Anissa Helou

“When I left Beirut in 1973 I didn’t cook at all. My mother was a marvellous cook, as was my grandmother, and my father was a gourmet so we always ate well. Nobody spoke about organic [food] then but everything came from the farmers. The fishermen came to the door to sell us what they’d caught; the milkman had cows and brought milk over in pails.

But I never cooked. Worse, I didn’t want to cook because I was supposedly liberated and didn’t want to be domesticated. I was reading Simone de Beauvoir and other feminists. What I didn’t realise is that I knew how to cook.

I started after an evening during which a glamorous young lady cooked for my boyfriend and I saw how impressed he was, which is actually not very feminist of me [laughing]. In London I decided to throw a Lebanese dinner party at the height of the civil war: with no way to call my mother back in Lebanon and no cookbook. I was thinking, ‘I’ll just have to cook from memory and remember what she did to make kibbeh, hummus, tabbouleh...’ Funnily enough, I did. It was a great success and I decided I would only cook at dinner parties.

When I came to London I didn’t know what I wanted to do, apart from be either Marie Curie or De Beauvoir. I went to the Inchbald School of Design but didn’t like the idea of becoming an interior designer and being at the beck and call of clients. Even then, I was particular. Someone suggested I do the Sotheby’s Works of Art course so I applied and was fortunate enough to be accepted. I loved my 20 or so years in the art world.

I started writing about food in 1992, just as cookbooks were becoming cool. I didn’t have much respect for them. It wasn’t a literary genre as far as I was concerned; they were just manuals to me. When I decided to write Lebanese Cuisine, I had two purposes: to record my mother’s recipes and to produce a volume for the young people displaced by the war. Once I did it, I understood that food was culture and that you could work seriously recording recipes, researching food, social context and all that.

So I carried on. I think a cookbook-writer records history and culture. That’s my mission. My latest cookbook, Feast: Food of the Islamic World, is a heavy tome with more than 300 recipes. Apart from the Middle East, I went to Indonesia, Zanzibar, Senegal, Kashgar in China and so on. I’m not a Muslim but following September 11, the Arab Spring and the rise of Isis, I felt that a positive way to portray Islam and Muslims was through food – that was the idea behind the book.

For my last meal here I would empty the restaurant – because I hate other people – and tell them to reserve it for me because I’m going to die. I’d then probably invite some friends who I really like. If my mother was still alive I’d bring her over and get her to cook something. That plus raw prawns, fried prawns, different kinds of pasta – and maybe I’d fly in some caviar and foie gras. I have expensive taste but I love perfect food and perfect food for me does not mean fussy food.

I remember one particular meal in Alexandria in Egypt. It was on the beach in a shack a bit like this. It was nothing special, just this fisherman bringing us amazingly fresh fried and grilled fish. Simple food is my idea of heaven.”