Twenty food questions with Joanne Harris....

Photo credit: Takazumi Uemura

Joanne Harris is a magnificent fiction writer. Half British, half French, she is perhaps most famous for 1999 bestseller Chocolat. All of Ms. Harris' novels are engrossing, evocative, and stay with you long after you've finished the last page. 

I was especially interested to hear how Ms. Harris would respond to my questions as her novels are often very focused around food and the senses.  
Her answers are, just as in her books; atmospheric and detailed,  leaving  you wanting to eat everything she's described.

Patchwork Tablecloth: What are your favourite foods?

Joanne Harris: It depends on the season. Right now I’m craving: spicy chickpea curry; chilli macaroni and cheese; hot Thai noodles; green papaya salad; olive bread. Then there are the things I rarely ever say no to: spicy pasta; fresh seafood; moules marinières; fresh bread and olives; French black pudding and apple; roast lamb with garlic and rosemary; grilled goat’s cheese salad.

PT: What sort of food do you like to cook?

JH: Food that doesn’t take a long time to prepare. Spicy salads; pasta with roast vegetables and garlic; soups and stews; rosemary garlic bread; grilled vegetable couscous; chilli nachos with cheese. My husband and daughter are both vegetarians, so I generally cook vegetarian food, although sometimes when I eat out, I go back to the dishes of my childhood.

PT: What are your favourite holidays or celebrations? What foods do you associate with them?

JH: My daughter associates Christmas with Mexican food, so I often cook fajitas, nachos and vegetarian chilli for her. We have cheese poppas to start with (shaped like Christmas crackers), and sometimes we make a rich, chilli-bean soup. I’m not a fan of the traditional Christmas dinner, except for the pudding, which I like (especially with chilli and dark chocolate grated over the top).

PT: What are your favourite fruits and vegetables?

JH: Sweet potatoes; spinach; chickpeas; avocadoes; purple-sprouting broccoli; pineapple; plums; mango; strawberries; Jerusalem artichokes; flageolet beans; tomatoes; chestnuts;haricot beans; sweetcorn; mushrooms.

PT: What did you eat as a child?

JH: I was a fussy eater. I wouldn’t eat anything that wasn’t immediately recognizable; so mostly I ate bread; uncooked fruits; fish without sauce; meat with no gravy; puddings with no cream or custard. I hated school dinners – I hardly ever ate anything at school. I remember the dinner ladies trying to persuade me to eat at least the puddings, but they were all drowned in custard, which I hated. 

PT: Imagine your refrigerator. What do you see inside?

JH: Milk; spring greens; tomatoes; goat’s cheese; grated Cheddar; low-fat mozzarella;hummous; jars of red pickled chillies; Indian hot lime pickle; Greek olives; sunblush tomatoes; free-range eggs; avocadoes; couscous salad.

PT: Are there any foods you dislike? What are they?

JH: I’m still not a fan of gravy, custard, cream, butter or mayonnaise. 

PT: Where do you consider yourself to be "from"? Please tell me a bit about the food in the place where you grew up, the place you live now, and, ifyou'd like, anywhere else that is important to you.

JH: I was born in Yorkshire of a French mother, and so I have two very different culinary traditions. From my English grandmother I learnt about traditional baking; pies; tarts; cakes and puddings (although I never learnt to like custard or English-style gravy). From my French family I learnt about fresh seafood; rare steaks; terrines; sauces; fresh vegetables in season (and cooked only for the barest minimum of time); herbs; dressings; spices. When I was a child, English food was often very bland; the vegetables cooked to a slush; the meat overcooked and drowned in gravy. I remember how difficult it was to find fish that hadn’t been frozen, battered or breadcrumbed to within an inch of its life. Even such everyday things as pasta were quite difficult to find in Yorkshire. I remember a lot of boil-in-the bag fish (which I hated); mashed potatoes and carrots. Salad was mostly green lettuce leaves and sliced ham. Now things are very different; Britain has undergone a kind of culinary renaissance, and there are many different food traditions to explore and enjoy. 

PT: What is your typical breakfast?

JH: Something substantial, generally. Porridge, with honey and dried fruit; or scrambled eggs with chilli and sourdough bread; or fresh pineapple and cinnamon muffins; or spiced hot chocolate and hot cross buns; or kedgeree with mango pickle. I like breakfast better than lunch, which I often skip when I’m working.

PT: What are your favourite beverages?

JH: In the morning; breakfast tea. With meals, red wine (or sometimes, champagne). Fresh juices, occasionally: I particularly like red berry juices like cherry, grape and blackcurrant. 
Guilty pleasures; diet Coke, chai latte and passionfruit bubble tea. I once went to a meal at Windsor Castle where they served a ’74 Margaux: it was undoubtedly the best thing I’ve ever drunk (and I doubt I’ll ever get to taste one again). When I was a child we always drank Sauternes at family celebrations. I still love it. My mother used to say that if we ever got super-rich, we’d drink Château d’Yquem instead. Last year, I bought her a bottle. We both tasted it for the first time. It was very expensive, but totally worth it...

PT: Which sweets and desserts do you like best?

JH: I’m not as sweet-toothed as people expect me to be. I often don’t bother with desserts, although it’s rare for me to turn down a cheeseboard. I don’t really like chocolate desserts, either, although I’m fond of a nice crème caramel, a tarte Tatin or a lemon tart. I tend to eat sweets between meals if I have them at all; my local café does a mean Eccles cake, fresh-baked and hot, served with a wedge of Cheddar.

PT: What is your favourite combination of flavours?

JH: I like chillies in most things, including in sweets – chilli hot chocolate is a favourite – and I love the combination of cardamom and hot milk in chai latte, tea or rice puddings.

PT: What is something interesting that you've eaten during your travels?

JH: When I was in the Congo with Médecins Sans Frontières, I ate a lot of chilli-fried bananas, which I love; and lots of chickens that had been living wild in the jungle. They were tough and rangy, but they were the best chickens I’d ever tasted. In years of eating farmed fowl, I’d forgotten what chicken was really supposed to taste like. I also ate wild crocodile – interesting and semi-familiar, a little like fishy pork – which was great, except for nearly breaking a tooth on the machine-gun bullet that had killed it...

PT: What is the best thing you can remember eating?

JH: Reef fish in Mauritius, caught twenty minutes beforehand, grilled and served whole, with green coconut and palm-heart salad, flaked salt and fresh limes.

PT: Do you have any food-related family traditions? What are they?

JH: Pancakes, rather than birthday cakes, at most family celebrations. The recipe belongs to my great-grandmother, who prided herself on making them her own special way (and who 
never allowed anyone ever to touch her pancake-pan, not even to wash it)...

PT: Are there certain foods you like to cook or eat during certain seasons? What are they?

JH: I like to eat food as it comes naturally into season. I’m not a fan of flying out strawberries from Israel, or tomatoes from Africa in December. Right now I’m enjoying the first rhubarb, which grows in my garden. Later there will be other fruit; strawberries, raspberries, cherries, gooseberries and currants, with which I will make pies and jam. I love it when the new potatoes, or the first asparagus, or the purple sprouting broccoli come into season; they’re good enough to eat on their own, just with butter and salt. In winter I find myself making a lot of dishes based on root vegetables - carrots; yams; parsnips; potatoes - which keep nicely in my cellar.

PT: What is your favourite food related smell?

JH: Baking bread.

PT: What do you like best on pizza?

JH: Anchovies, green chillies and olives. 

PT: You're throwing a party. What are you serving?

JH: Individual spicy soufflés; cardamom rice with hot chickpea dhal; chilli paneer with toasted almonds; seeded nan bread; green papaya salad; flame-grilled fresh pineapple; sticky caramel sauce. 

PT: Please tell me about a memory- any memory- that somehow relates to food.

JH: So many of my memories relate in some way to food. Meeting Ray Bradbury for the first time, and having him show me how to make a rootbeer float. Cooking cherry pie with Juliette Binoche at my house (my 5-year-old daughter thought her name was Juliette Brioche). 

Aged seven, eating moules marinières for the first time. I’d never eaten mussels before, and I wasn’t particularly eager to try them. They looked evil, not like food at all. My parents and I were at a restaurant in France, and they’d both ordered the moules for themselves, and chicken and chips (the default position) for me. Somehow my mother managed to get me to try what she was eating. I liked it so much that I finished her portion, then started on my Dad’s plate...