15. Anna Jones
“I honestly can’t believe sometimes that the ideas that I have here in my kitchen are then cooked by other people, for the people that they love. It feels like a really special thing.”
Many of you will have her books on your kitchen shelves and will no doubt have tried her recipes. The latest Worshipful Ones interview has been a long time coming but I think it’ll be worth the wait, as it is with the inimitable Anna Jones.
Anna lives in Clapton with her partner and two children, one of whom is 6 months old. She invited me into her home on a spring-like morning recently and immediately went about making me coffee and breakfast. So things got off to a pretty excellent start.
Anna has not always worked in food. In fact, she studied economics at university and went on to work in finance roles before moving briefly into PR. While she was there, aged 24, she had an epiphany prompted by an article in a Sunday paper and enrolled on to Jamie Oliver’s cookery school, at the now-defunct Fifteen. She completed the year-long course, which comprised various month-long units where Anna learned many different culinary disciplines: “I worked in this brilliant kitchen and the way Fifteen worked, was that you’d do a month on pastry, a month on dessert… every aspect of preparing and cooking food. We’d go on fantastic trips to Tuscany to learn about olive oil, I don’t think I’d have had that cooking education anywhere else. It’s so sad that Fifteen doesn’t exist anymore. I feel really lucky to have had that experience – it was a very gentle and inclusive kitchen”.
Cooking since childhood and a self-proclaimed “geek”, Anna was often inside experimenting in the kitchen while her friends were outside playing: “I started off on cupcakes and fruit salads and then I got really into making family meals and trying fancier stuff – a lemon mousse, for example!” Her parents weren’t big cooks but always enjoyed good food and were hugely supportive of Anna’s endeavours, buying her cookbooks and ingredients and giving her the opportunity and freedom to cook for everyone at home.
Anna got into cookery writing after being interviewed by a journalist while she was working at Fifteen. She mentioned in the interview that she was hoping to write about food in the future, so when a publisher needed someone to write a cookery book for Innocent Smoothies, that journalist recommended Anna. She did such a good job that they offered her the opportunity to write her own book, which became A Modern Way to Eat. After seven years with Jamie Oliver, she found her new path. Writing fulfilled a dream that she’d had since childhood and she has gone on to write four more books that grace the shelves of most of my friends’ kitchens (and mine), with another one in the pipeline! You heard it here first.
I know Anna because our children attend the same school, so it was inevitable that motherhood would come up in our conversation, and I’m always fascinated to hear how the women I admire juggle work with parenting. “I feel like it’s a forever project, I’ll still be working out the juggle when my children have moved out and I’m 65! It’s a lifetime job and a privilege, but it can be tricky. You’re so thrown out of your pattern when you have kids…. how do I dress again? for example. And I’ve definitely felt it in the kitchen, your cooking becomes completely different”
The challenge, Anna says, is aligning how she wants to parent with her work. But she loves that her children are seeing her work “it’s important to me that they do, and I am fortunate that I am able to be a bit flexible. Especially when breastfeeding my baby, he needs to be near me”. Her advice to other working mums? “Let yourself off the hook. I read somewhere once that parenting is a process of revaluating your levels of acceptance. By nature I am a perfectionist, but I am trying to accept that with young children and trying to work a bit, not everything is going to get done. It is all possible, but it might not all be possible in one day”.
I asked Anna about her career highlights, and unsurprisingly one in particular stands out:
“Every year, I would write down what I hoped to achieve that year – sometimes massive pipe-dreams, sometimes more achievable goals. Years before I started to write books, I jotted down that I wanted to do just that. One of the things I wrote down on a piece of paper, was that I wanted to win the Observer Food Monthly cookbook award. So when I did go on to win (in 2018, for The Modern Cook’s Year), it felt like quite a moment. It was a beautiful ceremony and Nigella (Lawson) presented me with the award. She was the one who got me really excited about cooking when I was quite young, so if I could distil things into a moment, that was a good one”.
When Anna started out in cooking, her aim was to use unusual ingredients and explore new ideas, and while she says that still exists in her recipes now, she has gone on to be driven by a need for them to be rooted in practicality, or, as she puts it, usefulness. “I care about whether people are making a great dinner for their families on a Tuesday night. That’s what I want my recipes to be. Maybe a couple of them make their way into people’s weekly/monthly rotation of recipes. My window of time to cook dinner in the evening is pretty much the same as everyone else’s, 20-40 minutes. I really want to make the most of every moment that I’m cooking. I think the choreography of a recipe is important: start this while that’s cooking, chop the topping, pick the parsley or chop the olives, whatever else it is. Not wasting time is vital”.
Another thing Anna feels strongly about is that a recipe should exist all on one page, so no flipping back and forth between different sections of your cookbook. It also needs to be a meal in itself, no accompaniments necessary. Her inspiration comes from travel, her interest in different cultures, new ingredients and eating out, but most of all it comes from a desire to create useful, everyday recipes.
On living and working in Hackney, she says that for her, it’s the best neighbourhood and she is thrilled to be in such a diverse area: “There are so many brilliant people here, I’m inspired by all of them. There are many different communities that in turn bring so many different foods, and options for food, in restaurants and takeaways and the massive array of different ingredients we have in our local corner shops, which we are so fortunate to have”. And of course, she and her family make good use of the expanse of green space we have on the doorstep.
Finding a moment to yourself as a parent of young children can be tough, but Anna starts her day with a mug of Lady Grey tea with oat milk and feels as though nothing can quite start before she’s done that. “…then my morning coffee is definitely something that needs to happen. Also, I love scent and I have a eucalyptus spray that I use in the shower which creates a sort of sauna vibe and it takes four seconds, which are the only rituals I have time for! I go to Yoga twice a week at Yoga on the Lane. If I don’t do that, I feel like my week is not really OK”.
When asked how she feels when people buy her books and cook her recipes, Anna responds with tangible delight “I honestly can’t believe sometimes that the ideas that I have here in my kitchen are then cooked by other people, for the people that they love. It feels like a really special thing. Those moments around the table are the lifeblood of a family. I really show love through food, so that I have any hand in someone else doing that for the people that they love, feels really incredible. I feel very lucky that it’s my job”.
Chatting about Anna’s plans for the future, she says she’s always got ideas fizzing around in her brain, one thing that keeps coming back to the fore is her desire to bring together some of the people who are doing great work around eating well and doing good for the planet. “Perhaps a podcast, a way of sharing that information together. The power of a group of people who really know their stuff and feel passionately about it is much more valuable. I have been working on something with my sister which is based around that feeling, so that’s something I would dearly like to do, and I love to work with my sister. It will be fun and fiery!”
Finally, I asked Anna which local businesses she most admires, which inevitably turned into a hugely enthusiastic discussion about all of our favourite women doing great work. “We have so many amazing people! Naomi at Yoga on the Lane for starters - I am spoiled by her classes and I can’t do yoga with anyone else. (YOTL) is a place that holds people. You go there to do yoga but you get so much more. I cannot fly the flag for her any higher. And I love Lillie’s jam shop (London Borough of Jam)! So many of those individual shops have been pushed out, so I treasure that place. The Triangle stores are both so good, they have great taste. So, when I am up for treating myself or one of the children it’s just lovely to have those places. Community is so important and we have that in spades. And there are so many women-led businesses, and of course those that don’t have shop fronts: SZ Blockprints, Dabba Drop, Kankan soaps. It’s wonderful”.
Amen to that.
To keep up to date with Anna Jones and that forthcoming cookbook, find her website here (she has an excellent newsletter, by the way) and her Instagram here.
Update: Anna’s latest book, Easy Wins, is now available to buy! Find signed copies at Honey & Co.