Welcome to my first post of 2023!
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Happy New Year to everyone!
This week I’m featuring my first podcast with a humdinger of a guest…Naomi Duguid.
I first heard of the Toronto-based cookbook author, Naomi Duguid, in the mid-'90s when she came to Montreal to give a cooking class based on her first book, Flatbreads and Flavours: a Baker's Atlas. Co-authored with her ex-husband, Jeffrey Alford, Flatbreads won the James Beard Award (think culinary Oscars) for cookbook of the year in 1996. One of their follow-up books, the much-acclaimed Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet: A Culinary Journey through Southeast Asia, also won the Beard as cookbook of the year in 2000. Their other books — Seductions of Rice, Home Baking, Mangoes and Curry Leaves, and Beyond the Great Wall — racked up an impressive number of awards as well
Naomi and I eventually met in Montreal back in 2005 when she came to cook in my kitchen while on a book tour to promote Mangoes and Curry Leaves. I was impressed from the get go. She was warm, friendly, and incredibly sharp. I could barely keep up as she chatted, chopped and stir-fried. After plating her dish, she created a little montage of ingredients for the newspaper photographer, smiled for the camera, and suddenly we were done.
She landed in my kitchen again in 2008 while in town to promote Beyond the Great Wall, but before she headed to her next interview, I invited her to join me for dinner on a restaurant review. She happily accepted and that night, at the bistro M sur Masson, we enjoyed a great meal together —one of many more to come. Oh and I must add that when she ordered her meal in the most perfect French, I sat back in my chair and thought to myself, “Ok, she’s perfect.”
In 2012, Duguid began writing cookbooks solo, beginning with Burma: Rivers of Flavour, and then in 2016, Taste of Persia (link for my story in the Montreal Gazette about that book here). And let’s be clear, she doesn’t just write her books, all of the location photography is credited to Duguid as well.
And now comes her her latest, The Miracle of Salt (Artisan, 2022), published this fall and already making waves. This book is essential reading for all of us cooks as she goes into great detail not only on salt, but ingredients made with salt (miso, fish sauce, soy sauce), along with a plethora of recipes that rely on salt to enhance and transform.
With all of her former books centred on far off and under-appreciated corners of the planet (I would never expect a book on Provençal cuisine from Naomi!), I wondered why she now turned her focus on a single ingredient. Or is it a condiment? Or a food? Listen to the podcast at the top of the page to find out!
And BTW, the Harald McGee book she’s referring to at 14:13 is On Food and Cooking.
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