About

She writes about food for a wide range of publications including The New York Times, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal (where she wrote the 'Table Talk' column). She also writes a monthly column for Scribehound Food.

Her first cookbook, THE SECRET OF COOKING, was published in 2023. It was chosen by Nigella Lawson as her Cookbook Corner book of the year. It includes recipes and ideas for making cooking much easier, whether you are cooking alone or cooking for a crowd; and ways to make use of simple everyday objects you probably already have in your kitchen such as box graters.

Her latest book is THE HEART-SHAPED TIN, a book about the emotional life of kitchen objects. It is her most personal book: part memoir and partly telling the stories of other people and their most beloved kitchen treasures.

She is interested in how food relates to every other aspect of human life, from history to psychology to technology. Her book CONSIDER THE FORK on the history of kitchen inventions, from fire to ice to pots and pans, was published in multiple languages including Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Estonian, Turkish and Chinese.

Her prize-winning book on the psychology of eating and where our food preferences come from, FIRST BITE, was published in 2015.

As well as writing about food, she writes about a range of other subjects, including film and biography, especially for The London Review of Books.

She has three children and a dog and lives in Cambridge in the U.K.