hangover, then enjoy it. But I do believe TV has helped to create more interesting cooks and, because of the changes in our population, created cooks able to make much more varied food.
“The marketing of food has become so much more sophisticated. And not just in London. You get good Lebanese food now. And Thai food. Moroccan, Indian, Japanese.
But there is one problem for me in that food has also caused more air miles. We don’t need to fly it in from miles around the world.”
Kyle’s softly-spoken words of encouragement hide her own dynamic determination. She will be cooking goose, her favourite, for Christmas, but there are plenty of fascinating suggestions in another of her productions, Allegra McEvedy’s Colour Cookbook.
How about almond, lemon and coriander stuffing for your bird, little Russian Peroshki pies from Russia, also now rampant in New York, lime chicken kebabs with saffron jewelled rice, venison and prune casserole with chestnut mash, blood orange and rose water jelly and, perhaps Salade Sheherizade made with clementines and halva?
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